California Academic & Research Libraries

Sat 4/6

9:00-10:00

Large Conference Room

Megan Graewingholt, Rachel Fleming, Keri Prelitz

Or Equivalent: Rethinking Inclusivity and Experience Barriers in Librarianship:
This discussion panel aims to challenge and change the traditional pathways into the librarianship profession by bringing together a varied group of library professionals—from those just embarking on their careers to seasoned veterans with years of experience—to openly discuss the systemic barriers that hinder the evolution and inclusivity of the library workforce. The program identifies a critical issue in library hiring practices: the strict requirement for "Library" experience that disregards the value of equivalent skills gained in other related sectors. By adhering to a narrow definition of qualification, libraries miss out on candidates who possess essential skills and life experiences that greatly benefit the diverse communities they serve. "Or Equivalent" provides a series of practical examples to reframe recruitment, professional development, and mentorship to be more inclusive, flexible, and reflective of the diverse skill sets that can enhance library services. The program will feature a mix of personal antidotes, professional strategies, and considerations for library leaders. The session will incorporate Menti/live polls and provide a discussion handout for independent think-pair-share opportunities at the end of the session.

Small Conference Room

lawrence maminta, Selina Portera

As the Zionist entity continues its genocidal rampage through Gaza, it also wages a U.S. taxpayer-funded disinformation campaign on liberal subjects in the Global North as both a form of obfuscation and a form of colonial erasure. This presentation will explore examples of the information war being waged on colonized subjects outside of Gaza and how Zionist organizations conduct this war through mainstream corporate media outlets and in our libraries. While the American Library Association (ALA) remains silent on the Zionist entity's destruction of schools, universities, and libraries in Gaza, library workers are left to fend for themselves against violent terror cells aligned with the United States' colonial outpost in occupied Palestine. Attendees will learn the various types of disinformation as conceptualized by the ALA and be reminded of what our ethical and professional obligations are as information workers even when abandoned by the field's largest professional organization.

10:00-10:30

Large Conference Room

Faith Rusk

Title: Peer-to-peer support in the library: Hits and misses

The high-impact practice of peer-to-peer student support, a common model for tutoring centers in higher education, is less common in libraries. A program proposed in the fall of 2019 sought to have peer mentors with extensive training staff the reference desk and teach information literacy instruction sessions, with librarians serving as backup and providing ongoing professional development to expand on students' information literacy knowledge. The goal was to provide peer mentors with opportunities to develop a variety of academic and professional skills, and their role in providing research assistance and instruction would increase the library’s capacity in both areas.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the original vision is not quite what came to pass. This presentation will discuss the program’s ongoing evolution and the institutional and situational factors involved, including pandemic closures, changes to training, changes to the reference provision model in the library, and the addition of circulation responsibilities to peer mentor roles. It will also discuss the ways in which adding instruction responsibilities has proven to be challenging, as well as how envisioning instruction responsibilities for the role has evolved. In sharing the successes and challenges of our implementation and current practice, we hope that others considering implementing a peer learning program can apply SF State’s lessons to their institutional context to inform their program development. Audience engagement will take the form of polls to gauge attendees’ experience with different program aspects throughout the presentation.

Small Conference Room

Wei Ma

We developed a prototype Scholarly Article Content Extraction Web Tool to allow users to extract the key content of a scholarly article, substantially reducing the amount of text the user needs to read.
Scholarly articles usually have an original author’s abstract, but it is often too simple to describe the article in depth. Our goal was to create a web tool to better summarize and describe the content of scholarly articles to help users be more productive in performing research and to stay up to date in the field. Our prototype web tool can also handle private files stored locally and copyrighted documents stored in the cloud or locally. The tool can also handle PDF documents, which is out of the scope of current AIs, such as ChatGPT.
We will demonstrate the development process, the governing algorithm, and what further research is still needed to improve the algorithm and provide a live demonstration. We will also compare ChatGPT’s content summary function and the limitations of ChatGPT with our web tool.

San Jose Ballroom

Sarah Forzetting

Title: The Solitude of Scarcity
Abstract: Drawing on my own conversations with academic librarians in the context of consortia work, as well as affectual theory and a political theory of revolutions, I posit that the antidote to loneliness in our specialized positions and feelings of insufficiency in our field is pursuing joyful collaboration. We work in a system that reflects the values of the academy; values that favor stoicism, sacrifice, and competitive individualism, values diverge from principles of openness and community that librarians hold. Scarcity of funding and staff, and relentless demands to do more with less, can lead to isolationism that renders us ineffective. To combat the solitude of scarcity, we can joyfully embrace the richness of talent in our profession through collaboration and reframe our labor and field to value affect as much as work output. Acting out joy in community has the potential to revolutionize the way we work and lead to a more impactful profession.

This will be presented as an opinion piece (10 min.) that the audience can react to and build on during the Q&A (10 min.). I will invite the audience to think about this idea on a practical level in terms of how it could impact everyday work. Additionally, I will question whether there are more radical implications to consider in terms of the ability of affect to challenge existing systems.

10:30-12:00

Large Conference Room

Julia Barrios, Christyana Visk, Kelli Hines

TLC from the PLC: Using mental health resources and spaces to support and encourage stressed medical students

As librarians at a medical school, we encounter a unique type of a student; they aren’t only focused on excelling in academics, but also trying to balance family life with working overtime at clinics and bearing the trials of complicated health systems. The nature of a medical student leaves little room for tending to their personal mental health, let alone participating in any library programming. Our library staff is faced with a small window of opportunity to make a positive impact when students pass the Circulation Desk to get to the study rooms. When we hear about their hardships during these passing moments, how do we respond? How do we leave them feeling encouraged and supported when pressed schedules do not allow conversations to carry on? In response to feeling insufficient in providing emotional and mental support to our students, our librarians have organically created a mental health campaign by creating bookmarks and stickers with mental health resources; re-designing library spaces for wellness activities (i.e., light exercise, meditation, and prayer), and encouraging staff to sign up for mental health first aid training. In this workshop, equip students with emotional, mental, and physical support through practice dialogues, re-design ideas, and creative resources.

Outline
15 minutes – Introduction of topic and resources our Content Creation Team made to respond to them
10 minutes – Demonstrate ways to respond to different mental health scenarios in the library
30 minutes – Create your own bookmark, sticker, pamphlet, or other creative item to share with students. Provide bookmark templates and utensils
15 minutes – Practice mental health dialogues for passing out creative items
5 minutes – Reflection

Small Conference Room

Tasha Bergson-Michelson, Melaine Huyck-Aufdemar

Join Tasha and Melaine to learn about editing Wikipedia as a collaborative project with instructional faculty and students. Through Wikipedia editing students learn information literacy skills and become empowered to affect changes in the information landscape. You will learn how to edit in real time. 

Think you will come? Please let us know ahead of time so we can set you up with editing privileges at the conference IP address:  https://rb.gy/feqmif. 

12:00-1:00

San Jose Ballroom

Alvaro Quezada

The poster presentation I will provide seeks to address the critical issue of burnout among academic librarians by offering practical strategies for prevention and promoting a supportive workplace culture. The poster presentation will focus on three key learning outcomes:
1. Identification of Burnout Warning Signs
a. Participants will be able to recognize early warning signs and symptoms of burnout, both in themselves and in colleagues.
b. Participants will develop an awareness of the physical, emotional, and behavioral indicators of burnout specific to the academic librarian profession.
c. Participants will be able to differentiate burnout form typical stress.
2. Implementation of Self-care Strategies
a. Participants will acquire a repertoire of practical self-care strategies tailored to the challenges faced by academic librarians.
b. Participants will be provided tools, tips, and resources for establishing and maintaining a healthy work -life balance.
3. Promotion of a Supportive Workplace Culture
a. Participants will learn strategies for fostering a culture of well-being within their library teams.

Lynsey Eames

This is a poster session titled: Ways we ensure equal library access for students studyng in remote or international branch campuses. It explains the challenges of being a satellite campus library, but also offers practical solutions to common problems. During the session I will be explaining my own experiences and best practices

1:00-2:00

Large Conference Room

Stef Baldiva, Elizabeth Tibbitts

Facilitators will outline a transformative approach to library outreach, pivoting from a conventional 'book chair' lecture to a more engaging and inclusive format. At the root of this transformation lies Catherine Price's compelling thesis on the power of fun, characterized by the elements of 'playfulness', 'connection', and 'flow'. Our conference session aims to reenvision library outreach by integrating these elements, fostering a more vibrant, egalitarian, and participatory library environment.
Facilitators will begin the session by describing the problem, an annual book chair meeting, which reinforced the top-down power dynamic criticized by Paulo Freire. The annual book chair event involved few library staff members and relied heavily on librarian facilitation, this led to reduced engagement from participants. Facilitators then explore Price’s definition of fun, and discuss how ‘true fun’ can reinvigorate routine library activities. Facilitators will discuss practical strategies for library-wide buy-in, shifting the focus from librarian-centered to a collaborative, whole-library effort. This approach encourages librarians to step out of their hierarchical roles to diffuse power to staff, inviting all library departments to contribute creatively and meaningfully to outreach activities.
As an active learning exercise, facilitators will lead participants in a “fun audit” exercise outlined by Price. Participants will be invited to recognize the “anti-fun” factors in their work and challenged to consider how to make space for rebellion.
By the end of the session, participants will have a clear understanding of Price’s elements of fun and how to implement them in library outreach. They will also gain insights into fostering a collaborative environment that welcomes the participation of the entire library staff, ultimately leading to more effective and enjoyable community engagement.

Session outline for submission:
1. Main Thesis: Bringing fun into routine library operations
2. The Setting: Chico State
3. The “Problem”: Book Chairs annual meeting
Describing the librarian liaison model at Chico
The function of the Book Chairs
Supporting their departments
Supporting the library
4. The annual meeting, historically
ACME-led meeting/ luncheon
Friere’s ‘banking model’ format
Acquisitions : Book buying process
5. The “Solution” Catherine Price and the Power of Fun: Book Chair Extravaganza
Playfulness: Let’s throw a party(!) In the New Innovation Lab
Reimagining library spaces
Flow: Let’s make it fun! Passport and prizes
Educating faculty and administrators as learners
Connection: Let’s invite EVERY(one) Library Department and the bookstore
Creating opportunity for library buy-in
6. The Extravaganza
Book Chair Extravaganza
7. Fun audit - Facilitators will lead participants in a fun audit exercise outlined by Price.
Establishing a baseline
Fun history
Quadrant graphing
Fun time journaling
8. Recognizing anti-fun factors in work
Making space
Pursuing passions
Rebelling
9. Q&A

2:00-2:30

Large Conference Room

Milena Seyed

During Spring 2023 semester, I took a sabbatical leave to conduct a diversity audit in my college library and believe that I have valuable information to share regarding both the process and the results. I plan to present the infographics about the diversity audit results and snapshots of the tools I used across various categories such as race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability/health, and neurodivergence. A poster, printed handouts, and PPT will be available to ensure audience engagement.

The topics of The Insufficient Librarian conference related to my planned session are:
- Implementing tools learned via professional development (I first learned about diversity audit at a library webinar),
- Cultivating justice-oriented practices, resources and/or leadership (I hope to encourage others to make their library collections more diverse and inclusive),
- Making the library “accessible” to all students (when students see themselves being represented in the library resources, they feel welcomed and that they belong in the library),
- Educating faculty, managers and administrators as learners (my sabbatical project was presented both at the District's Board meeting and the Library Staff meeting).

Jessica Lopez

My proposal is to conduct a lightening talk about my experience as an MLIS instruction intern. The talk will focus on what made the internship go well, recommendations for future interns, and what instruction librarians can to do to make internships useful for students.

2:30-3:15

Large Conference Room

Tasha Bergson-Michaelson

Database censorship: Legislation, RFPs, and other actions that threaten freedom of information for California students

The same forces pursuing book censorship also claim that research databases are created specifically as tools to allow K-12 schools to groom children and expose them to pornography. From chilling effects to widespread legislative efforts to statewide Requests for Proposals behind non-disclosure agreements, a wide array of methods are employed to censor the content of research databases. Depending on how individual companies respond, these blocks may be geographically specific, or employed nationwide; they may be limited to K-12 use, or bleed over into higher ed and public library tools. Ultimately, the national market does impact what happens to our information access in California. Come learn more, and let's think about action.

3:15-3:30

Large Conference Room

Rayheem Eskridge

Presidential Closing Remarks

12:00-1:00

San Jose Ballroom

Krista Anandakuttan, Hesper Wilson

In this presentation, we will share the process of creating the Multilingual Library Services Group at the J. Paul Leonard Library to support San Francisco State University students and faculty through multilingual library services. This working group started as an initiative to address issues related to serving the Latino/a/e/x student population, the library’s role in addressing disparities, and stepping up as part of a Hispanic Serving Institution. Following the formation of the group, we expanded our services to be more inclusive of other ethnic groups across campus. We will address the challenges that insufficient library diversity presents to engaging a wider multilingual and multiethnic student population as our services are limited to the language abilities of our library faculty and staff. Despite the obstacles, our group has created intentional, meaningful, and replicable culturally relevant outreach initiatives, instruction, and reference services that serve our multilingual community.

After this presentation the audience will acquire techniques to cultivate administration, library faculty, and staff buy-in for multilingual library services to better serve a linguistically, ethnically, and culturally diverse academic population. Our goals are to foster a sense of belonging and student success through connections with diverse and inclusive materials, to address various information-seeking approaches, and support the instruction needs of programs across SF State like Ethnic Studies, the Graduate College of Education, and the new Bachelors of Arts Program in Bilingual Spanish Journalism.

The Multilingual Library Services Group is composed of: Krista Anandakuttan, Zia Davidian, Talía Guzmán-González, Shawn Heiser, Ya Wang, Hesper Wilson, and Ashley Woodruff.

Magaly Salas

This poster session will showcase the impact of zine-making and self-reflection for first-year students transitioning to living on campus and conducting academic-level research. A Student Success Librarian forged a partnership with USF101, a designed course for first-semester undergraduate students new to the University of San Francisco. The Student Success Librarian designed an information literacy course that introduces first-year students to primary sources, USF’s Gleeson Library Digital Collections, and zine-making. Students work with the library’s primary sources to create a zine that reflects the goals and connections they hope to make during their undergraduate experience. As a result, students leave the library session with an understanding of how to navigate digital collections databases and how to conduct primary research. Most importantly, students are provided a space to reflect on their feelings and goals for this new chapter, while challenging mainstream media through the creation of alternate sources. This session will include tips for any academic librarian interested in incorporating this strategy into their work. This poster session will consist of a step-by-step tutorial for creating successful peer collaborations in library instruction and unconventional tools that enhance library instruction.

Carolann Curry

In today's digital age, librarians are faced with the challenges of meeting ever-growing demands for data management services while also grappling with limited resources and expertise. The Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) and the National Center for Data Services (NCDS) will soon launch a free, on-demand course tailored to empower librarians to navigate the complex landscape of research data management. Titled "Data Services on Demand," this series is designed to be an introductory course on data management and aims to equip research librarians with the necessary tools, strategies, and knowledge to thrive in the era of insufficiency. The course consists of four separate course modules on the topics of Research Data Management, Data Sharing, Ethics, and Open Science. Embedded throughout the course are practical tips and examples for how librarians can support data research at their respective institutions.

This poster will include QR codes so attendees can be taken directly to NNLM data resources and training webpages, where they can learn more about resources to support research data management and sign-up for free data training classes. Please note, while the NNLM’s mission is to advance the progress of medicine and public health, many of the NNLM’s data resources, including the Data Services On-Demand course, are practical and not specific to medical librarians; anyone with an interest in research data management and library data services can participate in NNLM and NCDS trainings.

Kymberly Goodson

More than Books and Seats: Library Offerings to Support Student Wellness

Since at least 2013, wellness-related offerings in the UC San Diego Library have expanded, following positive results and feedback from students to whom they are targeted. While library materials enrich the intellect, a suite of student-focused activities, amenities, and spaces are intended to nourish the whole student, while also encouraging student comfort, refresh, and productivity while in the library. Examples include unique spaces such as a Calm Cave and Leisure Lounge, engaging activities like crafts and building with Legos, popular amenities like a Shared Puzzle Program and De-Stress Newsletter, circulation of plushies as study companions, and events such as pet therapy and animal encounters hosted by a local wildlife rescue organization. Library collaborations with other campus units have also focused on student wellness.

This poster connects to the conference theme in that wellness offerings broaden the scope of what has been considered traditional library services. Further, library employees are eligible to participate in and benefit from many of these services as well, and like the student participants, employees come away from these offerings with positive interactions with student and colleague attendees and refreshed to resume their job duties.

This poster will detail several wellness-related services provided by the UC San Diego Library, along with user feedback on the offerings, costs, staffing required, and other logistics. Poster content will enable viewers to consider any offerings they might wish to replicate in their libraries. Likewise, viewers will be encouraged to share their ideas and experiences with the poster author and other viewers in order to enlarge the pool of wellness support ideas from which we can all draw.

Nicole Carpenter

Have you tried to take on an initiative without trading out another part of your current job duties? We feel you, we do. We created a faculty initiative to transition courses from expensive textbooks to open educational resources (OER) and affordable course materials, leaning into related issues including student debt, equal access to resources, and the opportunity to update course content that better reflects the student body. Our initiative has suffered from scarce campus administrative support, such as meetings with zero feedback and a lack of responses to follow-up emails. We have baited the hook for faculty but received very few nibbles since launching the initiative over a year and a half ago, and we are feeling burnt out. In this poster we share how we have begun reframing our project failures with the help of qualitative feedback from students. We also examine how we might better align our project goals with our power to influence, or lack thereof, as librarians designated as staff rather than faculty status.

1:00-1:30

Large Conference Room

Marley Rodriguez, Urusa Ali

This proposal for a twenty-minute conference presentation at the biennial CARL Conference will be on the topic of student-staffed reference desks at academic libraries. Urusa Ali and I, Marley Rodriguez, are student employees at UCLA’s Young Research Library and in our second year of the MLIS program. In relation to the overarching theme of “The Insufficient Librarian,” we aim to examine how academic library spaces, particularly reference areas, are shifting towards a peer-to-peer reference model. This presentation will focus on the experiences of “Library Student Research Assistants” (LSRA) at the University of California, Los Angeles. This proposal is interested in how LSRAs adapt to this model and how it influences their interaction with students. We further want to examine how different factors, such as LSRA training activities and librarian mentoring and support, contribute to their experiences and success as an LSRA. We plan on presenting our findings from a survey we will send out to LSRAs (once given IRB approval), which will gauge their opinions and comfortability on staffing the reference desk rather than librarians. Through these findings, we hope to provide valuable insights into the dynamics of contemporary academic library services and the role of student workers within them.

The User Engagement Department at the UCLA Library provides a unique student job in the role of an LSRA. The department openly recruits LSRAs every year before the start of the fall quarter. While LSRAs don't need to be in the MLIS program (in fact, several undergraduates and graduate students from other departments are hired as LSRAs), many MLIS students are typically employed as LSRAs in the university's various libraries. For students interested in academic librarianship, the LSRA position provides a great opportunity to gain valuable experience in areas that are often required in full-time entry-level librarian positions. Among others, the primary responsibility of an LSRA is to provide reference assistance to students. Often, they are the first point of contact for students seeking help. To make it easy for students to connect with us, a virtual reference desk is available for appointments, and reference desks are located at the Young Research Library (YRL), Powell Library, the Biomedical Library, and the Arts Library. LSRAs are responsible for staffing these virtual and in-person reference desks, rather than full-time librarians.

The goal of this presentation will be to give librarians attending the CARL Conference a chance to engage with and learn more about the peer-to-peer reference model and decide if it is something that could benefit their own academic library. In relation to “The Insufficient Librarian” theme, we hope this presentation highlights the emotional and mental labor that goes into staffing a reference desk and the pressure this places on student employees.

Dele C. Ladejobi

Title: Creating Transparency in Our Library Department Through Simple Steps

I would like to submit a proposal for a 20-minute presentation on how we leveraged a familiar, easy to use “basic tool”, the calendar, to create transparency and equity in our department. I will highlight how those who were resistant were later convinced of how important this calendar is to our daily operations; and how it has become one of our most valuable channels for up-to-date communication with each other. The presentation will guide the attendees on how to create a similar communication tool.

Iris Yellum

Catalog remediation can increase access and discoverability, but it is difficult to prioritize. There is often a lack of funding and staff time for this task, even though it has the potential to increase circulation of the collection, especially for items in remote storage that can only be found in the catalog. Collections may appear opaque to new researchers: a library collection could be comprised of a physical collection, remote storage, and e-resources. In addition, special collections items may not be highly processed.

For vernacular South Asian languages such as Urdu, accessibility and discoverability are dictated by Library of Congress transliteration schema and the vagaries of Unicode issues. There is interest among subject librarians in updating metadata to increase access and engagement. Historically inaccurate and offensive terminology has been applied in catalog records, since regionally specific terminology is often not available. For example, headings needing updates include terms related to LGBT communities in South Asia, the Mughal Empire, and anachronistic subject strings.

The tools we have are insufficient for providing access and discoverability of area studies collections. In addition, language classes may have sparse availability for students, such that awareness and circulation of specialized collections may diminish.

1:30-3:00

Large Conference Room

Faith Rusk

Title: Creating a Values-Based Future: Reflection & Planning to Support Sustainable Library Practices

Our library established a Student Success and Engagement (SS&E) team to support the diverse learners of a large public university in Summer 2021. The team’s inaugural year was challenging, and the newness of SS&E’s purpose forced reactive rather than proactive team strategy. Informed by these initial challenges, the team undertook strategic planning and team building by establishing individual and team values, crafting values-based mission and vision statements, pinpointing future areas of growth via a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis, and establishing “guardrails” (Petersen, 2021) to create work balance and structure.

These activities allowed the team to plan a second academic year of purposeful instruction and outreach, infusing the team’s previously-laid groundwork with new meaning and possibility. We found this work to be energizing and enlightening, showing us how to best work as a team and support each other through challenges while united in common values, and have continued to use these tools as the team has lost and gained new members. We are eager to share this process with others who are interested in embarking on a values-based, holistic practice.

Participants in this workshop will engage with some of the tools used by the SS&E team to inform an intentional future for themselves as individuals or to share with their teams. Participants will articulate their professional values via an exercise (Carr, 2011) inspired by the values-based living questionnaires used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (Wilson et al., 2010). They will then engage in a SWOT analysis of their individual or team practices.

Finally, participants will reflect on the two activities to consider future applications in their own work contexts, including formulating “guardrails” (Petersen, 2021) that allow them to honor their newly-articulated values. As Petersen (2021) articulates, guardrails (unlike self-enforced boundaries) are systems collectively put in place to protect workers. While individual participants cannot establish guardrails on their own, they can brainstorm possible values-aligned guardrails for their wider organization.

The presenters will provide examples of the planned practices that stemmed from their creation of their deliverables, and will reflect on how their second academic year aligned with their created values, mission, vision, and strategic planning.

The session situates commonly-used personal and professional development tools in a library context, and provides a unique opportunity for librarians to create values-informed deliverables to bring back to their workplace.

3:00-4:00

Large Conference Room

Ken Lyons

ALIGN Presentation

4:00-5:00

Large Conference Room

Nery Alcivar-Estrella, Grace Skalinder

Navigating Uncharted Paths in Liaison Librarianship (Title)

Introduction (2 minutes)
Names/academic backgrounds of the presenters
Issue/Circumstance - Science & Engineering Librarian left CSUN, so lecturer librarians, Nery Alcivar-Estrella and Grace Skalinder, stepped up to the challenge.

Process Self-Examining (2 minutes)
Overcoming imposter syndrome
Mention the idea of the “Insufficient Librarian.”
Nery & Grace don’t have Science or Engineering backgrounds

Community Outreach (3 minutes)
Received resources/ideas/support from our academic community.
Report on our teaching experiences (i.e. Science & Engineering information literacy sessions)

Conclusion/Engagement (3 minutes)
Who has been a liaison for a discipline/subject outside of your comfort zone? What were some of your strategies? Please feel free to share support and/or resources.
If we run out of time, we will encourage attendees to share emails to continue conservation.

Marianne Foley

Licensing streaming video - optimizing human and budgetary resources

At our library, the costs associated with Kanopy videos continued to grow with no upper bound in site. The costs involved both human resources and funding resources. With a continuously declining budget and no replacement for employees who departed, our library needed to contain these costs. Beginning in fall 2023 semester, we established a deadline for faculty to submit film requests and continued the policy into the spring 2024 semester. In the past, we purchased Kanopy film licenses throughout the year. After two semesters with this new policy, we have spent less than half of the amount we spent last academic year. But the impact on staff and librarian time has been more difficult to determine. This session will explain how we changed our policy and what enabled that change.

Yael Hod

I'd like to give a short talk about inequality in hiring practices. How things like where you went to school, how the hiring process works can affect who gets hired in academic libraries.

Mario Pamplona

The lighting talk will be an opportunity to share an overview of Stanford Libraries High School Internship program. Stanford Libraries offers a paid internship program for students attending East Palo Alto Academy High School. The internship program at Stanford Libraries is created to engage diverse students who do not have the typical resources or have not been traditionally encouraged to attend a premier research institution. We hope this type of program will encourage library buy-in from a non-traditional user, and will foster interest in Librarianship or inspire innovative ideas for their future.  I will provide an overview of the program, introduce past participants, the type of projects they get to work on, and describe how this type of program can enable engagement with the local community.

Katherine Roth

Title: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the (un)Artificially-Introverted Librarian or: Why the human librarians will always one-up generative AI. 

Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is everywhere and rapidly evolving! Librarians are becoming increasingly tasked with becoming AI-lite. We are also seeing the effects of generative AI on libraries, universities, teaching, information literacy and pedagogy. Most librarians identify as introverts – how does this affect our interactions with AI? What will the effects of AI be on the librarians themselves?

Vanessa Swanson

Title: Use what you know
Category: Dealing with professional fails

When you are working in your library have you over-explained a task to your coworker? When discussing a different group of people, you use the phrase “those people”? Have you been asked “What are you”? These are microaggressions. These phrases may appear innocent, but are damaging to workplace morale and to your library’s standing in the community.
Microaggressions have been a constant part of my professional experience. While attending San Jose State University’s MLIS program, The class INFO 281, Cultural Competence for Information Professionals, helped me realize the microaggressive behavior surrounding me.
Training in larger library organizations is commonplace and I did receive effective training to identify, mitigate and resolve microaggressive behaviors. So, did my former workplace become more aware? Did I see changes in my coworkers towards me or towards patrons different from them? No.
Library culture has a terrible reputation. We are not known for embracing diversity in our workforce. Implementing positive behavior and eliminating microaggressions from the library is beyond necessary.
An efficient method to implement training or newfound knowledge is active learning. Active learning’s main components: feeling, watching, thinking and doing are performed every workday in any library.
My personal model of implementing active learning:
consider my motives when engaging with someone (patron or coworker)
ask myself what is the intent of my interaction (do I need to do this right now?)
present myself professionally (no baby voice or a speech rhythm that comes off as a question)
Is this simple? Yes. Is it necessary? Yes. Is it practiced? Not often enough.
A call to action for library professionals is to use what you have learned. Eliminating microaggressions in the library will only help your workspace become happier, safer, and certainly more trustworthy.

Resources about microaggression identification and training will be made available.

Andrew Carlos

Abstract:

As part of our strategic plan for 21-24, the Santa Clara University Library asked themselves the question “ What is a Social Justice Library?” Over a series of two workshops and asynchronous work, more than 75% of the Library staff participated in developing our definition of Social Justice Library. In this short lightning talk, you will learn about the process it took to draft that definition - from planning the learning activities, to facilitating group discussions. Hear about the difficulty in finding appropriate examples for all of the Library departments! Marvel at the design of the online learning modules! Wonder at the definition that took 20+ folks multiple weeks to get to. Walk away from this session with ideas and tools you can use to develop this type of training at your library.

Outline:

Introduction:
Short background around defining social justice, Introduction to the local context of SCU
Planning:
Overview of workshop
Description of the development of the lesson plans for each component.
Doing the thing:
How did the workshops go?
Outcome:
Present our definition
Review:
How did the format work for our team
Takeaways:
What are some ideas from this workshop you could implement at your library?

Plan for engagement:
Using mentimeter as my presentation platform, I’ll have one to two reflection sides available in the presentation to see where folks are at in following along. I may also have one or two voting slides near the beginning, around the defining social justice slides.

Victoria Hernandez

Diving into a career transition to academic librarianship can often be a daunting experience. While going from one service-oriented profession to another may sound like a seamless transition, there are often barriers and stigmas based on the “lack of experience” in your new field. However, it is important to recognize that the skills we gain through life, education, and early careers can be transferrable to academic fields. Coming from a decade’s long first career as a social worker, I chose to transition into academic librarianship, where I expected to continue supporting and serving a community. Social work made me comfortable working with diverse communities, connecting people to information and services, accommodating for disabilities and special needs whenever possible, teaching adults and children how to access resources to set them up for self-sufficiency and success. These sound like the same skills I’d be using as an academic librarian, but the job search showed it wasn't so simple. Although I did eventually land the job, I recognized where change could be made. Instead of “taking a chance” of someone transitioning careers, we should be embracing the experience they bring. In addition, by integrating social work principles, academic librarians can enhance their support systems, ensuring a more comprehensive approach to student well-being. In this talk, I will use personal experience to touch on the transferrable skills from service-oriented professions to academic librarianship and show how social work principles can enhance the field.

Lisa Cheby

Title: Without sufficient libraries, how will the Hermiones and Buffys of today save the world?: Book banning and the inequity of school libraries in California

Proposal: As our society struggles against a information literacy crisis, there is an attack on intellectualism and information, exemplified by the rise in book bans and attempts at censorship, including here in California. Even as Governor Newsom signed AB1078 Instructional materials and curriculum: diversity, which aims to create accountability at the county level for challenges or censorship of instructional material, including library books, organized groups continue to target schools and school board meetings. While book bans have drawn the public’s attention to literacy and intellectual freedom, this crisis is decades old enacted through California education policies and budgets that have cut school library funding and left the majority of schools without trained librarians to staff the libraries. This denies students their right to access diverse, relevant, and current information, particularly the most vulnerable students who live in places that lack access to public libraries, books stores, and safe places for the diverse identities of our students. Moreover, students and schools are left without leaders – librarians – in protecting the intellectual freedom of our state’s students. This lightning talk will present evidence from ALA’s United Against Book Bans data, from the study “The School Librarian Investigation: Decline or Evolution?” by Keith Curry Lance and Debra E. Kachel, and from experiences from members of the California School Library Association to raise the audience’s awareness of the link between library staffing and book bans in California as well as some concrete actions to take to protect their community’s schools from book challenges and censorship.

Suzanne Maguire

I'd like to share my approach to teaching research topic development to first-year students, drawing from the theories of community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge. I'd like to share how this approach helps students to connect with research in a more meaningful and intentional way. My lightning talk will include an example of this approach in the classroom. I'm hoping to inspire more dialogue on how we can use strengths-based approaches to build a stronger foundation for student information literacy.

Fri Apr 5

9:00-10:30

Large Conference Room

Courtney “Jet” Jacobs, Jimmy Zavala

Re-imagining Library Spaces

Outline:
History of instruction program
2018-2020 ramp up
Identifying the need for new classroom space
Building support
Flexible Collaborative spaces lead to collaborative work
Physical concerns with the classroom
Growing the instruction program
Pedagogical mission
Meeting demand at scale

The 21st century librarian is often called upon to actively implement outreach into their work, and in doing so, attract community members to utilize the resources they provide. While this mission is critical in maintaining and hopefully increasing community engagement, what happens when the demand for those resources drastically outpaces our capabilities and facilities? Library staff at UCLA Library Special Collections (LSC) have been working to approach this problem of supply and demand within their robust instruction program. Critical staffing and space shortages present significant challenges in meeting the community’s needs for embedded primary source instruction. Simultaneously, prioritizing active learning and equity-based pedagogy requires intentional and proactive planning as well as flexible and secure classroom spaces.

We hope to discuss our challenges and successes addressing these insufficiencies. In order to accommodate increasing demand for instruction support using LSC collection materials, LSC staff leveraged campus buy-in to advocate for additional staffing and infrastructure support. This work resulted in the creation of and recruitment for a dedicated Teaching and Learning Librarian as well as construction of a ground-breaking, $1.5 million dollar purpose-built classroom space for teaching with rare and distinctive materials.

Sarah Tribelhorn

Engaging students in STEM and sustainability through inspiring collections and hands-on programming

In this presentation I will describe how I have developed collections and programming to inspire and engage students in STEM and sustainability. In my role as a traditional STEM liaison librarian, I have focused on building relationships and community with faculty and students by making science and sustainability more visible, connecting to the human side of science, and encouraging student retention. I will highlight how I been innovative in this approach, and how my work has evolved to highlight diverse voices in STEM and sustainability that have not always been heard in academic library settings in a way that encourages and excites students to become entrenched in STEM disciplines.

I will provide examples of the ways that I have done this including:
1. The collaborative development of a collection of “easy reading” nonfiction and fiction STEM books with other STEM librarians at my institution and student input, highlighting previously underrepresented voices to inspire our community in the pursuit of a STEM career. This collection will be highly accessible and placed in an inviting area, encouraging students to engage with it.
2. A collaboration with campus student organizations to host author talks organized through the library on topics of interest to them, including climate justice and sustainability.
3. The engagement of students through citizen science with already established and new programs to gather data for research projects locally, nationally, and globally, encouraging community participation, creating excitement around science and sustainability, and ultimately enhancing student retention.

Based on my these experiences of collection development and programming, I will share the challenges and opportunities, and hopefully inspire other liaison librarians to engage with their communities in a more innovative, human, and engaging way too, encouraging student engagement and success in their respective disciplines.

Faith Rusk

Title: No one is an island: A case for a team-based approach to instruction in libraries

The presentation will argue that a team-based approach to instruction can create a more supportive environment and a more sustainable practice. The traditional liaison model has each librarian operating as an island, with few opportunities for collaboration and support. By engaging in a team-based model, librarians can better distribute workload, grow as practitioners through collaboration and professional development, and support each other in enforcing boundaries or creating guardrails.

This presentation will ask attendees if they experience a variety of common challenges presented by the traditional liaison model and share how a team-based approach can eliminate or mitigate these challenges. The presentation will also discuss creating a team structure where changes to the formal organizational structure are not practical or feasible.

Wei Ma

Every academic institution provides assistive technology for users with visible and known disabilities, and posts the service on its website. We moved beyond the standard practice by expanding the availability of assistive technology (a text-to-speech tool) to all students, faculty, and staff. We promote text-to-speech (TTS) as an alternative reading tool to facilitate extensive reading. This presentation outlines how we deployed the service, our usage statistics and user responses, as well as how we developed a campus partnership to resolve the budget issue. Our practice not only created an equitable and accessible environment and services that supports all users who have visible or known disabilities, but also those who may have non-noticeable reading disabilities. Our practice also helps create a diverse learning need in the library and on campus, and provides value-added service that promotes student success.

Small Conference Room

Karen Adjei

Title - Striving for Sufficiency: Cultivating Curatorial Librarianship in Special Collections

While direct professional experience is critical in gaining post-graduate employment in curation within special collections, the complementary collections-centric approaches of exhibitions and librarianship is often siloed in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) field. This dilemma not only limits how information is curated and shared with the public through diverse modalities, but it also limits training opportunities for emerging library and museum professionals who are interested in engaging with special collections curatorship and exhibitions development. Furthermore, the difficulty in gaining relevant experience in exhibition development and special collections curatorship within academic librarianship is especially felt by library science students who must navigate normalized practices of applying for and accepting unpaid training opportunities. All of these factors present barriers to being prepared for and sustaining a rapidly changing field that is contending with new notions, roles, and definitions of what it means for a librarian to be sufficient in curatorial practices.

Situated at the intersection of professional development and academic librarianship, this presentation reflects on the value of an academic library providing practical experience in curation and campus outreach using special collections. The audience will learn how this value is exemplified by the exhibition “A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Connecting Through Canon In Post Occupation Japan” that was curated as part of a paid library science graduate program field study at The Prange Collection, a primarily Japanese-language special collection at the University of Maryland, College Park. Embracing the perspective of an emerging library professional, the presenter will illuminate possibilities and limitations for how academic libraries and special collection units can provide a meaningful and holistic professional development experience in order to sufficiently prepare library science students for the future library and curatorial workforce. This session will cover innovative mindsets and practices informed by thoughtful justice-centered approaches in generating innovations in the theory and practice of special collections curatorship and academic librarianship.

Given that this is a twenty-minute conference presentation, the majority of the session will be one that the audience listens to. However, I plan to provide the audience with key takeaways of best practices for how they can: (1) create supportive professional development opportunities for emerging information professionals; and (2) implement innovative approaches to information sharing and pedagogies centered on special collections practices and justice-centered mindsets at their respective institutions. I will also answer any questions from the audience and will help to facilitate any discussion after the presentation has concluded, and my contact information will be provided to continue the conversation and connection afterwards. I will also post the presentation slides and an online handout of resources on the online conference platform for those that are unable to attend in-person.

Ryan Brower

Coercive collection policies, unjust institutional control, and liberal reproduction agreements by academic libraries have inflicted historic, irreparable harm on Native American communities, but recent state legislation has created an avenue to address our inadequate practices.

Authored by Assemblymember James C. Ramos, the California Assembly’s only Native American representative, the 2023 Assembly Bill No. 389 implements long overdue and sweeping legislation that "...prohibit[s] the use of any Native American human remains or cultural items for purposes of teaching or research at the California State University while in the possession of a California State University campus....” While the bill governs that academic departments repatriate Native American Ancestors, the term "cultural items" is debated.

On Chico State’s campus, Meriam Library Special Collections and University Archives contains potentially sensitive Native American archival materials, including the Dorothy Morehead Hill Collection - containing 50 boxes and 5,700 digital items documenting the dozens of Native American Tribes that live in the 12 Northeastern California counties. Following AB-389’s passing, Special Collections is in active engagement with Chico State’s Office of Tribal Relations and Department of Anthropology to repatriate Native American Ancestors and cultural patrimony. We have decided AB-389’s instance of “cultural items” contains what the Protocols of Native American Archival Materials (PNAAM) defines as “culturally sensitive materials.” This is an outside-the-box approach to ensure justice is paramount and colonizers do not make decisions over Tribal sovereignty. While our conversations and policy development is in its infancy, we are implementing changes to our engagement with archival resources.

Library patrons submit reproduction requests for Native American archival material for personal and academic purposes, but in both cases, we must ensure Native American Tribes have absolute cultural stewardship. To ensure this, radical, justice-oriented practices must be implemented. In my proposed lightning talk, I will introduce our new reproduction request process that routes potentially sensitive Native American items to Chico State's Office of Tribal Relations. We consult with the item’s represented Tribes and, if deemed potentially culturally sensitive, we deny the request, restrict the material, and if applicable, remove the items from public view in our digital collections.

In conversations with other CSU archivists, AB-389 is not on many libraries’ radar, and I wish to foster discussion and collaborate with fellow California academic libraries to facilitate the repairing of the relationships with the Native American peoples whose lands we reside.

Margarita Zamora Saunders

In the first part of the session, the presenter will share disability statistics and the social and economic impacts on our communities to help folx understand the importance of removing barriers at work and in the classroom. Attendees will then learn important steps to make Word Documents accessible, create accessible tables, test their work, and convert Word Docs into a portable document format (PDF) for machine readability. The second half of the session will focus on essential PowerPoint accessibility features such as close-captioning, reading order for machine readability by Assistive Technologies (AT), alt-text for pictures, and creating descriptive graphs. Lastly, a step-by-step tipsheet and additional resources will be shared with attendees.

10:30-11:15

Large Conference Room

Christal Young

Title: Lost Amongst Peers : Increasing Awareness of Library Resources and Opportunities for Collaboration Amongst University Faculty

Outline:
- Pre-session Poll On Current Outreach Methods (2 mins)
- Introduction & Institutional Background (5 mins)
- Poll Results (3 mins)
- Committee Charge Overview (5 mins)
- Survey Methodology (5 mins)
- Preliminary Findings and Recommendations (5 mins)
- Outreach & Engagement Brainstorm (10 mins)
- Q&A (10 mins)
- Recommended Reading

The University of Southern California (USC) Libraries Committee is a joint committee of the Academic Senate, the Provost, and the USC Libraries. The Committee has historically advised the Dean of the USC Libraries and the Provost on matters related to printed and digital information resources and technologies, and on policies associated with scholarly communication, research, teaching, and study. The Dean of the Libraries in turn apprised the Committee on current issues and challenges associated with library resources and endeavors.

A 2022 survey conducted by the USC Libraries Committee, which assessed discipline faculty’s perceptions of library resources and services, revealed that many faculty members were not familiar with library offerings or opportunities for collaboration with library faculty. Within the survey findings, faculty requested that the Libraries provide a service that we already offer or obtain resources that we already own. Clearly, there was a lack of understanding among faculty about the current Libraries’ availability of resources and services. So how can library faculty ensure effective outreach to discipline faculty in order to communicate existing and potential collaborations, materials, and services? How can schools ensure that the offerings of the Libraries are known and utilized by their faculty? What happens when library faculty efforts for engagement and collaboration don’t go as planned?

During the 2023-2024 academic year the Committee was charged to evaluate the Libraries’ current communications strategy, devise recommendations for improving communication with faculty and educate them about library services and programs. Additionally, there is a misperception amongst some discipline faculty that librarians are not faculty and do not hold expertise in student learning and engagement. Improvements in communication strategies would promote collaboration opportunities with library faculty and assert USC Libraries faculty as equals in the academic arena.

This session will discuss this committees’ work, present preliminary findings and recommendations, and discuss implications for engagement work at a large, and often siloed, research institution. Attendees will learn how to conduct a survey to gauge faculty perceptions of library offerings and develop a strategic approach for reaching faculty at their point of need. Attendees will also reflect on the multiple meanings of outreach, outreach to students, the university community, and discipline faculty, to better advocate for library presence within faculty orientation, training, and ongoing research opportunities.

Plans for Engagement :
Attendees will reflect on their current outreach practices to promote collaboration amongst faculty. Through interactive polls and group discussions, attendees will identify barriers and brainstorm strategies to conduct more effective outreach to their liaison areas and discipline faculty.

11:15-12:00

Large Conference Room

Amy Gilgan, Airana Varela, et al.

Proposal:

Critical library instruction strives to engage students in dialogic learning while unpacking power dynamics. How can librarians facilitate learning spaces that encourage dialogue? Whether facilitating a difficult conversation or a low risk discussion, it is necessary to first build the foundation for dialogue. This interactive session will explore ways librarians can incorporate facilitation techniques borrowed from Intergroup Dialogue (IGD) into the classroom and other group settings. Through a social justice lens, participants will be invited to reflect on the scaffolding necessary for class discussion and practice techniques for increasing learner engagement. This session is hosted by the Southern California Instruction Librarians Interest Group.

Session Outline:

I. Grounding and community aspirations
II. Introduction to Intergroup Dialogue (IGD)
A. Connection between IGD and critical library instruction
B. Four stages of IGD
C. Multipartiality
III. Applying IGD to library instruction
A. Building the container for discussions
B. Group exercise and practice
C. Practical skills for the classroom
IV. Reflections
A. Debrief of exercise and applications in the classroom
B. Identify settings where IGD skills can be implemented
V. Q&A


Active Learning & Engagement:

Attendees will be invited to engage through reflection prompts, digital bulletin boards, small group discussion and practice scenarios. In small groups, participants will practice foundational dialogue skills including mindful listening and differentiating between dialogue and debate. At the end of the session, participants will have an opportunity to reflect and share ideas for incorporating dialogue facilitation techniques into their library instruction.