Indicate why you are interested in the information/library professions as a career.
As a young child wandering vast halls in my city library, I remember myself wondering how anyone could find a particular volume among all the works set among seemingly endless ranks. Once older, I learned the Dewey decimal system, and my mastery of it allowed me to track down the exact items I desired with ease and consistency. Now a web designer, I see myself again as that child, not just trying to find information, but trying to organize and present it for others and myself.
I desire to use the information profession to understand the other half of what I now do professionally: designing websites as a tool for supplying information. Although I currently do everything from creating individual page layouts, logos and color schemes to editing and organizing content structure, my maturation as a site designer has emphasized not only the importance of relevant content, but of content organization as well.
On the World Wide Web individuals have infinite freedom to view many similar websites in their search for information. From a business standpoint those individuals must find information quickly and conveniently, or they will look elsewhere among the other numerous sources for that information or product. From an ethnographic standpoint, individuals should be presented with clear and concise information relevant to their needs. As a site designer I must not only design easily understood navigation and aesthetics, but must also manage and present information in a manner that is clear and comprehensive regardless of the audience.
To excel in this, I feel I need to further study the principles behind information science. Then, I can better myself as a designer no matter whom or where my audience may be.
There lays my interest in studying how people use the Internet both in various cultures within the United States and in other societies around the world. With the Internet’s inevitable spread into “Non-Western” and “Third World” nations, understanding how people interpret the Internet and its content becomes vitally important to any interested in effectively presenting information. For example, not all cultures read from left to right, top to bottom, or even prioritize information equally. Understanding those intricacies of a culture and its acceptable standards becomes the key of the ultimate goal: getting the correct information to those who need it.
Today, children use the Internet as their libraries. Rank upon rank of similar sites reveal themselves through numerous search engines, and child and adult alike can find the sheer amount of available information to be overwhelming. On such an awesome entity as the Internet, the ability to get what one needs with ease should be foremost. That goal underlies my desire to study at the School of Information and Library Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill.