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Fri Apr 5
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9:00-10:30
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Large Conference Room
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Courtney “Jet” Jacobs, Jimmy Zavala
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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.
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Sarah Tribelhorn
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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.
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Faith Rusk
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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.
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Wei Ma
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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.
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Small Conference Room
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Karen Adjei
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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.
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Ryan Brower
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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.
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Margarita Zamora Saunders
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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.
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10:30-11:15
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Large Conference Room
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Christal Young
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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.
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11:15-12:00
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Large Conference Room
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Amy Gilgan, Airana Varela, et al.
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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.
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