MLIS Portfolio
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Core Competency
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Mika Hall MLIS e-portfolio
Mika Hall MLIS e-portfolio
Librarian, information architect, and lifelong learner. Finding meaning at the intersection of design and access.
Program
Master of Library & Information Science
Institution
San Jose State University
Navigation
Competencies
Introduction
This e-portfolio represents the work I completed while pursuing my Master of Library and Information Science degree at San José State University’s School of Information. It is organized into four parts: this introduction, fourteen areas of competency, a conclusion, and an affirmation that the work presented is my own. Each competency section includes an introduction, a discussion of my supporting evidence, and a conclusion connecting the competency to my professional practice and career goals.
Core Competencies
The fourteen competencies below represent the professional and intellectual foundations of the MLIS program. Each reflects demonstrated learning supported by coursework and applied practice.
Conclusion
“Whatever comes next, I hope to always be showing up for people — organized, thoughtful, and genuinely present.”
Looking back across this portfolio, what I notice most is how consistent the thread has been. Whether I was learning about information retrieval systems or cataloging standards, reference interviews or program evaluation — the question underneath everything was the same: how do we make sure the right person finds what they need?
That question feels both ancient and urgent. Libraries have been asking it for millennia. But the stakes feel different now, when misinformation spreads faster than correction, when digital divides determine who can participate in the information economy, and when the systems we build either open doors or quietly close them. I want to build the kind that open them.
This degree has given me a framework, a vocabulary, and a community of practice. It has also confirmed something I suspected when I arrived: that organizing and providing access to information is an act of care, and that I want to spend my career doing it with intention.
It all began at storytime. Before I ever thought about information architecture or metadata standards or the politics of access, I was a new mother sitting on a library floor meeting other new mothers. It was there, amongst the picture books that the library became more than a place I visited weekly, it became my community. No purchase required, this was my refuge in the modern world. What I felt in those walls made an impression on me that has forever altered my life. It led me here, to San Jose State University to pursue an MLIS degree.
What I didn’t expect, when I enrolled in this program, was how much it would reveal to me about my career up to that point. As a self-taught web designer, I had unknowingly been helping clients design and structure information so people could find and use it all along. The MLIS program gave me the theoretical framework and the language for this work. I learned why the decisions I had been making for clients mattered. I learned how the same principles that determine a website’s navigation can also govern a library’s catalog or an archive’s usability. The vocabulary changed; my underlying commitment to information users did not.