LIS Student Reflection: Jenna Qi, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

MLS Student Jenna Qi answers a series of questions on the collection she built for the LIS Student program and the program overall. Jenna was one of the participants in the 2024 LIS Student Program.

Jenna Qi

Jenna Qi studies Information Science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and holds a bachelor’s degree in economics. She aspires to combine her tech skills with her passion in the library. Apart from work, she is also an amateur translator and speaks three languages.

Please describe the CollectionBuilder project(s) you worked on during the LIS Student Program and provide a link to your projects if available.

I worked on a collection of my favorite type of video game, visual novels. Visual novels are rather new and often overlooked in western popular culture, but still represent my passion for storytelling and game design. In this collection, I hope to create a subjective history of significant visual novels that impacted the industry.

Here is my site: https://jennaqi2001.github.io/visual-novel-history/

What were some of the benefits and/or successes of using CollectionBuilder for your project(s)? What were some of the limitations or drawbacks?

The most important advantage for me is its simplicity! It’s really easy to follow the documentation to build and customize your own website. It also allows a lot of flexibility for different topics too. I don’t think there are really big drawbacks. Just one thing: the CSV metadata file cannot be opened in Excel so we have to add things on Google Sheet before downloading it, but it’s just a tiny thing to take care.

What were some of the challenges you faced while using CollectionBuilder? How did you navigate these challenges?

Preparing metadata seemed hard to me at first as I was not familiar with how a project works. The tutorials and training sessions helped me out by providing thorough instruction to both the technical process and the idea of collection building.

Do you have any future CollectionBuilder projects that you are planning to do? If so, please describe them.

Yes! Actually, the visual novel history collection wasn’t the one that I first planned. I had wanted to build a collection of distinguished alumni in the School of Information and Library Science. It would be fun but more challenging to create a collection of people for the purpose of career education.

Do you see yourself using CollectionBuilder in your future career? If so, how would you implement it in your work?

Of course. I want to become a digital humanities librarian and I would love to use CollectionBuilder in my future work. It is a wonderful tool for teaching students about humanities.