Legacy Portfolio FAQs, Advice, and Samples
The
Legacy Portfolio option is available only to MLIS students who started in the program in Autumn 2008 or earlier. They will partner with their faculty advisor on the creation and review process of the portfolio.
FAQ's on Legacy Portfolios
No. Just because something is new to you does not make it significant—unless you articulate in the portfolio how a particular experience, expression, or participation was a real challenge or stretch for you.
No. While the majority of students submit their portfolios in some electronic form (website, CD, etc.), we routinely receive several portfolios each year done in paper. We do not prescribe the form of the portfolio.
Yes. You certainly may, so long as they meet the significance criteria. You should plan in advance if you intend to use a specific classroom experience so that you stretch that extra bit beyond simply completing the experience.
Yes. In many ways, group experiences are a great way of demonstrating both that you can manage the substance of the experience and group work.
Sometimes things don’t work out exactly as planned; sometimes, they even fail. However, a well-documented failure is not necessarily a bad thing for a portfolio. In your portfolio, document your examination of the reasons why the experience was less than you had hoped.
Unfortunately, this situation happens. Plan in advance. If you think you may want to use the experience in your portfolio, discuss it with the group in advance. Think carefully about the reason for the refusal. Is it because he or she does not think the work was that good and does not want his or her name publicly associated with the work? Would that person agree to your using the work in your portfolio if his or her name was removed? Is the work of the sort that it might be problematic for the person if made public? For example, think about a group project looking (unfavorably) at some information processes at the place the refusing person works. Not cool.
As is true of all of the other experiences required for the portfolio, the meaning of significant will vary from person to person. However, one of the best ways to discover the meaning of the word is to look it up in a dictionary. We suggest that you look up the wordslead and leadership in a variety of dictionaries. In the Encarta FactFinder, definitions such as to influence, to direct, to guide, to have a principle part in, to control, to command others, and to be at the beginning or front of something help make the terms to lead and leadership understandable.
No, simply being a good team member isn't a leadership experience—unless you played a significant role in influencing, guiding, commanding, or controlling the directions taken by the group.
Advice on Legacy Portfolios
- Talk to your faculty advisor, early and often. First of all, this is a person who you may be talking with about your ambitions, career plans, coursework, etc., and so they are in a good position to help you think about how to make that all visible in the context of the portfolio. Second of all, your advisor is one of the two people who will evaluate your portfolio, so having them on board is ideal.
- Pay attention to context. The kinds of things you do and experiences you have should make sense within the context of what you want do eventually in your professional life, but also in the contexts of the rest of your academic program, your past and background, and interests, and so on. So if you have lots of teaching experience (or leadership, or technology development, or whatever) in your past, your portfolio experiences should build on them and show how you have developed those aspects during your time here and in an information context. Similarly, if you’ve had no leadership, training, etc. background, your experiences might be somewhat smaller in scale, but are nonetheless huge and important to you. Explain all this in the description and narrative.
- Document your experiences well. Make sure that each of your experiences is thoroughly documented. If you make a presentation, get a video or audio recording, along with things like handouts, slides, letters from people who organized the presentation, etc. If you build a system, save your drafts and designs, user studies, evaluations, and so on.
- If something’s in progress, submit a placeholder. If you’re working on a project that won’t be completed until after the submission time for the portfolios, you can include it as a work in progress, and update it as you get closer to finishing.
- Shoot high. You’ll do this anyway, but here goes. In everything you do, in courses as well as in portfolio experiences and out into the rest of your careers, do it really well. Things usually take care of themselves after that.
- Do I have to address all five bullets equally? Not necessarily; some people will have natural or intended strengths in particular areas. Everybody should have something that addresses each of the bullets, but not necessarily at exactly the same level. None of them should be dismissed, of course. Your advisor may well feel differently about this, though, so discussion on this point is important.
- Do I need five separate experiences for the five bullet points? Not necessarily, but ideally you will have a series of experiences which touch on one or more of the requirements, and your narrative would then help to tie them all together and make your interests and experiences coherent for a reader.
- How long should the narrative be? As long as it needs to be, and think of who is reading it - are they getting enough detail, too much detail, etc.? Think of the narrative component as something that connects and brings together the individual experiences. The narrative is an important part of the overall presentation.
Sample Legacy Portfolios
Below are some sample Legacy Portfolios from the past few quarters. While these portfolios are great examples, please note that we encourage individuality and creativity; these examples are not guidelines/standards, but simply a sampling to show how students formatted their portfolios. Our list of sample portfolios is updated whenever new samples become available. Please report any broken links to stalbert@uw.edu.
Recent Legacy Portfolios:
Earlier Legacy Portfolios: