Have you been appointed head, assistant/associate director, supervisor, manager, or similar for the first time within the last two years? Feeling out of breath from juggling all of your new responsibilities? Or do you anticipate becoming a leader in the near future and want a glimpse behind the curtain? Join a candid discussion with librarians who have also recently stepped into collections and technical services leadership roles and are right there with you. Panelists will each touch on a different challenge and/or benefit of taking on a library leadership position and then invite attendees to enrich the subject by contributing their own perspectives and experiences.

Attendees can expect to hear tips, tricks, and advice about topics such as training, mentorship, advocacy, communication, workload, staffing, emotional labor, and navigating campus politics. The open dialog format will not only allow attendees to actively participate in and contribute their own ideas to the session, but will also help facilitate networking for participants who are having difficulty finding peer librarians with similar responsibilities now that they are in a new role. Bring your business cards and come prepared to share your struggles and triumphs with the room as we strive to make it a little less lonely and overwhelming at the top.

LibGuides are essential teaching tools for synchronous and asynchronous research. The University of La Verne has a diverse student body that includes traditional undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students, and non-traditional adult learners. In an effort to improve access and inclusivity, the librarians at Wilson Library redesigned their LibGuides to make them mobile friendly, inclusive, and more visually accessible and appealing. They incorporated web accessibility design as well as well as best practices for creating and designing LibGuides, including soliciting feedback from student library workers. In this session we will present strategies and research to help librarians create LibGuides that are more meaningful for students.

This Engaging in Practice session will cover strategies for how library workers can support one another when one of their colleagues is suffering, and how bereavement can sometimes lead to post-traumatic growth in individuals who have experienced loss. Through sharing my story of loss and leading reflective exercises, I hope to help those managing the death of someone close to them or supporting someone in their workplace who is bereaved, doing good work when it can sometimes feel pointless to try.

There is a small amount of scholarship in the LIS and academic literature about bereavement and its effects on higher education workers. For example, a piece in C&RL News published in April 2016 discussed the strategies that several librarians used for coping with the death of a close colleague and friend. Bereavement leaves and benefits for grieving employees vary widely across workplaces, and libraries are no different.

Taking the time to think through what you intend in your individual approach to support a grieving colleague can help you to be more present, more true to your comfort level, and more genuine in your relationship to them. In this session, participants will reflect on techniques that they might use when assisting colleagues with developing benchmarks for professional expectations, while managing their own personal responses to bereavement. Participants will also identify formal and informal support systems that they feel comfortable sharing with the bereaved. Participants will also learn about post-traumatic growth, an explosive period of change and achievement during and after loss. Participants can elect to share their own personal stories, but this is not required to be engaged with this session. Participants are expected to keep the stories of others confidential to the session, and are encouraged to reflect on the experience and its potential effect on their work.

The realities of position scope creep faced by many librarians, and the urgent needs of our students, mean that digital literacy instruction has become an integral part of the labor performed by many librarians engaged in reference, instruction, and other student support functions. In attempting to meet student needs in the moment, are we doing our students and ourselves a disservice? How could bringing planning and intention to the provision of digital literacy support services help students and empower librarians as advocates for student needs?

By speaking to these difficult questions, I hope to problematize the assumption made by many instructors, administrators, and even librarians that students who are “digital natives” are entering college with the computer proficiency they need to succeed. By shedding light onto the often unseen, unacknowledged and uncompensated labor many librarians are putting into supporting these users we reflect on how such invisible labor may in fact mask larger issues of educational inequity.

After exploring the social justice implications of limited access to digital literacy support for already marginalized students as well as the effects of related scope creep on librarians, this presentation will describe how a reference coordinator and instruction librarian at an urban public comprehensive university has begun to strategically address gaps in students’ digital literacy competencies.

Attendees can expect to leave this session with strategies to help librarians define an acceptable scope for their digital literacy instruction services, identify opportunities to integrate digital literacy competencies into existing instruction, develop campus partnerships, and advocate for the necessary resources within and outside the library to support this essential work.

Librarians support students outside the classroom and swoop in like super heroes for “one-shots” to get students “information literate.” Consequently, we often imagine (and publish) all the conversations we’d like to have with faculty versus the ones we’re actually having; in other words, “we know how to help students with their research, so why won’t you stop, collaborate, and listen!” To expand instruction beyond the traditional “one-shot” model and collaborate with faculty in creative ways, I piloted a workshop titled “Faculty Research Freestyle: Developing Your Unique Research Freestyle to Share with Students.” The workshop was a response to two critical questions I wanted to ask faculty: When was the last time you honestly put yourself in the role of your student navigating a research assignment for the first time? Furthermore, have you ever reflected on your research process as a means to finding your unique style of teaching information literacy skills? The description publicized was less aggressive of course, although it started with this invitation to think about research anew: “When thinking of freestyle, we often think of improvised dance, off-the-cuff lyricism, and intuitive creation. Research is also worthy of inventive possibilities!” The foundation to all this “freestyling” was engaging faculty to empathize with students, while playfully gaining the confidence to create their own mini-one shots. For this session librarians will create and share other models of faculty engagement designed around empathy, as well as explore strategies to be more empathic questioners/listeners in the collaborative process.

In this Engaging in Practice session the presenter will
share the consultative process they and their colleagues engaged in to produce
a reciprocal set of community standards that commit library personnel and
library users to creating “an inclusive, affirming, and welcoming space.” The
presenter works at a private university best described as a predominantly white
institution (PWI) with significant and growing Latino/a/x, Black, and Native
American student populations. Even as demographics change and with a diverse
library staff, White institutional presence (WIP) persists in policies and
practices with the possible effect of negatively shaping social, academic, and
professional experiences (Gusa, 2010). Rather than focus on a code of conduct
or set of policies that look like a laundry list of “don’ts” that reflect a
White, middle-class worldview, we decided to focus our policy-making on
creating equitable, safe, and anti-oppressive spaces for library users and
employees.

In public-facing services, power relations between library
workers and library users are complex and shifting. With this in mind we
engaged the entire library staff in several rounds of defining expectations for
student and employee behavior, consulted with other academic support units and
with student groups. Through consultation we negotiated language and agreed on
processes to compose a set of shared principles and practices for working in
the collaborative and alone-together spaces of the library. This “living
document” remains a work in progress, as are the library personnel striving to
meet the aspirations of our new policy. Barnard Library’s “Community
Agreements” served as our starting point, an example of inclusive standards
with a goal of anti-oppressive behaviors and actions.

The presenter will ask attendees to participate in small
group activities and large group discussion to facilitate consideration of
multiple perspectives in developing community standards, including decentering
normative understandings of language and processes.

Gusa, D. L. (2010). White institutional presence: The impact
of whiteness on campus climate. Harvard Educational Review 80(4): 464-489).

Let’s be honest. Are we really providing equitable reference services and information literacy instruction for online, distance, and off-campus students? Meeting students’ needs and sustaining their attention in an asynchronous, online environment can be challenging, and it takes a lot of time to create digital resources like videos, tutorials, and research guides. Infographics are an ideal, multimodal tool for effectively engaging students by visualizing library spaces, services, and research processes. At California State University, Dominguez Hills, many of our students commute to campus, work full-time, rely primarily on mobile devices, and take online classes. In addition to providing videos and computer-based tutorials, we use interactive infographics as reference and instruction tools to orient students to our library’s physical spaces and information literacy concepts both in-person and online. These infographics supplement and complement other resources such as Frequently Asked Questions, research guides, tutorials, and class handouts to meet our students’ needs. In this session, participants will learn about free tools and design principles for creating instructional infographics, and work collaboratively to translate common library processes into engaging visualizations. We’ll also discuss critical considerations of equity and inclusion in infographics through access, representation, language, and accessibility.

This highly interactive workshop will provide an introduction to creating transgender and gender non-conforming inclusive library spaces. Participants will learn skills applicable to library instruction, staff meetings, and other professional settings. Additional resources on transgender allyship will be provided.