California Academic & Research Libraries

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.