Lightning
Talks
These seven minute sessions are
on Saturday, May 13, immediately following lunch.
Decipher the Department Spread as a New Librarian
Rashida Scott Blades @ San Diego State University
Great for new graduates who are now the liaison for departments in academic librarianship. In this talk, I will discuss the template that I created to help me understand the subjects for which I am the liaison, in the form of a spreadsheet. Learn to decipher what information to categorize about the instructors, their research, classes and more. The information that is compiled in this template can help with many projects in the long run. From identifying where to embed yourself, identifying relevant journals and publications, and understanding the diversity of faculty and their research at your institution.
Find a Research Payday with a Writing Group
Megan Benson @ Binghamton University
Many librarians have scholarship expectations as part of their job responsibilities. Library employees also enjoy sharing their knowledge with others through presentations. Learn from one university that started an informal writing group to support the scholarly activities of its faculty and staff. Ways to support these endeavors, hosting a writing retreat, and what has worked / didn’t work will be shared to encourage folks to start their own writing groups.
Podcasting to Promote Faculty and Student Scholarship and Publication
Josh P. Cohen @ Elizabethtown College
Podcasts created by librarians understandably tend to focus on librarianship with an intended audience of other librarians. This past Fall, I started The JayPod, a library-sponsored podcast with a different purpose: promoting the scholarship, publications, and research of our college’s faculty, staff, and students. This is in keeping with part of our library’s outreach mission to promote scholarship on campus. In this lightning talk, I’ll explain the process of developing this type of podcast, the technologies used, the amount of time/effort invested in creating and promoting the podcast, and the assessment data I’ve gathered, including some successes and challenges.
Research as Expression: An Interactive Virtual Workshop for First-Year Students to Support Research Creativity and Ease Anxiety
Christine Fena @ Stony Brook University
Do research papers feel increasingly formulaic? Especially in regard to recent discourse surrounding ChatGPT, how can librarians help students find their own unique voices? Students are often so overwhelmed by their research assignments that the experience of “research” becomes more about checking off boxes than their individual journeys in exploration, inquiry, discovery, and communication. In this presentation, I’ll share outreach methods, activity design, and lessons learned from an exploratory virtual library workshop whose goal was to shift away from detailed database demos and toward developing students’ awareness of expressing themselves and their interests throughout the research process.
Teamwork Makes Diversity Work: Involving the Whole Library in a Diversity Audit
Julie Setele @ SUNY Buffalo State University
Diversity audits require collaboration between technical and scholarly librarians to accomplish successfully. This session will examine a diversity audit of an academic library’s picture book collection, undertaken as the first step in a new strategic initiative focused on conducting a diversity audit of the entire collection. We analyzed a random sample of picture books in our collection, noting author’s race and gender, and the main character’s race and gender. We checked our work using Diverse BookFinder’s free Collection Analysis Tool, confirming that approximately 15% of our picture book collection features BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) characters.