2018 ACRL NEC Annual Conference

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/54629

The conference schedule was as follows:
8:00 A.M. - 9:00 A.M. | Breakfast and Registration
9:00 A.M. - 9:45 A.M. | Welcome Remarks and Business Meeting
10:00 A.M. - 10:50 A.M. | Breakout Session One (5 sessions)
11:00 A.M.-11:00 A.M. | Breakout Session Two (5 sessions)
12:00 P.M. - 12:45 P.M. | Lunch
12:45 P.M. - 1:30 P.M. | Dessert and Vendor Showcase
1:30 P.M. - 2:20 P.M. | Breakout Session Three (5 sessions)
*2:30 P.M. - 3:15 P.M. | Poster Session (12 posters)
*2:30 P.M. - 3:30 P.M. | Afternoon Coffee & Vendor Showcase
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M. | Breakout Four (5 sessions)

*Concurrent programming

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Impossible missions, interesting failures: A toolkit for dismantling fears and doubts
(2018-05-04) Oliver, John T
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 an exercise designed to systematically examine barriers to action. The exercise has 7 questions/prompts: 1) Define (and imagine in detail) the worst-case scenario. What doubts and fears spring to mind? 2) Think about potential steps to prevent those “what-ifs.” 3) What could be done to repair the damage if those imagined bad things happen? Who could you call for help? 4) Imagine a partial success. What benefits could be realized by an attempt that comes up short? 5) What bad outcomes are somewhat likely (at least compared to the scariest, worst-case scenario)? What potential benefits might they carry? For example, what would be the value of the lessons learned from these somewhat likely, somewhat bad outcomes? 6) What are you losing or missing by postponing action? 7) For the (necessarily, intentionally) unrealistic goal you have in mind, what are the doable, measurable tasks that would move you toward success? (Based largely on Ferriss, 2017, “Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month”) Answering these questions can help deflate fears and doubts that are unwarranted, but it can also provide a clearer view of legitimately problematic factors. Reduced fear and doubt is possible. A clearer picture is almost certain. This workshop session would include a discussion of how these questions helped propel a project completed by the workshop facilitator. Using this type of reflection and planning, the presenter designed and implemented library instruction that uses writing-for-Wikipedia activities to teach information literacy during a one-shot library session, an approach that had not previously been described in the literature. Workshop participants would be asked to complete the fear-dismantling exercise while reflecting on a potential project of their own. After reflecting individually on their own projects, participants would be given the opportunity to work in pairs or small groups to rapidly review each other’s drafts and provide feedback. Lastly, participants would be given the opportunity to offer criticisms and refinements to these questions, and to also offer their own approaches for tackling fears and doubts that impede bold action.
Website Usability Testing with Custom Tools in a Community College Environment
(2018-05-04) Arguelles, Carlos; Eaton, Mark
Library webpages are at the core of contemporary library services, and should be updated frequently, based on well-defined user-generated data. This means that technical decisions should not be the only the factors considered when updating web content. When building a library web presence, we should aim to overcome the mistaken idea that gathering user input on design is difficult or unwieldly. To bring this mindset to our community college library, in 2016 we received a grant to fund a usability study. This study aimed at gathering quantitative data to support data-based decisions about our library website. The goal was ultimately to improve the use of our college library webpages measurably. The methodological approach was to build a testing environment (mostly in JavaScript), where students could interact with prototype webpages to execute a number of pre-defined tasks. We also used a subscription-based analytics tool to record users’ interactions with these prototypes. This allowed us to gather a significant amount of data on how users carry out tasks on the various prototype library webpages. Yet despite our best efforts at pre-testing our technology setup, the combination of technologies that we initially chose failed dramatically in a real testing environment. Specifically, the proprietary subscription-based analytics software we used did not work as intended, and was almost impossible to debug. Our project came to a sudden stop because of technical issues that we found very difficult to resolve. After much consternation and some time spent reflecting on the problem, the solution was to build our own tool to gather usability analytics, rather than rely on a third party solution. We built a service that uses Flask, a Python web micro-framework, to transform the data created by participants’ interactions with the prototypes into a CSV file, a format that is easy to open and work with in spreadsheets such as Excel. We learned several important lessons from this experience: There is value in building your own tools, which are often easier to use, understand and debug than proprietary tools. Moreover, using homegrown tools can also create a more user-friendly environment for participants. Most importantly, homegrown tools can ultimately increase the quality and reliability of the collected data. The tools we built are now openly licensed allowing others to benefit from our work. Once we had built the technologies we needed, we were able to move forward and successfully complete our grant project. After several rounds of testing and refining our prototypes, we had gathered significant data, and developed recommendations that will ultimately move our library toward a more user-friendly and well-tested web interface that better suits the needs of our stakeholders. Our students, faculty and administrators will all benefit from our study and the improvements implemented as a result.
Failure to Reproduce: The Replication Crisis in Research — Can Librarians Help?
(2018-05-04) Rathemacher, Andrée J; Izenstark, Amanda; Dekker, Harrison
“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, animal research, and biomedical research. We will outline the primary causes of the problem (the “file-drawer” problem, publication bias, poor experimental design, and the incentive structure for researchers) and will also note the unfortunate failure of peer review to weed out many false findings. From there, we will discuss how librarians are assisting researchers in designing reproducible workflows that can help prevent research replication failure. These workflows include proper experimental design, proper management and documentation of research data and code, and the use of open-science tools for registering experiments, collaborating with colleagues, and sharing research outputs. We will conclude with a demonstration of one important tool in this area, the Open Science Framework from the Center for Open Science. We will cover how it works, how to use it to connect to outside services, and its support for versioning, collaboration, and sharing preprints. Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the reproducibility crisis, the role librarians are playing in assisting researchers with reproducible workflows, and a popular tool they can use for doing so.
We've Failed at Diversifying Our Librarian Ranks, Now What ? A Plan for Addressing the "Pipeline" Problem
(2018-05-04) Sollinger, Annie; Espinal, Isabel; Smith, Pete; Freedman, Kate
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 this problem over the past decades, the demographics have remained stagnant. For example, for the past decade, our staff of roughly 40 professional librarians has not included any African American librarians. The Institute of Museum and Library Services tweeted a graph in November 2017, showing that the problem is nation-wide (see: https://twitter.com/US_IMLS/status/927922066896146432). Although we might take comfort in knowing that it's not just us — that the profession as a whole has not been able to diversity its ranks — at our library we are not satisfied by the reason that many leaders in our field give for the whiteness of our profession, namely that the issue is "simply" a lack of a diverse MLS holders. At our library, we are attempting to address this problem at the root, by making graduate school in library science more financially accessible to people of color. This past year and a half, a group of library staff have worked out a proposal for a Post-Baccalaureate Diversity Recruitment Fellowship in which participants would have their tuition and educational expenses financially covered while attending library school and working at our library. The aim is to recruit people of color into the field of librarianship, thus increasing the pool of librarians of color both at our library and in the profession at large by removing the financial barrier of the cost of attaining a graduate dress in Library and Information Studies. We will outline the previous approaches as well, so that we can learn collectively about what did not work. For example, over the years, we held recruitment events for students of color; we post our jobs to listservs of the library ethnic caucuses; we have included diversity language in our recruitment and personnel materials. What we have found is that some of the efforts were inconsistent, not fully supported by library administrations, or simply not bold or big enough. There are other reasons that we will also discuss. Takeaways: -A positive new idea – a Diversity Fellowship that has been fleshed out in a proposal template that we will share. -Work on this proposal has established inclusion as a priority for library staff, catching the attention of the Dean who has looked for ways to make this a reality.
The Burden of Access: Patron Driven Acquisitions for Streaming Video on a Small Campus
(2018-05-04) Scull, Amanda
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 on the Kanopy platform. The intention was to spend approximately $5,000 per year in support of open pedagogy and flipped classrooms. To date we have spent $30,000 despite attempts to rein in spending by closing certain packages by subject and/or production company, an amount that is unsustainable for a small library approaching its fourth straight year of budget cuts. A dive into the Kanopy data has revealed that not only has much of this spend been redundant and rather fiscally irresponsible on paper, but also that faculty have not been using the platform as intended. In this presentation I will take attendees through the data analysis I have conducted, including overlap analysis, cost data and comparison, and amount of video accessed, and tackle the essential question that my library is facing: Does the educational benefit of streaming video justify its cost, and how do you reconcile those two factors on a small campus with a limited budget? Attendees will gain an understanding of what to expect if they embark on a streaming video program in their small-to-medium sized libraries, the potential pitfalls that they should be on the lookout for, and some ideas for moving forward under a different collections model.
Reframing Failure: Post Mortems for Library Projects
(2018-05-04) Apfelbaum, Danielle S.; Stadler, Derek
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 an opportunity for ensuring future successes. Built upon the premise that similar projects face similar pitfalls, post mortems yield lessons learned that can be used by team members to prevent and/or plan for the mitigation of obstacles within and beyond their control. Although the project post mortem has its roots in the field of software development, many of the processes and principles upon which the post mortem is built can be applied and scaled for library projects of all sizes. By participating in this presentation, attendees will gain an understanding of the purpose and value of post mortem analyses for library projects; identify steps associated with planning for, conducting, and communicating the results of a post mortem analysis; consider how to scale post mortems for individual and team-based projects; and be able to develop a post mortem analysis plan for a past or current project upon returning to their home libraries.
These Are Not Your Students: How Service Orientation Doomed a Library Instruction Assessment Project and What It Took to Bring It Back to Life
(2018-05-04) Aydelott, Kathrine C
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 short narrated PowerPoint presentations and a brief quiz, before having their session in the library. All students would then receive a survey three weeks out from the library session to assess how much information they retained. Implementing this project would require almost no extra effort either on the part of librarians or the composition instructors. But in spite of conversations about and demonstrations of the module, when it was time to execute the project, the composition coordinator balked. She said, “These are not your students, and you are not allowed to assess them or give them homework.” Efforts to renegotiate failed. My project was rejected, my research agenda was stalled, and the module went into mothballs. However, this episode revealed much about campus culture, faculty status, assessment, and the library’s traditional and long-held service orientation. Even having faculty status, librarians were not considered peers, even among those departments with whom we had the longest working relationships. And having said “Yes of course,” for so long, the librarians’ ability to exercise that equal status, their power to negotiate, in fact, their very sovereignty as faculty instructors, was now at risk. Further, without a broad culture of assessment on campus, assessment projects—even ones concerning a single session of instruction were easily feared and rejected. From the perspective of failure, it was clear to see why the hard work of reform had been so long in coming. This presentation will discuss the dangers of the service mindset in academic libraries and how long-held traditions—unevaluated--can chip away at authority and stagnate programs. But it will also present how entrepreneurial efforts and new energies can forge new paths, and how broader campus initiatives can bring mothballed projects back to life.
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
(2018-05-04) Chase, Elizabeth; McPherson, Patricia; Perry, Heather
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 housing lottery. We were confident the prospect of earning merit points would be enough incentive to bring students to the library. We were very wrong. You could say The Info Café program was a dismal failure. A great deal of staff time was spent developing the content for the workshops, scheduling the sessions, and creating surveys to assess their effectiveness. Over the course of the Fall 2012 semester and Spring 2013 semesters, we scheduled 48 Info Cafe sessions. Some attracted one or two participants. Most failed to attract anyone. In total, only 26 students attended. We, however, like to think of The Info Café debacle as the catalyst for some of our greatest successes. The InfoCafe’s failure made us realize that we needed to provide the students with the information and support they required at their point of need. We decided one of the easiest ways to meet them at that point of need was through the college’s Learning Management System. Through the creation of a variety of video tutorials, research modules, and librarian-facilitated research discussion forums, we have reached far more students remotely than we ever did at The Information Café. In the Fall 2017 semester, for example, librarians created learning management system information skills modules for 35 different classes and produced 52 information skills videos. While the Info Café workshops we created reached fewer than the 30 students , our LMS participation in Fall 2017 reached approximately 700 students.
From Chaos to Planned Future: Transforming LibGuides from Pathfinders to Learning Objects
(2018-05-04) Ramos, Marisol
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 were not addressed before adopting LibGuides. Furthermore, the lack of guidelines and best practices for the creation of guides made the overall look and feel of the site a hodgepodge of guide types, formatting styles, contents, and colors. Guides did not follow accessibility standards and tended to mimic print pathfinders with links instead of call numbers. By 2015, there were about 800 guides in the system which made it hard for users and librarians alike to find relevant guides to answer research questions. In 2016, a new group was created to address these issues. The LibGuides Management Team (LGMT), a cross-departmental team, was charged to create a new policy and guidelines for building, reviewing and maintaining LibGuides. To manage the review process, we utilized the Publishing Workflow, an automated system in LibGuides that allows a set of reviewers to revise guides before being made public. This presentation will share with the audience how our group applied what we learnt from our previous mistakes to build more accessible and pedagogical sound research guides using LibGuides v2. I will share the issues, challenges, and successes of applying guidelines and best practices in a consistent way to improve the user experience while accessing our research, course, general and topic guides. I will discuss the different approaches we used to create the guidelines, train staff on how to use the new version, as well as, what were the LGMT expectations regarding using the guidelines to revise, merge and/or collaborate with other librarians to create share guides when necessary. Attendees to this presentation will walk away with the following takeaways: How to request the necessary authority from Admin to implement new guidelines and best practices across the organization How to communicate changes, expectations, and deadlines to all guide owners How to start the conversation of converting pathfinder-type guides into learning objects What types of training (how to create/edit guides; instructional design for guides) and help were offered to support staff during this process How to successfully implement the Publishing Workflow What works, what didn’t work and what can be improved in the future
What if You Build it and They Don't Come? Lessons Learned from a Tutorial-Creation Project
(2018-05-04) Homol, Lindley
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 this presentation, the librarian will discuss experiences developing video tutorials at the request of graduate students and faculty in a liaison area. The librarian spent a semester developing a series of video tutorials based on student-identified pain points, and notified faculty of the resulting collection of learning objects. Despite student requests and faculty excitement over the tutorials, the collection saw little use. Reasons for the low usage numbers will be discussed, along with a set of best practices to improve tutorial use and relevance for students. The librarian will also discuss how the lessons learned from this failed project were factored into a department-wide tutorial-creation project that has seen much more success. By the end of the session, attendees will have several takeaways to apply to their own instructional efforts, including: -How to promote and brand tutorials so they see increased usage -How to decide on the best content to cover in tutorials -When to consider alternate methods of instruction to reach students
If At First You Don't Succeed in Your Instruction Methodology, Try, Try Again
(2018-05-04) Angell, Katelyn; Shannon, Eric
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 two authors of this proposal are both academic instruction librarians. One presenter works as an instruction librarian at a small rural university in New England; the other is an instruction librarian at a mid-sized private urban university in the Mid-Atlantic region. Although the presenters work at two very different institutions what they have in common is the shared experience of evaluating and refining their teaching practice as a means of improving student information literacy skills. Within this presentation three case studies will be provided, each of which will describe an ineffective teaching experience, an intervention to reflect on this failure, and the development and implementation of an alternative intended to address shortcomings of the previous method. Three specific components of information literacy instruction will be covered: online library tutorials as a replacement for one shot library sessions for first year students, a problem-learning based group activity in replacement of database and catalog demonstrations for first year students, and an interactive online game about citing and referencing instead of a lecture. The first case study discusses the creation of online library tutorials in Canvas for students enrolled in First Year Inquiry classes, a project undertaken due to a perceived lack of effectiveness of the traditional one shot. Assessment techniques and data will be shared as well. The next case study pertains to a collaborative and active-learning based library orientation for first year students called The Amazing Library Race. This method was adapted and implemented to reduce library anxiety among first year students and provide students with an opportunity to learn about the library’s resources and services in a discovery rather than lecture-based environment. Assessment methods and data analysis will be described. Lastly, one of the presenters will detail an online game created using the popular audience response system Poll Everywhere. The game teaches students fundamentals of citing and referencing in MLA format using a pop culture theme. This game was created to make learning about citing more fun and engaging, as the presenter perceived a lack of engagement during a previous lecture based approach to citation instruction. By sharing their own experiences with instruction obstacles, as well as changes made to overcome them, the presenters hope that their own failures and subsequent successes could be useful for other academic instruction librarians.
Survey Says: Strategies for Responding to Challenging Findings
(2018-05-04) Schattle, Erica; Meaney, Dorothy
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 with the campus office of institutional research to incorporate student exposure to library instruction and demographic information into the survey data. One finding from the 2016 iteration of the survey was particularly troubling: students who had experienced course-integrated library instruction did not differ in in usage and awareness of library collections and services. Presenters will share how this information was communicated to library and to campus constituents, and how the library responded to this finding. The experience of responding to difficult findings presented an opportunity for administrators to shape the culture of the organization in a healthy way. By celebrating and rewarding experimentation and deep commitment to learning about library users, staff remain encouraged to ask challenging questions about library impact and services. Attendees will take away strategies for identifying student data sources and approaching potential campus partners in order to collaborate on action research projects at their own institution. Attendees will also generate plans for responding to situations where data collection does not represent the library in a positive light.
Fake News: Taking News Evaluation Out of the Classroom and Into the Fire
(2018-05-04) Kruy, Martha; McGuckin, Briana; Ruhs, Theodora; Slaga-Metivier, Susan
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. The workshop went on the road, to public libraries throughout the state. Sessions were well attended and participants were engaged, but the shift in venue and audience presented unforeseen challenges. Incompatibilities with the presentation’s needs and goals (technological, attitudinal, and beyond) abounded; addressing these kept the workshop fluid, growing and changing with lessons learned from each new iteration. Despite the hardships, it is important that everyone – not just college students – is engaged with resources that encourage critical thought. The presenters will discuss the pitfalls they encountered, and reflect upon their possible causes. Presenters will also share survey data from workshop participants, and discuss the findings. Attendees of this presentation will leave knowing what to expect as they plan academic programming for a public audience. They will get some sense of the hurdles involved in shifting from programming for academia to programming for the community. They will also be armed with strategies to minimize or completely avoid losing programming quality in translation.
Encouraging Experimentation and Creativity through Professional Development: Turning our Failures into Best Practices
(2018-05-04) Piekart, Amanda; Lafazan, Bonnie; Kiebler, Jessica
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 failures has expanded our capacity to reflect and take future risks in order to encourage a culture of robust professional growth. Participants will learn the impact that buy-in has on implementing a successful initiative. In order to create success from missteps, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the importance of soliciting and using feedback. Participants will also recognize the value of offering a wide range of opportunities and formats that allow people to contribute in their own ways. Through reflecting on failures and refining approaches, librarians can learn how to create an environment where they are committing themselves to their organization, profession and their own life-long learning education.
Worst Practices? Surviving the Pitfalls of License Negotiation
(2018-05-04) Rodriguez, Michael
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 script to look at agile win-win negotiating—rapprochement, relationship management, and more—and how to bounce back from your missteps and how to leverage (mis)cues from vendors. We will review and understand mistakes common to any level of negotiation experience (contradictory statements, inattention to context, etc.). We will also look at risky tactics and even at borderline or unethical tactics in which negotiators might engage (deception, half-truths, combative zero-sum approaches, taking undue advantage of the other party’s omissions or blunders, etc.). We will also look at actions by libraries that, while effective for one institution at one point in time, may make future negotiations more challenging for one’s successors, other libraries, or consortial partners. By drawing on real-world examples and encouraging audience participation, the presenter will attempt to show how librarians can walk the fine line between engaging in questionable tactics versus leveraging their situations, personas, and know-how to their organizations’ advantage. This session will benefit anyone seeking to improve their negotiation skills in any context.
The Trials & Tribulations of incorporating 3D Printing into the Health Science Curriculum
(2018-05-04) Scheinfeld, Laurel; Wagner, Joan; Leeman, Blanche
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 departments, it was agreed that a valuable experience for our students would be for them to design and print a custom assistive device for a patient. Our plan was for the Librarians, OT & PT faculty and IT staff to attend a 2-day training in 3D printing and design. Then the Librarians and faculty would train the students in two different graduate courses to design and print a custom assistive device. The IT staff would help with the installation and maintenance of the printer. The 3D printer would be housed in the library where all the involved parties could have access to it for the greatest number of hours and the printing would be supervised by library staff. What we didn’t foresee was that a 2-day training was not enough to learn the design skills needed to create the assistive devices. We felt we had learned what we needed to get started running the printer, but designing objects to print was a more technical process that required skills and expertise beyond our introductory knowledge. The design software was completely foreign from any other types of software the Librarians and faculty had experience with and we were intimidated and overwhelmed by the end of the 2nd day. In addition, no one realized the noise that a 3D printer makes and how that would affect students studying in the library. Others might have given up at this point, but we wanted to complete the project somehow. With a little luck, a little serendipity, and a lot of determination, we found a solution. But it didn’t solve all the problems and our solution created new problems. We kept working through them and have found the experience to be worthwhile and valuable for everyone involved. In this presentation we would like to share how we managed the unexpected problems and also share our successes and continuing challenges. The key takeaways will be tools for evaluating 3D printers, training or finding partnerships for file creation, and effectively situating a 3D printer within the physical space of the library.
From Worst to Best: Discovering IR Best Practices and Planning for Change
(2018-05-04) Monaghan, Hedda
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 of scholarly works, archival materials, and university ephemera and how the newly implemented best practices have been created to minimize future project slow-downs. Takeaways will include how and why IR staff can use lab notebooks for documenting projects and strategies for minimizing project slow-downs during times of staff change or shortages.
Spectacular Failures and Tenuous Successes in Faculty Outreach: A Story of Persistence
(2018-05-04) Malik, Melinda; Lindquist, Hannah; Dreyer, Bekah
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 specifically struggled with its outreach efforts to faculty through workshops held each semester. Year after year, faculty express interest in library workshops, perhaps even register for them, and then fail to attend. Over time, the librarians have experimented with modifying the workshops’ content, format, date, time of day, and incentives of food and prizes, with minimal success. And yet, with full support of their director they persist, continuing to try new and innovative ideas each semester in the never ending search for the perfect recipe that yields attendance. This poster describes these efforts and programs, the librarians’ many failures and few successes, and what they’ve learned along the way. Included are roadblocks they’ve overcome and lessons learned that have turned into best practices for implementing faculty workshops. Included is a case study of a day-long workshop inspired by another college library’s successful implementation, but which failed miserably when implemented at the Library. Primary takeaways include: 1) reasons why they’ve been able to persist in their efforts, and 2) best and worst practices.
Displaying the Past: Guidelines for Outreach Using Archival Collections
(2018-05-04) Mondt, Laura; Oleaga, Rachel
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 of our own, archival display materials are limited. In order to design this exhibit, the librarians had to inventory and identify potential archival sources for display, address preservation concerns, obtain display equipment, coordinate installation with the historical society, work with college public relations and plan an opening reception. With future outreach exhibits planned, we wanted to use what we learned in the process to make subsequent outreach exhibits easier to plan and execute. This poster will provide attendees with a list of guidelines to consider when creating an exhibit with an external partner based on what was learned as we worked through the exhibit making process. While the exhibit was an overall success, there were many bumps in the road and lessons learned to share with conference goers. Attendees will walk away with an understanding of pitfalls to avoid as well as recommended best practices for librarians using an exhibit for outreach. This poster presentation will also demonstrate that librarians should not let inexperience or minimally processed collections be a barrier to establishing meaningful community connections.
MOOC: Miscalculations, Oversights, Opportunities and Celebration
(2018-05-04) Goldman, Julie; Herrera, Allison Kay
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 study about a library creating an online course for broad use in a specific subject domain. Learn from our mistakes! Three years of working on an online course results in a lot of lessons learned. We’ll take you through the journey of mishaps and misadventures in chronological order, and share how we turned oversights into new opportunities. Questions and areas to keep an eye out for when creating your own online class: 1. Planning Stages: Take it seriously and think about the entire project timeline Do you have the background knowledge? Find experts who can help! Use resources available to you, but don’t cut corners! Be realistic about your budget. Include specific breakdowns and costs. 2. Include the User: Include the user in everything you do with check-ins Think about the user first, and think about different users. Your user = your audience. Be reasonable about who your content is for! Conducting a pilot? Include honorariums and plan early! Focus Groups are a great way to get user feedback. But how many should you do? 3. Be Adaptable: Online courses are never going to run exactly as planned Understand both the technology possibilities and limitations. Prepare for scenarios, but be flexible and able to pivot with problems! What happens when the content changes? Think about the long term. With some experimentation, we ultimately were able to celebrate a completed online course. Long-term assessment will be crucial for determining the aspects that still fell short or lead to the eventual success of this project.

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