Texas Library Association Conference 2013

This year is my first year attending the Texas Library Association annual conference, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and notes.

Prior to attending the conference, I learned that I was elected Chair-Elect of the College & University Library Division of TLA and I begin my official appointment 4/27/13. This means I am also the programming committee chair for next year’s conference, so it’s a good thing I met some wonderful people including past chair, Julie Leuzinger and incoming chair, Sian Brannon (thanks again for the steak). I am really excited to get to making a really engaging program for next year – who are some speakers you would love to see at a library conference?

I also presented my paper, “Course & Subject Guides in Academia: an Analysis of Student Usage and Librarian Perceptions” – so it was pretty busy. However, I did go to many sessions, so for those of you who couldn’t make it – I hope this post sparks some inspiration at your institution!

Library Learning Space Assessment Strategies by Kim Duckett (NC State Librarian & future classmate at the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians)

• Learning Space Toolkit - If you are thinking about redesigning some of the space in your library, this is a great place to start. It is broken up into 6 sections: Roadmap, needs assessment, space types, services, technology, and integration.
• Methodologies for assessment: Usage data, observation, interviews, photo interviews, focus groups, surveys, mapping.
• Suma – open source data collection tool. Could be used for reference transactions and for most other data-collection.
• Create personas to gain stakeholder support. Often times we create personas for website usability, but think of using them for learning spaces. It helps people visualize real student need gathered from the aforementioned assessment methodologies.
• Craft Journey Maps - “a visual representation of how a customer or user experiences a service over time.”

Transforming Libraries for Engagement by Gary E. Strong (Dean of Libraries @UCLA)

• Be a participatory library – place for scholarly as well as collaborative “Mashup Space” that is user-driven & one that fosters relationships.
• Library as laboratory
• Islandora for digital projects: “open-source software framework designed to help institutions and organizations and their audiences collaboratively manage, and discover digital assets using a best-practices framework”
• SIMUL8 software to rally students to create apps and content they will actually use.

Lib-Value: Determining the Value of Academic Libraries by Paula Kauffman (University of Illinois-UC)

• Lib-Value project: Tennessee, Illinois, Syracuse, & ARL. The goal of this project is to provide assessment tools to help prove your library’s worth for the university community.
• These are big picture values that do not consider the ‘value’ of staff.
• It isn’t granular research. How can we put $$$ on teaching?

At the Intersection of Information Literacy & Adult Education by Diane Bruxvoort (University of Florida)

• Pedagogy vs. Andragogy – how are we teaching our patrons?
  
• “Adult learners don’t want to figure it out. They want someone to show them.”
• Ultimately: we need to train staff

Reducing Service Points in the Academic Library  by Julie Leuzinger (University of North Texas)

• You all know how I already feel about Reference Desks. Yes, Julie, spread the word!
• “We spent most of our time playing pass the patron.”
• Quality customer service is making the library more intuitive for our users.

Overall, this was a fantastic conference. I wish I could’ve stayed the entire time, but I had to come back to campus to judge our Student Research Conference participants (which did a wonderful job, by the way).

What are some inspiring conferences that you’ve attended? What are some programs that you wish you could see at your next library conference?

Sowell Collection Conference

April 18th-20th kicked off the 2nd annual Sowell Collection Conference at Texas Tech University’s Southwest collection. This conference featured well-known writers such as Rick Bass, Barry Lopez, Robert Michael Pyle, and John Lane as well as students and fellow lovers of the natural world. I presented my paper, “(Re)sensing Place: Somatics in Rick Bass’ A Thousand Deer.”

Rick Bass

Rick Bass’ reading, “The Thinness of Soil,” reminded us that we are “all part of something larger,” and that stories are under the thin soil, the foundation of the West is held up by “smoke, mirrors, and faith.” Soil or stories are created slowly and we must move from absence to presence. He states, “wilderness is the 1st place for stories – filling the soil.” What then for the future? How can we move people to act against the atrocities and crimes against our land? Bass offers the solution of creativity, that “beauty is the caulk to plug the ship… it is definitely time for different crops and different gardeners.”

Barry Lopez

Barry reminded us, too, that we need stories to “hold it down,” that a successful story is a “constant restoration of Beauty.” He claims, “you have a responsibility,” to spread the beauty of the land to move people to act.

John Lane

John moved us all with poems from his collection: Abandoned Quarry.

Bob Pyle

Bob described the making of Mariposa Road and how he went on an expedition for 1 year to discover as many butterflies in the United States that he could.

During the conference, we gathered ’round in a circle to sing “Texas River Song” lead by David Taylor and Bob Pyle on harmonica.

It is almost impossible to convey how this amazing experience affected me. As a long-time fan of Rick Bass, I was moved by his words and by the end of the three days, I feel inspired and satiated. I feel so full of love after meeting some of the most beautiful human beings on Earth. I can’t wait until next year.

Ghost Towns of the Llano Estacado: Pictures

Here are a few photos from the Ghost Towns of the Llano Estacado exhibit:

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Ghost Towns of the Llano Estacado

My photography exhibit, Ghost Towns of the Llano Estacado, officially opens tomorrow at the Cornette Library. A reception with refreshments will be held from 5:00pm-6:30pm … and I’m bringin’ wine!

Ghost Towns was started to capture the late 19^th & 20^th century American expansionist decay of the Llano Estacado in attempt to retain the history of the neglected sites before they are lost. The haunting photographs examine the evolution, eerie beauty, and eventual abandonment of each site. As a landscape photographer, I was naturally drawn to these places for their unique characteristics, social impact, and stories. From the perspective of an Easterner, land is a prized commodity. It is constantly being redeveloped, resold, and changed. What I’ve come to admire about this part of the West is that the vastness of land lends itself to retaining these vestiges of the past as life around them continues to expand.

The aim is not only to preserve the historical value of these buildings, but to serve as a statement of their emotional, spiritual, and metaphoric relevance to our lives on the Llano. The photographs are printed on stretched canvas to mimic the texture and grittiness of the landscape while the small photos serve as the tiny details that make up each structure.  As you sift through the debris and enter a parallel space of silence, rust, and peeling paint- imagine the stories and the people that inhabited this beautiful, wind-swept, naturally decomposing space.

These are things that I’m writing

Recently, I had two book chapter proposals accepted to different manuscripts that are due to publish this year! At the end of 2012, I dubbed 2013 the year of writing, and so far, I’m on track.

Here’s a glimpse at what I proposed:

1. Focus on Educating for Sustainability: Toolkit for Academic Libraries

Teaching sustainable information literacy: a collaborative endeavor in the humanities 

Academic librarians must become active partners in advancing and integrating sustainable literacy into instruction through collaborative teaching across disciplines. Embedding a librarian into a classroom in a collaborative effort with faculty ensures ACRL standards will be adapted appropriately to the culture, economy, local history, and ecology of West Texas A&M University as well as promote the importance of sustainability and the impact of student research to the future. This chapter outlines a collaborative effort in the humanities, specifically studies in the Western Memoir, and blends eco-criticism, the West, place and identity, and synthesizes the impact of information and research through an ecological, economic, and social lens. Students engage with western memoirs and use eco-criticism as a lens to further investigate their texts. In the process, students are introduced to the idea of Western identity and place and the impact of critical regionalism in scholarship. Integrating sustainability education and information literacy into the curriculum provides students the ability to shift their perspective to investigate, think critically, and evaluate their use of information in a global sense. In this collaborative endeavor, students conduct primary source inquiries in the local community with faculty guidance while the librarian promotes the use of open access content to secondary scholarly research in order to cultivate a breadth of information. The synthesis of primary and secondary scholarship leads students to think critically about the local consequence, application, and manifestation of information. This research and primary oral histories are then preserved by the library where students can recognize the significance of their research for the future, therefore fostering and promoting the importance of sustainability. Students leave the course with a better understanding of how knowledge and information can impact local culture and traditions and understand the fusion of critical thinking and sustainable thinking as inherently necessary. This chapter provides teaching faculty and academic librarians the tools to start a collaborative effort to promote lifelong critical thinking in sustainability that can be adapted and fused to a broad range of disciplines.

2.  The Machiavellian Librarian: Winning Allies, Combating Budget Cuts, and Influencing Stakeholders  

Slybrarianship: Building Alliances Through User Engagement and Outreach
Strong relationships are at the core of delivering an exceptional experience and providing library programs and services that match what our users want and truly need. Academic librarians must become active partners in advancing and integrating the library by building alliances with faculty, staff, and students to increase positive perceptions of libraries. This chapter explores how building strong personal relationships through user engagement and outreach can increase reputation and improve visibility while providing better services on campus. Looking at user engagement through a library student advisory board allows librarians to provide desired services to targeted groups as a strategy to deliver the best user experience. By enhancing student engagement, librarians can then position themselves to become indispensable to their campus. This chapter provides sly academic librarians the tools and tips to equip themselves to rally strong allies and gain relevance and influence at the university.

The first proposal is a hypothetical program that could tie into the humanities, while the 2nd proposal is one that I strive to accomplish in my daily work activities. I have presented at several conferences, published reviews and encyclopedia entries, but this is the first time that I will have ever published a book chapter – I’m really excited to see how this process goes Stay tuned!

Sexy Hipster Librarian: Exotic, Erotic, the Other

In less than one week, I will be visiting Albuquerque, New Mexico (about a 5 hour drive) for the Southwest Pop Culture Association‘s annual conference where I will be presenting “Sexy Hipster Librarian: Exotic, Erotic, the Other.” We have all heard of the sexy librarian trope in pop culture, but this presentation will examine how letting-down-the-bun and the sexualization of the librarian affects student relationships in Academia.

I will be using Daryl Bem’s research on the exotic becoming the erotic but placing it onto the hetero-normative “dominatrix” librarian as the “other.” We do not always know what really compromises the assumption users hold of a certain perception, how it impacts library use, student interaction with librarians, and professional credibility and identity. Through qualitative research, I explore how this popular stereotype affects student-learning, campus perceptions, and the sexualization of young, female librarians.

I’ve never been to a pop culture conference, but I think it will be interesting and fun to present on librarianship from my perspective and project it into the pop culture ‘scene,’ since the stereotype is already so predominant in all of our minds.

Open Library of Humanities

Recently, I accepted appointment to the Editorial Committee for the Open Library of Humanities, an open access publishing platform. Its founder, Dr. Martin Paul Eve is a Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. It is well known that the state of publishing in academia is sick. “Since 1986, subscription costs for academic journals have risen by 300% above inflation. In addition to exponentially increased research output over this period this has triggered what is known as “the serials crisis”; the inability of library budgets to keep pace with the prices set by publishers.”

As a librarian, open access is something that I fight for. I want it, give it to me. However, in the humanities, a field that is known for its low-funding, has been unable up until this point to be able to launch such an endeavor. The sciences have PLOS (Public Library of Science), which has been publishing open access articles for 10 years – and again, nothing comparable in the humanities fields.

I guess that is why I am so excited for this project, so hungry for submissions to start rolling in. This is the solution to our serials crisis, and here is our mission:

The Open Library of Humanities aims to provide a platform for Open Access publishing that is:

• Reputable and respected through rigorous peer review
• Sustainable
• Digitally preserved and safely archived in perpetuity
• Non-profit
• Open in both monetary and permission terms
• Non-discriminatory (APCs are waiverable)
• Technically innovative in response to the needs of scholars and librarians
• A solution to the serials crisis

Want to get involved? Help us to build the future of academic publishing in the humanities by pledging to publish a paper with us in our first year.