Digital Commons Network^™

Lost In Translation: Faculty And Archivist Communication, Blake Spitz

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

What happens when a partnership with a faculty member seems like a success, only to reveal misunderstandings and difficult repercussions? This talk will discuss lessons learned from a complex collaboration between an archivist and a labor studies instructor to orient a class of graduate students to special collections and archival research. After several conversations, (with some miscommunications and surprises along the way!) a graduate student class on U.S. Labor History visited our Special Collections for an intense 2.5 hour deep-dive into our various labor collections. The archivist led all portions of the class, focusing on primary source analysis and specific …

If At First You Don't Succeed In Your Instruction Methodology, Try, Try Again, Katelyn Angell, Eric Shannon

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Teaching, by its very nature, is a trial and error process. Experimenting with a variety of methods of pedagogies is an integral part of determining which strategies demonstrate the greatest possible learning outcomes. One would be hard-pressed to meet an academic instruction librarian without at least one concrete example of a teaching method or educational activity that was not a success within the library instruction classroom. However, these incidents are critical learning experiences that inspire instruction librarians to grow and develop their teaching practice, hopefully in tandem with student feedback, opportunities for assessment, and the support of departmental colleagues.

The …

What Went Wrong: Reflections On A Teaching With Technology Failure, Amy Barlow

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

When functioning properly, interactive learning modules are great for student engagement, but when the technology falls short, precious class time is wasted and learning objectives may go unmet. This speaker will tell the story of how a clerical error resulted in a technological meltdown during library instruction. She will share how she came to view the incident as a useful failure because she learned to: Accept that not every problem can be anticipated; always have a Plan B; and be patient with tech support. More than that, she came to realize that testing web-based learning modules in class is a …

Choose Your Own (Mis)Adventure: Practicing Digital Literacy Skills In The Community College Classroom, Meggie Lasher

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

The lighting talk will outline the creation process of a digital literacy workshop for a diverse group of learners from scratch. Librarians instructing in a community college setting often work with a diverse student body‑ from different backgrounds and identities to levels of technology and research skills. To help students make the critical thinking leaps between textbook hypotheticals to relevant, real-life digital dilemmas, librarians can act as digital literacy educators and advocates. After teaching introductory library sessions to first-year students, I noticed a variety in the skill, comfort, and knowledge of using a computer in an academic and work setting. …

That Time One Person Came To My End-Of-Semester Citation Workshops, Katie Beth Ryan

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Recognizing the challenges and stresses many students encounter when citing and paraphrasing, I decided to hold two citation workshops -- one for MLA, one for APA -- at the end of the semester. I created visually appealing presentations in Canva. I got the word out by distributing a flyer for digital signs across campus. A colleague and I disseminated an announcement to professors. An advertisement appeared on the sign above the campus center. Chocolate-covered pretzels were offered as snacks! These efforts resulted in exactly one person -- who didn’t know there was a citation workshop taking place -- wandering into …

The Trials & Tribulations Of Incorporating 3d Printing Into The Health Science Curriculum, Laurel Scheinfeld, Joan Wagner, Blanche Leeman

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

In May 2015, our library was granted an NNLM MAR Medical Library Project Award to purchase a 3D printer and incorporate its’ use into the health science curriculum. No one on our staff had any prior experience with 3D printing. What we did have was an interest in offering new and innovative library services. We also wanted to promote the library as a partner in introducing new technologies to our students. Therefore, we forged ahead and learned all we could very quickly in order to get the program up and running. During brainstorming sessions with our Occupational and Physical Therapy …

Pivot, And Pivot Again: Ever-Nimble Library Leadership, Kathryn Geoffrion Scannell, Lyena Chavez

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Pressures continue to build for academic library leaders. Leaders face re-purposing of library spaces, staffing shortages, and increasing expectations to respond to a widening variety of library needs. Leaders must not only manage day-to-day library operations, but also successfully guide and lead within a sea of unpredictable, evolving institutional forces and activities, frequently at a late stage in the journey. How do leaders stay on course while constantly recalculating the route? What competencies are needed to stay afloat during turbulent times in higher education?

This poster will offer real-world examples of “pivoting” in response to space repurposing, new and changing …

Mooc: Miscalculations, Oversights, Opportunities And Celebration, Julie Goldman, Allison Kay Herrera

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Online learning is incredibly important for libraries and librarians to stay valuable in modern information ages. While face to face classes are wonderful, online courses give our users more flexibility and opportunities to learn. The field of online learning is essential for libraries and we want to support and embrace online learning developments.

Ways for libraries to become involved in online learning have recently been explored in-depth (Tasha Maddison, and Maha Kumaran, ed. 2017. Distributed Learning. Chandos Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-100598-9.00023-4). While some of the identified challenges and limitations are also reflected in this project, this presentation provides a case …

Spectacular Failures And Tenuous Successes In Faculty Outreach: A Story Of Persistence, Melinda Malik, Hannah Lindquist, Bekah Dreyer

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

The College has a long history of engagement and outreach with its community. The Library supports the college’s mission of “engagement within local, national, and global communities” in various ways. For example, librarians work with local high schools to provide access to resources and information literacy instruction, as well as engage immigrant, refugee, and underserved high school students in the college experience to help them envision a pathway to college. On campus, the library’s outreach efforts extend to faculty, staff, and students through collaborations that support teaching and learning programming and resources. Despite all of its successes, the library has …

When Your Info Café Fails, Think Of Your Lms As Take-Out: Learning From The Services Students Won’T Use To Create The Services They Will, Elizabeth Chase, Patricia Mcpherson, Heather Perry

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

In 2012 we transformed our obsolete periodicals desk into The Info Cafe, and planned a series of information skills workshops for that meeting space. In an effort to encourage attendance at those drop-in sessions, we partnered with the our institution’s merit point program to offer points to each student who attended a twenty-minute workshop on topics ranging from searching a specific database to using a particular citation style. The merit point system, which was discontinued in 2015, provided a range of opportunities for students to amass points that contributed to their odds of getting their preferred choice in the institution's …

Encouraging Experimentation And Creativity Through Professional Development: Turning Our Failures Into Best Practices, Amanda Piekart, Bonnie Lafazan, Jessica Kiebler

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Without a dedicated librarian in charge of training and development, our librarians are empowered to experiment and explore professional development opportunities to grow within the profession. Several librarians within our department have taken initiative to create a wide range of internal development experiences that foster growth and dialogue.

This session will present the best practices we have identified through our missteps and failures from several internal professional development initiatives. From a weeklong conference to a bi-weekly collaborative newsletter, we have learned how to tackle failures such as lack of participation, confusion from complex processes and overlooked event logistics. Each of …

These Are Not Your Students: How Service Orientation Doomed A Library Instruction Assessment Project And What It Took To Bring It Back To Life, Kathrine C. Aydelott

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

I was new to campus, a faculty member in the library in charge of overseeing our instruction program, and--in pursuit of building my tenure portfolio--I had partnered with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to develop a terrific research project: in order to assess whether our first-year composition students retained their one-shot library orientation instruction, I designed an online Blackboard module to be delivered in “flipped classroom” style. Some classes would see a librarian in class for the traditional lecture-style session, as had been the case for years, while some would complete the module, a series of four …

Fake News: Taking News Evaluation Out Of The Classroom And Into The Fire, Martha Kruy, Briana Mcguckin, Theodora Ruhs, Susan Slaga-Metivier

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

As cries of “fake news” weave into popular discourse, university reference and instruction librarians have teamed up with a Journalism professor to lead a workshop tackling a two-pronged issue: defining what fake news is (and isn’t), and evaluating news from several commonly-encountered source types (from videos and memes to more traditional-looking articles online). The goal of this workshop was to spread information and news literacies in a time when they are sorely needed. While this venture began as a campus event, all presenters involved agreed that the tools and resources provided would be especially valuable to communities beyond the classroom. …

What If You Build It And They Don't Come? Lessons Learned From A Tutorial-Creation Project, Lindley Homol

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

To extend the reach of many library instruction programs both on-campus and online, many librarians have been creating instructional tutorials. Whether these learning objects consist of screencasts, static webpages, or interactive modules, they can be time consuming both to create and maintain. In order for students to see the instructional benefits, and librarians to justify the time put into creating and maintaining the learning objects, it is crucial that students actually access and use the tutorials. What if librarians build tutorials, and the students do not come? How can librarians ensure that their tutorials will be accessed and used?

In …

From Chaos To Planned Future: Transforming Libguides From Pathfinders To Learning Objects, Marisol Ramos

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

In 2008, our library adopted LibGuides version 1 as the platform to deliver subject, course, general purpose and topic guides. As a co-chair of the implementation group, our goal was to transition from static web pages to a more dynamic system to deliver information about all our general and subject-specific resources. Over the following years, I realized that our initial goal lacked enough specifics or a clear understanding of what the ultimate purpose was for creating these guides. Should guides simply be lists of resources? or should they be learning objects that allow for unmediated learning? Those were questions that …

Survey Says: Strategies For Responding To Challenging Findings, Erica Schattle, Dorothy Meaney

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

As academic libraries are increasingly called on to demonstrate their value, librarians are beginning to define measures of library impact that work both within and across libraries and constituents. Initiatives such as ACRL's Assessment in Action program have sought to quantify library impact on student success through action research and campus collaboration. But what happens when data collected through an action research project tells you something you don't want to learn? This session will share one university library's experiences with shifting focus from measuring user satisfaction to assessing library impact through a biennial survey of students and faculty. Librarians collaborated …