Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Impossible Missions, Interesting Failures: A Toolkit For Dismantling Fears And Doubts, John T. Oliver

ACRL New England Chapter Annual Conference

Seemingly impossible endeavors can give us our biggest successes and our most informative failures. Just as importantly, they can be the most energizing to work on. If we can find a way to break down our anxieties and anticipated criticisms, we can be truly bold and wildly successful even when an attempt at the impossible comes up short. This interactive workshop would offer a toolkit for analyzing (and dismantling) the potential points of resistance that keep us from doing amazing, unreasonable, unrealistic things.

After briefly discussing the advantages of taking on seemingly impossible projects--it’s actually deceptively sensible!--this session would present …

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 …