In her winning video for the Wiley Scholarship for Early Career Librarians, Ximin Mi (MS '13) talks about the importance of lifelong learning—how learning doesn’t stop when you graduate. She put this concept into practice in making the video, which earned her a $1,500 travel grant that she will use to attend the Association of College & Research Libraries Conference in Baltimore this March. The video took about forty hours to make, and Mi’s previous experience was limited.
"My video editing experience didn’t go beyond Windows Movie Maker and iMovie before creating this Wiley video, which was made with Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere," Mi said. "There is definitely a learning curve in picking up the Adobe Suite, but it is not too hard to learn."
Wiley Scholarship applicants had to submit a short video explaining what they learned in a library that they might not have learned in library school and to offer advice to other early-career librarians. In addition to emphasizing the need to keep learning, Mi’s video also stressed the benefits of collaborating with fellow librarians and thinking creatively, "outside of the box," to help library users.
A business data services librarian at Georgia State University (GSU), Mi's duties include finding suitable datasets for various research projects, selecting tools for specific data analysis, and analyzing datasets, as well as general research reference and instruction. In addition to her iSchool classes, her graduate assistantships at the International and Area Studies Library and the Library and Information Science Virtual Library at the University of Illinois helped prepare her for her job as an academic librarian.
"I got my first master's degree in education (from Arizona State). As my studies went on, I became more curious about how research tools give more control over the research process," said Mi. "Academic libraries are collectively working on reshaping the future of our roles in the bigger picture of education. Since every school is different, every academic library needs to find its own way to get involved in teaching and research, and therefore, remodel its services."
In her spare time, Mi enjoys traveling, cooking, hiking, and working at the local makerspace. She currently serves on a campus committee to design the first university-sponsored makerspace at GSU.
A member of the 2015 class of the American Library Association's Emerging Leaders, Mi credits the strong support she received as a graduate student at Illinois for her success. "The university community offers students rich information, resources, and opportunities to learn and grow. The challenges I faced as a student shaped my core skills, and more importantly, built my mindset of being a problem solver," she said.