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Sat 4/6
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9:00-10:00
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Large Conference Room
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Megan Graewingholt, Rachel Fleming, Keri Prelitz
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Or Equivalent: Rethinking Inclusivity and Experience Barriers in Librarianship:
This discussion panel aims to challenge and change the traditional pathways into the librarianship profession by bringing together a varied group of library professionals—from those just embarking on their careers to seasoned veterans with years of experience—to openly discuss the systemic barriers that hinder the evolution and inclusivity of the library workforce. The program identifies a critical issue in library hiring practices: the strict requirement for "Library" experience that disregards the value of equivalent skills gained in other related sectors. By adhering to a narrow definition of qualification, libraries miss out on candidates who possess essential skills and life experiences that greatly benefit the diverse communities they serve. "Or Equivalent" provides a series of practical examples to reframe recruitment, professional development, and mentorship to be more inclusive, flexible, and reflective of the diverse skill sets that can enhance library services. The program will feature a mix of personal antidotes, professional strategies, and considerations for library leaders. The session will incorporate Menti/live polls and provide a discussion handout for independent think-pair-share opportunities at the end of the session.
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Small Conference Room
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lawrence maminta, Selina Portera
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As the Zionist entity continues its genocidal rampage through Gaza, it also wages a U.S. taxpayer-funded disinformation campaign on liberal subjects in the Global North as both a form of obfuscation and a form of colonial erasure. This presentation will explore examples of the information war being waged on colonized subjects outside of Gaza and how Zionist organizations conduct this war through mainstream corporate media outlets and in our libraries. While the American Library Association (ALA) remains silent on the Zionist entity's destruction of schools, universities, and libraries in Gaza, library workers are left to fend for themselves against violent terror cells aligned with the United States' colonial outpost in occupied Palestine. Attendees will learn the various types of disinformation as conceptualized by the ALA and be reminded of what our ethical and professional obligations are as information workers even when abandoned by the field's largest professional organization.
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10:00-10:30
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Large Conference Room
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Faith Rusk
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Title: Peer-to-peer support in the library: Hits and misses
The high-impact practice of peer-to-peer student support, a common model for tutoring centers in higher education, is less common in libraries. A program proposed in the fall of 2019 sought to have peer mentors with extensive training staff the reference desk and teach information literacy instruction sessions, with librarians serving as backup and providing ongoing professional development to expand on students' information literacy knowledge. The goal was to provide peer mentors with opportunities to develop a variety of academic and professional skills, and their role in providing research assistance and instruction would increase the library’s capacity in both areas.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the original vision is not quite what came to pass. This presentation will discuss the program’s ongoing evolution and the institutional and situational factors involved, including pandemic closures, changes to training, changes to the reference provision model in the library, and the addition of circulation responsibilities to peer mentor roles. It will also discuss the ways in which adding instruction responsibilities has proven to be challenging, as well as how envisioning instruction responsibilities for the role has evolved. In sharing the successes and challenges of our implementation and current practice, we hope that others considering implementing a peer learning program can apply SF State’s lessons to their institutional context to inform their program development. Audience engagement will take the form of polls to gauge attendees’ experience with different program aspects throughout the presentation.
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Small Conference Room
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Wei Ma
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We developed a prototype Scholarly Article Content Extraction Web Tool to allow users to extract the key content of a scholarly article, substantially reducing the amount of text the user needs to read.
Scholarly articles usually have an original author’s abstract, but it is often too simple to describe the article in depth. Our goal was to create a web tool to better summarize and describe the content of scholarly articles to help users be more productive in performing research and to stay up to date in the field. Our prototype web tool can also handle private files stored locally and copyrighted documents stored in the cloud or locally. The tool can also handle PDF documents, which is out of the scope of current AIs, such as ChatGPT.
We will demonstrate the development process, the governing algorithm, and what further research is still needed to improve the algorithm and provide a live demonstration. We will also compare ChatGPT’s content summary function and the limitations of ChatGPT with our web tool.
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San Jose Ballroom
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Sarah Forzetting
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Title: The Solitude of Scarcity
Abstract: Drawing on my own conversations with academic librarians in the context of consortia work, as well as affectual theory and a political theory of revolutions, I posit that the antidote to loneliness in our specialized positions and feelings of insufficiency in our field is pursuing joyful collaboration. We work in a system that reflects the values of the academy; values that favor stoicism, sacrifice, and competitive individualism, values diverge from principles of openness and community that librarians hold. Scarcity of funding and staff, and relentless demands to do more with less, can lead to isolationism that renders us ineffective. To combat the solitude of scarcity, we can joyfully embrace the richness of talent in our profession through collaboration and reframe our labor and field to value affect as much as work output. Acting out joy in community has the potential to revolutionize the way we work and lead to a more impactful profession.
This will be presented as an opinion piece (10 min.) that the audience can react to and build on during the Q&A (10 min.). I will invite the audience to think about this idea on a practical level in terms of how it could impact everyday work. Additionally, I will question whether there are more radical implications to consider in terms of the ability of affect to challenge existing systems.
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10:30-12:00
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Large Conference Room
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Julia Barrios, Christyana Visk, Kelli Hines
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TLC from the PLC: Using mental health resources and spaces to support and encourage stressed medical students
As librarians at a medical school, we encounter a unique type of a student; they aren’t only focused on excelling in academics, but also trying to balance family life with working overtime at clinics and bearing the trials of complicated health systems. The nature of a medical student leaves little room for tending to their personal mental health, let alone participating in any library programming. Our library staff is faced with a small window of opportunity to make a positive impact when students pass the Circulation Desk to get to the study rooms. When we hear about their hardships during these passing moments, how do we respond? How do we leave them feeling encouraged and supported when pressed schedules do not allow conversations to carry on? In response to feeling insufficient in providing emotional and mental support to our students, our librarians have organically created a mental health campaign by creating bookmarks and stickers with mental health resources; re-designing library spaces for wellness activities (i.e., light exercise, meditation, and prayer), and encouraging staff to sign up for mental health first aid training. In this workshop, equip students with emotional, mental, and physical support through practice dialogues, re-design ideas, and creative resources.
Outline
15 minutes – Introduction of topic and resources our Content Creation Team made to respond to them
10 minutes – Demonstrate ways to respond to different mental health scenarios in the library
30 minutes – Create your own bookmark, sticker, pamphlet, or other creative item to share with students. Provide bookmark templates and utensils
15 minutes – Practice mental health dialogues for passing out creative items
5 minutes – Reflection
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Small Conference Room
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Tasha Bergson-Michelson, Melaine Huyck-Aufdemar
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Join Tasha and Melaine to learn about editing Wikipedia as a collaborative project with instructional faculty and students. Through Wikipedia editing students learn information literacy skills and become empowered to affect changes in the information landscape. You will learn how to edit in real time.
Think you will come? Please let us know ahead of time so we can set you up with editing privileges at the conference IP address: https://rb.gy/feqmif.
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12:00-1:00
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San Jose Ballroom
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Alvaro Quezada
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The poster presentation I will provide seeks to address the critical issue of burnout among academic librarians by offering practical strategies for prevention and promoting a supportive workplace culture. The poster presentation will focus on three key learning outcomes:
1. Identification of Burnout Warning Signs
a. Participants will be able to recognize early warning signs and symptoms of burnout, both in themselves and in colleagues.
b. Participants will develop an awareness of the physical, emotional, and behavioral indicators of burnout specific to the academic librarian profession.
c. Participants will be able to differentiate burnout form typical stress.
2. Implementation of Self-care Strategies
a. Participants will acquire a repertoire of practical self-care strategies tailored to the challenges faced by academic librarians.
b. Participants will be provided tools, tips, and resources for establishing and maintaining a healthy work -life balance.
3. Promotion of a Supportive Workplace Culture
a. Participants will learn strategies for fostering a culture of well-being within their library teams.
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Lynsey Eames
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This is a poster session titled: Ways we ensure equal library access for students studyng in remote or international branch campuses. It explains the challenges of being a satellite campus library, but also offers practical solutions to common problems. During the session I will be explaining my own experiences and best practices
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1:00-2:00
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Large Conference Room
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Stef Baldiva, Elizabeth Tibbitts
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Facilitators will outline a transformative approach to library outreach, pivoting from a conventional 'book chair' lecture to a more engaging and inclusive format. At the root of this transformation lies Catherine Price's compelling thesis on the power of fun, characterized by the elements of 'playfulness', 'connection', and 'flow'. Our conference session aims to reenvision library outreach by integrating these elements, fostering a more vibrant, egalitarian, and participatory library environment.
Facilitators will begin the session by describing the problem, an annual book chair meeting, which reinforced the top-down power dynamic criticized by Paulo Freire. The annual book chair event involved few library staff members and relied heavily on librarian facilitation, this led to reduced engagement from participants. Facilitators then explore Price’s definition of fun, and discuss how ‘true fun’ can reinvigorate routine library activities. Facilitators will discuss practical strategies for library-wide buy-in, shifting the focus from librarian-centered to a collaborative, whole-library effort. This approach encourages librarians to step out of their hierarchical roles to diffuse power to staff, inviting all library departments to contribute creatively and meaningfully to outreach activities.
As an active learning exercise, facilitators will lead participants in a “fun audit” exercise outlined by Price. Participants will be invited to recognize the “anti-fun” factors in their work and challenged to consider how to make space for rebellion.
By the end of the session, participants will have a clear understanding of Price’s elements of fun and how to implement them in library outreach. They will also gain insights into fostering a collaborative environment that welcomes the participation of the entire library staff, ultimately leading to more effective and enjoyable community engagement.
Session outline for submission:
1. Main Thesis: Bringing fun into routine library operations
2. The Setting: Chico State
3. The “Problem”: Book Chairs annual meeting
Describing the librarian liaison model at Chico
The function of the Book Chairs
Supporting their departments
Supporting the library
4. The annual meeting, historically
ACME-led meeting/ luncheon
Friere’s ‘banking model’ format
Acquisitions : Book buying process
5. The “Solution” Catherine Price and the Power of Fun: Book Chair Extravaganza
Playfulness: Let’s throw a party(!) In the New Innovation Lab
Reimagining library spaces
Flow: Let’s make it fun! Passport and prizes
Educating faculty and administrators as learners
Connection: Let’s invite EVERY(one) Library Department and the bookstore
Creating opportunity for library buy-in
6. The Extravaganza
Book Chair Extravaganza
7. Fun audit - Facilitators will lead participants in a fun audit exercise outlined by Price.
Establishing a baseline
Fun history
Quadrant graphing
Fun time journaling
8. Recognizing anti-fun factors in work
Making space
Pursuing passions
Rebelling
9. Q&A
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2:00-2:30
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Large Conference Room
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Milena Seyed
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During Spring 2023 semester, I took a sabbatical leave to conduct a diversity audit in my college library and believe that I have valuable information to share regarding both the process and the results. I plan to present the infographics about the diversity audit results and snapshots of the tools I used across various categories such as race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability/health, and neurodivergence. A poster, printed handouts, and PPT will be available to ensure audience engagement.
The topics of The Insufficient Librarian conference related to my planned session are:
- Implementing tools learned via professional development (I first learned about diversity audit at a library webinar),
- Cultivating justice-oriented practices, resources and/or leadership (I hope to encourage others to make their library collections more diverse and inclusive),
- Making the library “accessible” to all students (when students see themselves being represented in the library resources, they feel welcomed and that they belong in the library),
- Educating faculty, managers and administrators as learners (my sabbatical project was presented both at the District's Board meeting and the Library Staff meeting).
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Jessica Lopez
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My proposal is to conduct a lightening talk about my experience as an MLIS instruction intern. The talk will focus on what made the internship go well, recommendations for future interns, and what instruction librarians can to do to make internships useful for students.
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2:30-3:15
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Large Conference Room
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Tasha Bergson-Michaelson
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Database censorship: Legislation, RFPs, and other actions that threaten freedom of information for California students
The same forces pursuing book censorship also claim that research databases are created specifically as tools to allow K-12 schools to groom children and expose them to pornography. From chilling effects to widespread legislative efforts to statewide Requests for Proposals behind non-disclosure agreements, a wide array of methods are employed to censor the content of research databases. Depending on how individual companies respond, these blocks may be geographically specific, or employed nationwide; they may be limited to K-12 use, or bleed over into higher ed and public library tools. Ultimately, the national market does impact what happens to our information access in California. Come learn more, and let's think about action.
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3:15-3:30
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Large Conference Room
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Rayheem Eskridge
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Presidential Closing Remarks
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