Daniel Earls 's Group Reflection.

The project, from the outset involved constructing a reference collection for Traditional Irish Music. Our group formed after the first information and reference services class and consisted of 7 MLIS students.

We decided on the topic of Irish Traditional music after debating about a topic leaning towards history. A few of the group members had a musical background and the focus on traditional Irish music meant that information resources would be relatively close at hand. Personally I’m completely unfamiliar with the conventions of Irish traditional music, but I never thought this was going to be a limiting factor since the main impulse behind the collection was an adequate structure and form, as opposed to comprehension of content.

We settled on the topic by the end of the class and by week 3 we were meeting once a week to discuss the collection. The group meetings I felt were all quite efficient as we made a point of always leaving with everybody having at least one task to complete. This lead to us building up quite a bit of momentum in terms of material covered and we managed to get to the reference tool evaluation stage fairly early on. I felt that our work management was well managed, more so than in some other groups I was involved in, and the even work distribution lead to a feeling of mutual appreciation and respect among the group members. However the early momentum lead to a consensus that we could defer the group meetings for a while and this may have delayed the potential completion of the overall project somewhat. Although our strong dynamic did compensate for any possible delay by each group member agreeing to a specific portion of work by a specific deadline; this lead to people who wanted to proceed to go ahead at their own pace.

Although I didn’t have a prior familiarity with traditional Irish music, I do listen to music regularly, so even though the project was structure orientated I thought I would be ok when it came to evaluating the reference tool. I had to evaluate the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music by Michael Kennedy and I found it a formidable task. Many of the dictionaries definitions had to be cross referenced and explored with various other music encyclopaedia’s as I was not familiar with much of the content.

I personally think I was very lucky with the group dynamic, as everybody got on really well and there was never any detectable conflict or tension at all within the group. It also proved useful as a socialising point and getting to know some very nice people. Hopefully this aspect of group harmony will be reflected in our presentation of the wiki.