Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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. …

No Attendees? No Problem. Redefining Programs At The Library, Deb Baker

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

After launching an ambitious series of programs at our library as part of a larger outreach and marketing effort, we found that few students, faculty, or staff attended events. Even programs suggested by students themselves had very poor attendance. The following two semesters we tried more interactive self-serve (“passive”) programs around the library, to varying success. Overall, this has resulted in raising the library’s profile as a community hub for the campus as well as sometimes engaging more people. Attendees will:

--hear a few ideas for transforming traditional events-style programming into activities your community can deal themselves into with little …

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 …

Failure To Reproduce: The Replication Crisis In Research — Can Librarians Help?, Andrée J. Rathemacher, Amanda Izenstark, Harrison Dekker

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

“It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.” Those are the words of John Ioannidis in a highly-cited article from 2005. Ioannidis is referring to the “reproducibility crisis,” a phenomenon whereby researchers are not able to replicate published results in later experiments. A recent survey by Nature found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments and more than half have failed to reproduce their own.

In this presentation, we will introduce attendees to the replication crisis and provide real-life examples of reproducibility problems in the fields of psychology, economics, …

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 …

Turning Missteps Into Stepping Stones: Personal And Professional Growth As An Early Career Academic Librarian, Christina Bell, Naomi Binnie, Brooke Duffy, Gina Levitan, Kelleen Maluski

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

This panel discussion will focus on the challenges and failures we have experienced as new and semi-new academic librarians. The all too familiar trend in libraries has been to do more with less: requests for library services have increased yet our budgets, time, and supplies have all decreased. While institutions have devised creative ways to adapt to new difficulties, including adopting new staffing models, the situation remains the same: we have been hired to do one job but inevitably end up doing much more. How did we as new librarians deal with systemic issues? How has it impacted our professional …

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 …

Displaying The Past: Guidelines For Outreach Using Archival Collections, Laura Mondt, Rachel Oleaga

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

In the summer of 2017, our community college library had the opportunity to partner with a local historical society to produce an exhibit about the history of the college in the historical society’s welcome center. With no dedicated archivist or outreach librarian, two research and instruction librarians with archives experience from previous employment were tasked with leading and implementing this project with little precedent.

Our archive is relatively new, and still in the early stages of development. Most collections are minimally processed and no electronic finding aids exist to aid in search and retrieval efforts. Additionally, with limited display space …

Mindset Matters: Developing A Growth Mindset To Reframe Failure In Libraries, Benjamin Peck, Kimberly Burke Sweetman

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

The theory of the growth mindset was first described by Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck and is an emerging concept within the field of education. It is now also being applied to business theory. Those with a growth mindset hold the belief that intelligence can be developed, leading to a desire to learn and a tendency to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setback, see effort as a path to mastery, learn from criticism and find lessons and inspiration in other’s successes. As a result, they continually reach higher levels of achievement and a greater sense of free will. …

If You Build It, Will It Collapse? Roadblocks To Building A Regional Repository Community, Erin Jerome, Lisa A. Palmer, Rebecca Reznik-Zellen

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Background: In July 2017 the authors organized a regional user group meeting for librarians who use or were considering Digital Commons, the popular hosted institutional repository platform from bepress. It had been many years since this group had been brought together. Bepress sponsored the meeting and sent a product consultant to participate. The organizers hoped to make this an annual event, and also broaden the scope to all repository platforms. By all accounts, the well-attended New England Digital Commons User Group Meeting was a success and evaluations were positive. Just five days later, however, bepress announced that the company had …

Can Robots Replace Librarians? Experiences Using A Chat Bot To Respond To Im Questions, David Meincke

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

This poster will use text and statistical data to describe the conditions that led to development of a chat bot. It will use text and graphics to illustrate the steps involved in building and launching the bot, and it will use text and statistical data to illustrate its functionality in responding to IM reference questions. A laptop will also be available to demo backend (developer code, etc.) as well as frontend (bot responses to questions in real time

Two or three takeaways

- The poster session will demonstrate the basic steps that are needed to integrate a chatbot to library …

My Misadventures In Scheduling Innovation, Annette M. Vadnais

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

For my poster session I would talk about my personal experience with being granted flex time to work off site one day a month. I used research mostly from the tech world to back up my request. This way I would have some time each month to focus on things that often get pushed down for other items that take priority. This way I would have a whole day to focus on a project or tweaking a current program. I will talk about why I chose to not work from home, and instead chose to work mostly from other libraries. …

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 …

From Worst To Best: Discovering Ir Best Practices And Planning For Change, Hedda Monaghan

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

This poster presentation discusses how an institutional repository (IR) team at a mid-sized university discovered their best practices. A period of staff changes and shortages caused IR projects to slow-down almost to a halt due to a lack of clearly defined best practices. How and why IR projects faltered is explicitly discussed. This poster includes lessons from IR literature, with notes on adapting best practices from larger institutions to smaller institutions. How the concept of lab notebooks from the biological sciences can be incorporated to an IR workflow is demonstrated. Finally, the poster discusses working with an eclectic IR collection …

The Game Of Library Tetris: Using A Shelf Address System, Judy Quist, Rachel Gogan

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Having to constantly shift materials to make space while maintaining call number order can be challenging and time consuming, particularly when needing to move materials quickly. Most of the library literature around alternative shelving systems is focused on user experience and resource discoverability. A shelf address system makes it easier for library professionals to quickly organize and locate items, making it an ideal choice for a staff only area. Using a shelf based address system allows quick insertion of materials into any available shelf space without worrying about call number order, but it also comes with its own set of …

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 …

We've Failed At Diversifying Our Librarian Ranks, Now What ? A Plan For Addressing The "Pipeline" Problem, Annie Sollinger, Isabel Espinal, Pete Smith, Kate Freedman

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Like many libraries, at our library, we have tried for many years to racially diversify our profession. One of our librarians even made it to the Library Journal " Movers & Shakers" list for raising awareness of the library profession to students of color through presentations, videos, dinners, and icebreaking activities. But despite our intentions and past efforts, the situation has not improved significantly. Let's face it, we have all failed miserably: currently, the racial composition of librarianship, both at our library and in the librarian profession-at-large, is woefully unrepresentative of the United States’ population. Moreover, despite numerous analyses of …

Worst Practices? Surviving The Pitfalls Of License Negotiation, Michael Rodriguez

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Do you negotiate vendor license agreements? Are you interested in doing so? Do you work with someone who does? Attend this session to learn about the “worst practices” of license negotiation. You’ll hear first-hand from a lead university negotiator about the pitfalls and temptations of negotiation and how to elude them or recover when you fall into them. Based on true stories! Emphasis will be on license negotiations that fell short, delivered mixed results, or might have ended badly due to either the vendor or the librarian exhibiting risky, careless, or improper negotiation behavior. We will be constructive. We’ll flip …

How Not To Grow An Orcid Program, Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, Lisa A. Palmer

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

In 2017 the University of Massachusetts Medical School became a member of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) through a regional library consortium. Over the course of the year, the library made efforts to establish ORCID implementations with the institution’s faculty profile system. However, progress was insufficient by the end of the year to warrant membership renewal. In this lightning talk, we will discuss our efforts to get ORCID off the ground and the positive lessons we learned in the process.

Rfid-Saster, Christina Huffaker

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

At a large university library, RFID tags were incorporated into all materials, in anticipation of using RFID as multi-purpose tool for circulation, theft protection, and stacks management. The incorporation of these tags as substitutes for barcodes and security tape worked smoothly, as the circulation workflows were adapted to include newly necessary tasks such as applying and re-writing the tags themselves. However, the second phase of this project created unforeseen challenges, some of which remain problematic and unsolved.

Despite being hailed as the up-and-coming, all-encompassing solution for library circulation, security, and stacks management, the implementation of RFID technology into the daily …

Reframing Failure: Post Mortems For Library Projects, Danielle S. Apfelbaum, Derek Stadler

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

As librarians, we often take part in or lead projects and initiatives, but not all of these endeavors succeed; we sometimes experience failure. Whether a solo research effort or a collaborative attempt to improve information literacy skills, not every endeavor may go as planned. Yet, how often do we take a step back and investigate how, what, when, where, and with whom a critical breakdown occurred? The post mortem -- a systematic method for discovering, documenting, and disseminating an actionable summary of the ups and downs of a project’s execution -- offers librarians a valuable tool for reframing failure as …

The Ballad Of The Textbook Annex, Sharon H. Domier

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Do you remember the theme song for Gilligan's Island? Imagine this in a project setting where a large number of library materials were contracted to be moved to storage in a very quick time-frame, only to discover that a significant number of them were not in the inventory system. A perfect storm of the effects of earlier uncompleted projects, poor implementation planning, quick decisions, and outside challenges threatened to sink our ship. Only the heroic efforts and flexibility of all involved managed to get us to shore without drowning or killing each other. The lessons learned will ensure that we …

The Burden Of Access: Patron Driven Acquisitions For Streaming Video On A Small Campus, Amanda Scull

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

There is a great deal in the literature about the benefits of streaming video for faculty and students, and many articles tout the patron driven acquisitions (PDA) model which allows a large amount of content to be made available while ensuring that the library only pays for what is used. However, it is notable that a significant percentage of these articles and conference presentations have focused on large universities and systems that have substantial budgets and have leveraged streaming video as a way to enhance access to a sizeable patron base.

Three years ago we opened PDA for streaming video …

My Library Has A New Residency Program, Now What? Planning And Implementing A Successful Residency Program, Quetzalli Barrientos

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

As residency positions in librarianship have increased in popularity again, libraries have rushed to develop their own resident librarian programs. Nearly three years ago, my institution hired me as their very first resident librarian. This presentation will lay out a road map example of a successful and effective residency structure for universities. As my three-year residency concludes, there are many successes and challenges of the residency program experience to reflect upon. A successful program should focus on introducing residents to the organizational culture of academic librarianship, and provide formal training for the skill sets or areas of expertise that the …

20/20 Hindsight: Mistakes Made And Lessons Learned From A New Director, Cori Wilhelm

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Do you ever look back on decisions you made, and wonder, “What was I thinking?” Hindsight can be 20/20, particularly after a major transition such as starting a new leadership position.

This brief talk will explore one new director’s experience in her first four semesters as director of a small academic library, including mistakes made that helped lead to lessons learned. Topics include preparing for the transition, relationships with supervisors, setting team expectations, and communicating with staff. Participants can expect to learn from someone else’s mistakes, and take away real-world, applicable advice that can potentially save them from making the …