Program & Conference Schedule

Discussion Guide for this session

Our profession seeks to overcome a history of centering cis white men and their experiences. Though we steward many diverse stories, we struggle to move beyond the celebrations of legacy collections that fail to demonstrate the true breadth and variety of perspectives found in our libraries. There have been many discussions to reflect on DEI efforts in our field, but the energy and ability to create large-scale change can be challenging to sustain beyond these reflections due to staffing, budget, and time constraints.

Join us for a lively discussion of the ways that we as information professionals center DEI in our everyday practice, outreach, conservation, and more. We hope these conversations will empower librarians to become agents of change in their institutions regardless of size or staffing. This world café discussion will involve attendees in small group brainstorming, culminating in a share-out session in which we can learn from each other’s ideas. The focus of the conversations will be about what small-scale efforts and decisions can be made at the ground level that accumulate to create larger scale changes. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas and fresh energy and momentum to bring to DEI practices in their institutions.

Learning Outcomes: 

• Attendees will learn how to sustainably center DEI in their everyday duties in their position.
•  Attendees will discuss different approaches to incorporating DEI work through discussions and conversations.
• Attendees will interrogate legacy narratives in the collections of their home institutions and learn how to re-frame their collections to uncover obscured narratives and perspectives.
  

Zachary Lewis (University of Dayton)

Student success has reached its tipping point. Covid-19, the shift to and from remote learning, and other current events have laid bare the fact that students are struggling. Struggling with mental health, struggling with the obvious gaps in access exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, and struggling to connect. Academic achievement, retention, and degree attainment have long been used as measurements of student success. Many library programs, services, and partnerships are designed to promote academic achievement. But does academic achievement show us the whole picture? Is a straight A student successful if they don’t feel supported? This session will use an intergroup dialogue format to address other factors that should play a key role in conversations about student success, such as student engagement and sense of belonging, and the role the library can play in helping students succeed in a more holistic way. From building relationships with campus partners to better understand student needs to creating space for and acknowledging students of all backgrounds and identities, attendees will be asked to think critically about the type of success their libraries and institutions ask of their students.

Learning Outcomes:

• Attendees will be asked to think critically about student success metrics in order to better understand how their library does or does not promote student success. Attendees should leave the session with a fuller understanding of student success as it is traditionally defined and measured, and should leave feeling challenged to view student success in a different light.
• Attendees will learn how to apply different student success metrics in their own libraries or institutions in order to better support students with varying needs.
• Attendees will participate in intergroup dialogue in order to share their own experiences and views on student success while actively listening to others.
  

Tag:  DLIG, C2YCL, IIG, AIG, PROMIG

Maureen Barry (Bowling Green State University) and Ash Faulkner (Ohio State University)

While medical and health science librarians have collaborated with systematic review teams since the early 2000s, recent years have seen the methodology growing more popular in social science disciplines as well. An increasing number of academic librarians who liaise with faculty and graduate students in social sciences, business, and education are now being called upon to support systematic review projects. The hallmark of this methodology is exhaustive and reproducible literature searching across multiple databases and sources of grey literature, the critical appraisal of the relevant literature and data, and a synthesized conclusion, the goal of which is often to inform practice, policy, and future research.

Learning Outcomes:

• Differentiate systematic reviews from other types of literature reviews in order to ​improve support for students and faculty at their home institutions
• Identify the implications ​of systematic review support for ​reference and instruction programs in order to p​lan for adequate library staffing and services.
• Recognize potential challenges of systematic review methodology in order to set realistic expectations for research teams about librarian contributions to the process.
  

Tag:  C2YCL, IIG, STEMIG

Tina Schneider and Zach Walton (Ohio State University)

A tiny academic library is an unlikely hotbed of digital activism. Yet with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, two librarians decided that they could not sit on the sidelines when there was an opportunity to help preserve Ukrainian culture. A global initiative called SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online) offered the chance, using a variety of tools new to us, to capture websites and digitized materials hosted in Ukraine, with the hope of preserving them in case of destruction of the original physical materials or online presence. Some of our involvement then extended to administrative tasks to help with workflow. The ultimate goal was and is to have these sites and files ready should Ukrainian institutions need assistance in getting websites back up in the future.

Learning Outcomes:

• Attendees will learn about the skills needed to do this work to help organizations or areas that are vulnerable or in crisis.

Tag:  SCIG, TEDSIG, SCAig, IIG

Dawn Winans, Meagan Brown, Courtney Cooney, and Stephanie Ruddock (Kettering University)

Presentation slides

The Library Third Space serves as the inclusive hub of faculty-student-industry collaborations, with flexible learning and dining spaces, and our next century digital collection. We will share all the steps it took to shift library services from a traditional library setting to an inclusive third space seamlessly. Reference services transitioned to a model that includes a physical desk and adds a barrier-free roving research service. The predominantly print library collection converted to all electronic, including a new ILS that further supported the digital transition. Library stacks closed and service moved to a request-driven booking system for physical materials, with patron delivery of items via a smart locker system. A focus was placed on the accessibility and discoverability of resources and services through improvement of the library website, FAQ’s, LibGuides, and also increased marketing and outreach to the campus community. The results of a best practices survey of our colleagues across the nation also helped prepare us to serve our patrons in a significantly different way. We have continued to provide essential services while building a sense of community amidst a major location and digital shift.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify what practices worked and didn’t work while planning and executing a major shift in library services, in order to gain insight into tested strategies for library transformation

Tag:  SCIG, TEDSIG, STEMIG, CMIG

Jane Hammons (Ohio State University)

When COVID-19 required a shift to all virtual events, one librarian took advantage of the need for programming to develop an Information Literacy Virtual Workshop Series for instructors. Although not originally part of the library’s plans, the success of the first series has encouraged the librarian to incorporate workshops as a regular component of the library’s programming. Workshop topics have ranged from specific core concepts from the Framework to an exploration of the connections between information literacy and social justice. By changing the topics regularly, connecting information literacy with pedagogical strategies, and providing practical steps for incorporating information literacy, the librarian has been able to keep the workshop series engaging for participants. Offering the workshops has helped to increase the library’s visibility and create connections with other units that support teaching and learning. In this session, the presenter will describe the creation of the workshop series and provide guidance for librarians interested in developing their own workshops. She will share tips for selecting topics, keeping the workshops engaging and relevant for participants, and building an audience through strategic promotion. Participants should leave with steps that they can take to begin planning an instructor-focused information literacy workshop or series.

Learning Outcomes:

• Examine their institutional context in order to consider how information literacy workshops for instructors can support their library’s goals
• Identify steps that they can take in order to develop an information literacy workshop (or workshops) for instructors
  

Tag:  DLIG, C2YCL, IIG, PROMIG, AIG

Meris Longmeier and Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros  (Ohio State University)
Culture is present in your library whether it is acknowledged or even immediately apparent. The more you as an individual are aware of the culture and its impact on your library processes, the more effective you will be at successfully proposing changes within your organization. By explicitly unpacking the organizational culture, norms and values of the library, individuals will be able to maneuver within their organization, anticipate potential pitfalls, and navigate a project to successful completion. This session will help attendees identify characteristics of culture at their organization, understand what influence they have within the system, elevate their individual agency within the organization, and build strategies for managing up (with supervisors and administration) and out (with colleagues and campus) to propose changes and projects within their library. This will be achieved through the use of active learning using real-world case studies to unpack and understand methods for successfully proposing changes to services. Our case studies will also touch on projects and changes related to equity, diversity, inclusion (EDI).

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will be able to identify and reflect on explicit and implicit elements of organizational culture that may influence the success and timeliness of projects, including projects with a DEI focus.  
• Participants will learn how to develop a strategy for managing up and out in the context of their organizational culture after working through case studies.
• Participants will collaborate to determine different techniques for elevating their agency within their organization to support their individual project goals.
  

Tag:  SCAig, DIV, PROMIG, SSIG

Mark Strang (Bowling Green State University)

Presentation slides

So you work in Acquisitions, Cataloging, Collection Development, Systems, or other backend library service areas and you want to contribute to your institution’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals or initiatives. During this presentation we’ll provide ideas and examples of bite size projects to promote and highlight Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in your library’s collection. If you have any bite size or small projects you’ve done or ideas to share, please bring them to the Q&A session to share with others.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand why DEI is important in providing access to library resources and services to meet the needs of all members of the library community.
• Identify small projects that backend/technical services library faculty and staff can work on to promote and highlight the library’s collection.
  

Tag:  C2YCL, TEDSIG, SCAig, PROMIG

Abigail Morgan (Miami University), Jerry Yarnetsky (Miami University), and Janell Verdream (Ohio State University at Newark)

Presentation slides

What happens when high school students don't have access to librarians? In fall 2021 we conducted a survey of first-year students at two Ohio public universities. We hoped to learn about incoming first-year students' confidence in their ability to conduct college research based on their library experiences at different types of high schools and districts throughout Ohio. For example, we found that 82-88% of rural and small town students in our survey reported they never or rarely received librarian help with their research in high school. These same students reported feeling much less prepared to do college-level research. Similarly, students reporting lack of access to library instruction due to remote learning also reported feeling a similar lack of preparedness. In turn, consistent with library anxiety literature, many of our respondents also find college libraries intimidating. While the students don't report finding library staff to be intimidating, they rank librarians as the last choice for who they would ask for research help. We will share additional findings from our survey, such as our students' understanding of how college librarians can help them. We will then discuss how our findings impact librarians’ work with first-year students in reference, instruction, and web services.

Learning Outcomes:

• Describe the differences in exposure to library instruction reported by students in Ohio high schools.
• Understand first-year students’ self-described knowledge of college librarians.
• Develop novel approaches to overcome first-year students’ library anxiety.
  

Tag:  DLIG, C2YCL, TEDSIG, IIG

Stephanie Founds, Anna Gardener, Kristin Henkaline, and Michael Flierl (Ohio State University)

Presentation slides

How do you approach redesigning a traditional reference service into something more impactful? In this presentation we will describe our experience of inheriting a traditional service point and our new vision to focus on enriching student employment. Student employees, in an academic library environment, often provide much of our service coverage and assistance. With this awareness, we decided to make students, both as employees and as users, the focal point of our redesign. We began to work with student employees as our partners and prioritized student contributions to our strategic goals and vision.

This experience of pivoting to a new design presented a unique opportunity to build a re-imagined workplace culture where we centered student contributions and incorporated consistent, formative feedback processes. We shifted from a transactional model of these contributions to our services to one of integration into the mission, goals, and vision of the service. We will share examples of student work, student perceptions of their experiences in this new model, and provide participants with opportunities to reflect on and discuss how they might cultivate a positive student employee workplace culture where student contributions and work are prioritized.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will re-imagine reference services in their local institutional context and identify examples of transformative student work
• Participants will conceptualize specific ways for student employees to contribute meaningfully to strategic goals in their institutional context
  

Tag:  SCAig, IIG, AIG

Anita J. Slack (Kent State University)

Presentation slides

The research demands of Evidence-Based Practice courses in the Nursing curriculum benefit from Information Literacy instruction. This presentation details how a librarian in a new position serving a large Nursing program navigated the challenges of working to establish ties with Nursing faculty, negotiated providing information literacy instruction for about 12-15 sections of the required EBP course per semester during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and protracted period of remote and asynchronous course offerings. In remote and asynchronous courses, synchronous online instruction was not permitted. The solution was to provide a YouTube-style channel of instructional videos to meet the needs of faculty and students. While this method was devised in response to the pandemic, it will continue beyond. This presentation provides details on how Kaltura was leveraged to provide items that were familiar to students, flexible for faculty, and how they became assigned activities in all EBP courses that allowed the librarian to scale instruction to a new, more expansive audience in the new position. The results of this exploration have been published in Medical Reference Services Quarterly and further research including pre- and post-testing continues.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will discover YouTube features that can most easily be mimicked using the Kaltura video platform in order to take advantage of the strategy on Kaltura or similar platforms at their home institutions.
• Participants will be encouraged to evaluate the adjustments made during the pandemic in order to determine whether to continue utilizing them.
  

Tag:  C2YCL, IIG

The Academic Library Association of Ohio (ALAO) is a chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). ALAO exists to develop, promote, and improve library and information services in Ohio’s higher education community, to advance the interests of academic librarianship and the personnel of academic libraries, and to provide leadership and advocacy for the educational and policy concerns of the academic library community in Ohio.

The conference planners seek to create a space for respectful dialogue and debate about critical issues. Upon registration, attendees will be asked to review and accept a list of community agreements. Conference planners will actively strive to create spaces in which multiple perspectives can be heard and no one voice dominates. We welcome any and all suggestions that will make this a safe and productive space for all. Please contact Gerald Natal, the program chair, at president@alaoweb.org.