Digital Commons Network^™

State-Specific Secondary Sources, Joshua Levine

Library Staff Online Writings

As legal research instructors, we regularly teach students that it’s a good idea to start their research with secondary sources. If the research issue falls under the law of a specific state, it’s especially helpful to consult a secondary source that discusses that law of that state. However, you might not find relevant state-specific secondary sources – they simply might not be available – and that poses a special set of challenges.

Open Education As A Tool For Trans And Gender Diverse Inclusion, Stephen Krueger

Library Presentations

There has been little attention given to gender diversity in the open education world so far. But OER and open pedagogy have the potential to be extraordinary tools for supporting trans and gender diverse students: removing cost barriers for a population with extremely high poverty rates, adapting resources to include current and localized information about healthcare and law, and highlighting trans and gender diverse voices. This session will offer an overview of the relationship between open education and gender inclusion. It will also touch on ways in which widespread practices in open education do not serve trans and gender diverse …

Poster: Grassroots Only Goes So Far: Why Your Oer Needs A Strategic Marketing And Promotion Plan, Chelsee Dickson, Sabrina Davis, Kristina Clement, Femi Jayeola, Jin Jo

KSU Grey Literature

Promotion, marketing, and sustainability aren’t often considered factors in the creation or adoption of open educational resources (OER). OER authors often avoid crafting a marketing or promotion plan for their newly created materials, as the presenters found in a previous research study funded by an Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) research grant. The presenters received a grant to understand why authors and supporters do not consider promotion and sustainability plans as an integral aspect of OER creation and adaptation. The presenters interviewed OER creators and librarians who support OER (collectively, OER champions). The study aimed to understand the phenomenon of the …

Evaluating Information - Verifying The Credibility Of Sources, Sandra Teft

Handouts

This in-class assignment was designed for students in a WRT 150 course. The purpose was to get students thinking about the credibility of different sources types, evaluating them based on the criteria presented.

Destined To Fail [Book Review], Jessica Schomberg

Disability in LIS (DisLIS)

A deep dive into the eugenical ideas that grounded the work of influential educator and psychologist Carl E. Seashore. While Seashore was working a century ago, the author demonstrates how his ideas continue to influence education today.

Integrating Digital Archives & Scholarship: Raising Awareness Of Library Historical Collections, Alice W. Sherwood

Library Staff Publications

Since 2022, The TMC Library started using Digital Commons Exhibits, adding 15k items to its 18yr institutional repository to include more library archival materials. Traffic of archival collections jumped from 4k, 36k to 107k downloads in 2024, bringing greater impact to not only archives, but the entire library community.

Other beneficial impacts have been identified since additional archival materials have been integrated within our institutional repository. Other than more people who have been accessing McGovern Historical Center using their services and materials, The TMC Library has noticed changes since more download traffic has been noticed on our institutional repository. In …

Crawling Is More Fun With Friends: Active University Web Archiving Through Cross-Campus Collaboration, Ruth E. Bryan, Andrew Mcdonnell

Library Presentations

Between 2023-2024, staff of the University Archives at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center (Lexington, Kentucky, United States) reviewed the sustainability of our web archiving program. Preserving our institution’s vast web presence is technologically demanding, requires ongoing specialized expertise, and is underfunded. It is also absolutely necessary: If university archives do not determine how to sustainably acquire, preserve, and provide access to online documents, we will suffer (and already have experienced) significant gaps in our understanding of the university’s actions, events, and decisions. We used Kristin R. Eschenfelder, et al.’s “nine dimensional framework for digital cultural heritage …

Taming The Chaos: Strategies For Streamlining Library Work In An Interruption-Driven World, Melanie S. Brasher, Amanda K. Izenstark

Public Services Faculty Presentations

Library workers often can’t follow the typical productivity advice doled out by productivity experts. In a job that is essentially managing ongoing interruptions with the added bonus of needing to describe what you’ve accomplished to numerous stakeholders, how can you keep track of what you do, what you need to do, and what you need to know? Join this session for some examples of frameworks and connect with others to tame the chaos that is modern library work. Due to the size of this topic, we will poll attendees live in order to choose the topics of greatest interest to …

Lanthorn, Vol. 60, No. 06, October 27, 2025, Grand Valley State University

Volume 60, August 4, 2025 – current

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State's student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present.

Brewed Connections: Bringing Early Career Librarians Together Through Virtual Coffee Chats, Brandon Kennedy, Brianna Hales, Samantha Nunn, Sarah Villere, Alex Henigman

Library Staff Publications

Early Career Librarians (ECLs) thrive on collaboration, informal exchange, and community elements that have been challenged by remote and hybrid work. In response, an ECL task force developed and implemented a monthly Virtual Coffee Chat project aimed at fostering informal nationwide connections among ECLs and Library and Information Science (LIS) students interested or involved in health sciences. Hosts provided discussion prompts while also fostering an open forum to discuss challenges and current events such as: AI, systematic reviews, faculty conversations, organizational structures, and training challenges. This poster presents the design, launch, and impact of the ongoing Virtual Coffee Chat project. …

Librarians On-Call: A Review Of Search Tools Utilized By Fourth Year Medical Students On A Mock Call, Celeste Perez, Brandon Kennedy, Katie Prentice, Sonya Fogg, Jennifer Stockton, Bronwyn Sutherland, Lara Oulette, Sandra Desjardins, Beatriz Varman, Tracy Ashby

Library Staff Publications

OBJECTIVE: A team of medical librarians were given the opportunity to observe the medical readiness of fourth year medical students (MS4s) for finding evidence-based clinically relevant information (drug choice, patient care, etc.) during an on-call simulation. For this initial analysis, we observed the search tools utilized by MS4s when asked to recommend treatment for simulated patients.

METHODS: 10 librarians were asked to evaluate 1 module of a simulation required of 240 MS4s as a gauge of their readiness to be residents on call. A Night On-Call Simulation program was used to record their responses & online navigation. The MS4s attended …

Demystifying Research Reviews, Sandra Y. Desjardins, Jennifer Stockton, Madison Hastings

Library Class: Lunch & Learn

Feeling lost in a sea of research articles? Unsure which studies you can trust to inform your work?

In this 30-minute session, we'll demystify the world of research reviews, teaching you how to quickly and confidently navigate the literature like a pro. You'll move beyond feeling overwhelmed and become a research detective, equipped to find and evaluate the best evidence.

Libraries Are Fundamental: Supporting Student Wellness With Stress-Less Events, Maria Atilano

Library Faculty Presentations & Publications

Why Wellness? Making the Case:

-- The library is the most visited building on campus
-- We see students at their best but also their worst
-- Stress happens, and not just during finals week
-- Student Wellness=Student Academic Success

Kindness In Action: Leveraging Qualitative Data To Assess And Enhance A Library's Physical And Digital Space, Jennie Tobler-Gaston, Lori Schwartz

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library has a history of conducting kindness audits that evaluate our physical space. The “Kindness Audit” has been an internal effort to reflect on how welcoming, accessible, and responsive our library environment is to all who use it. In Fall 2024, a working group reimagined this effort with a broadened lens: incorporating the physical space, the welcoming atmosphere, and the usability of the library website.

This presentation outlines the process and purpose of this updated audit. We designed and distributed a qualitative observation paper survey for our physical …

Tracking Removed And At-Risk Government Information, Molly Blake, Sanga Sung, Ben Amata, Jenny Mcburney

SJSU Open Access Conference

The current U.S. administration is intentionally undermining public access to information as well as scholarly research by removing documents, reports, datasets, images, and language from government websites. In doing so, this administration is withholding publicly-funded information that we have a right to access, including data from government-sponsored research, historical information about marginalized groups, and speech transcripts. In removing these materials, the government is also deliberately sabotaging research related to topics it does not like, such as LGBTQ health, COVID, and climate change.

It is difficult to grasp the scope of this problem: how do we know when something is gone, …

Access Denied: Defending Research In A Shrinking Scholarly Landscape, Emily Kingsland

SJSU Open Access Conference

In early 2025, the U.S. Department of Education announced a reduction in the indexing of key journals in the ERIC database. As government censorship increasingly threatens the accessibility of educational research, librarians are emerging as critical defenders of open access and research transparency. This presentation reports on the proactive efforts of a Canadian academic librarian who developed actionable workarounds to address the disappearance of articles from ERIC. These missing records pose a significant challenge to researchers conducting knowledge syntheses, who face a reporting and reproducibility crisis when search results fluctuate or shrink without explanation. The implications are profound: systematic reviews …

Navigating Nih’S Revised Public Access Policy: On-The-Ground Experiences From Librarians And Researchers, Anneliese Taylor, Katie Fortney, Tim Vollmer

SJSU Open Access Conference

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) rolled out its revised Public Access Policy on July 1, 2025, in accordance with the 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy Nelson Memo. The Nelson Memo calls on all U.S. federal funders to implement a policy requiring immediate public access to published articles and supporting datasets resulting from federal grants. On the surface, NIH’s new policy is a public good, ensuring that federally funded research outputs will no longer be held back from public access for 12 months after publication. But the implementation mechanisms of this new policy for researchers and publishers …

Predator-Prey Population Distribution, Robert Robinette, April Sheppard

Staff and Faculty Scholarship

Determining the extent of the predatory publication problem at an R2 research university, Robert and April share their discoveries as well as how that impacts library services. This was presented at the Arkansas Library Association (ArLA) conference on October 19, 2025.

Changes To Utah State University's Open Access Fund, David Advent, Yassin Nacer

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

Utah State University (USU) Libraries established an open access (OA) fund in 2012 with the goal of helping USU authors offset the costs of publishing OA articles. The fund proved to be enormously popular, and funds were expended quickly each year—most recently being exhausted in less than 72 hours. In recognition of this unsustainability, as well as concerns about the rapidly changing role of OA and copyright in scholarly publishing, USU Libraries initiated significant changes to the fund. This lightning talk will share how we identified and assessed challenges with the existing OA fund, the modifications we implemented, our plans …

Enshrining Library And University Values Through The Creation Of A Policy Committee, Brian Sullivan, Rebecca B. French

Faculty Scholarship

As interprofessional organizations operating within the context of higher education, academic libraries find themselves pulled between competing forces with regards to both policies and values. Departmental, unit, library, division, university, and professional interests all hold sway over a library's decision-making and its implementation of policies and procedures, making balancing these tensions a complex endeavor. When faced with a backlog of needed policy revisions and a campus-wide review by the Provost's office that resulted in additional policy update requests, the authors formed a policy committee within their library's faculty governance body. This chapter details how we kept organizational values in mind …

Behind The Scenes Of A Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, Rebecca Giver Johnston

Librarian Publications

Syracuse University Libraries hosted a student workshop that explored Wikipedia, its history, and its modern challenges. After a conversation and Q&A with a Wikipedia expert, librarians worked with students to make their own updates to Wikipedia, focusing especially on making improvements to pages for folks from the Latinx and LGBTQ+ communities. This lightning talk will explore how staff prepared for this event, how it went, and some takeaways from running it.

Who Let The Dogs In? Hosting A Therapy Dog Event At Your Library, Bradley P. Tolppanen, Janice Derr

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Different Perspective: Maslow's Hierarchy & Information Literacy, Amy Odwarka, Brian Keith

All Faculty Scholarship

This poster offers an innovative conceptual framework for intellectual freedom and explores information literacy as a developmental journey for learners, aligning it with stages of student experience and growing ability drawn from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The adapted system positions information literacy in a progressive journey tied to a student's academic growth, evolving from basic participation to advanced knowledge creation and intellectual independence. With this guide, libraries and instructional librarians can tailor information literacy supports based on the progression of student needs at various stages of information literacy development, some of which are foundational to success in library instruction settings. …

“Literally Made Me Cry”: The Results Of The Student Course Materials Cost Survey, Stephen Krueger, Brandon Bradley

Library Presentations

In 2024, over 300 UK students took a survey on how the cost of textbooks and other course materials impacted their academic experiences. The presenters will share highlights from the results and resources for finding solutions.

W&L Law Fall Scholarship Celebration 2025, Andrew Christensen, Michelle Cosby, Brandon Hasbrouck, Jennifer Mitchell, Melanie D. Wilson

Library Events

On October 9, 2025, the Washington and Lee Law Library hosted the fifth W&L Law Fall Scholarship Celebration. The event was co-sponsored by the Frances Lewis Law Center and took place in the Law Library's main reading room from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

On display were dozens of scholarly articles, books, chapters, and court briefs authored by the W&L Law faculty and student body between October 2022 and October 2025. Additional works were accessible online via QR codes to W&L Law Scholarly Commons institutional repository. A selection of vintage scholarship by former W&L Law professors was also on display, courtesy …

Reference At A Remote Field Station: A Case Study Of Ecology, Environmental Science And Geology Fieldwork At An Embedded Library, Thomas Gerrish

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Purpose Field station libraries, particularly those serving biological and marine research stations, represent a unique but understudied class of special libraries. This case study investigates reference services at the remote University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) to provide a baseline assessment of how such services support the information needs related to research in ecology, geology and environmental science.

Design/methodology/approach The study recorded, coded and analyzed 209 reference transactions from the 2022 and 2023 summer sessions, revealing trends in patron inquiries and the role of the reference desk. Further, the case study examined the organizational structure, community interaction and mission of …

"Appalachian Pop Culture Fairs", Heather A. Lauer

Librarian Research

This presentation explores the development, impact, and challenges of pop culture conventions in West Virginia and the implications on the broader Appalachian region. Through in-depth interviews with organizers of eight regional conventions—including HerdCon, Tsubasacon, Causeacon, and the Mothman Festival— Lauer examined the motivations behind organizing such events, the cultural and logistical hurdles faced, and the personal and communal rewards experienced by those involved. By investigating how these events foster community, promote regional tourism, and provide inclusive spaces for fandoms, the presentation highlights the importance of pop culture in shaping identity and engagement in rural Appalachia. Special attention is given to …

What Do Students Read? Let’S Talk About Data-Informed Library Collections Planning For Student Success, Nat Gustafson-Sundell, Heidi J. Southworth, Evan Rusch

Library Services Publications

Do students read? What do they read? What kinds of information resources are most used by students? What subject areas are most used by students? What do they need from their library if they are going to complete assignments? How can the library plan ahead to meet student needs? The modern academic library is mostly online and highly data driven. The MSU Library Services Collection Management Technology team briefly demonstrated some of the tools they’ve developed to understand student needs. They showcased some of the instruments they’ve used to communicate collections plans to administration, as they’ve strategized to conform to …

"There And Back Again": An Archives Story, Laurinda Weisse, Jenny Haddon

Posters, Proceedings, and Presentations: CTR Library

UNK Archives and Special Collections has been required to pack and move their holdings no fewer than four times in the past two and a half years. In late 2022, work began to pack and move the holdings of UNK’s Archives and Special Collections in advance of a 2-year multi-phase renovation of the Library building. Organization was maintained via a carefully curated numbering system and associated spreadsheet. Access was challenging throughout and reference services significantly limited while collections were in temporary storage. The collection returned to the partially renovated archival stacks in late 2023. Unfortunately, problems were immediately apparent. A …

Strengthening The Future: Sparking Growth And Connection Among Early Career Librarians, Alex Henigman, Brandon Kennedy

Library Staff Publications

Description: This presentation highlights innovative programming created to support early career librarians as they develop and grow in their professional roles. Using a case study of an Early Career Librarian Task Force specifically for medical librarians, led by early career librarians themselves, it will showcase the programs developed, share lessons learned, and offer preliminary insights into the unique needs of early career librarians. Learning Objectives: The audience will gain insight into the needs of the next generation of librarians, learn about ways to support early career librarians at their library, and leave with practical guidance for creating their own social …