Register for the 2021 Pennsylvania Library Association Virtual Conference

The vast digital world in Academic Libraries is continually changing. Here are just some examples of available sessions which include literacy toolkits, digital librarianship, filming and production strategies, and how-tos for expanding interactions with patrons and staff. Not only will these sessions provide you with some answers that you’ve been looking for, but they’ll also propose questions that are pertinent in today’s libraries!

• Check out The College & Research Division Lunch & Learn: Kick Back and Relax: Creating a Radical Sense of Belonging in Our Libraries! This session, applicable for all types of libraries, will take place on Tuesday at noon and will feature Ione Damasco, Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, Engagement, and Operations at the University of Dayton Libraries. Libraries are places that hold the ability to connect people from different backgrounds and life experiences.  However, despite that being the goal, sometimes stories are left out, experiences aren’t told, and identities are not represented.  Hear how the speaker has been able to make connections across campus with partners to develop and implement programming that fosters a more inclusive campus environment and how you might do the same at your library. The development of these dialogue-based skills can make our libraries places where people don’t just belong, but feel at home.

• If your own dreams aren’t yielding solutions to issues, try Dreaming in Digital: Equitable Engagement across Distances. Attend this session to learn how collaborative documents and social media platforms can expand your interactions with patrons while supporting institutional efforts towards inclusion and accessibility!
• No scissors and glue are needed with: Crafting an Information Literacy Toolkit: Maximizing Faculty Options to Embed Information Literacy in the Curriculum. Learn the process of creating an information literacy toolkit that maximizes librarian and faculty choices and increases student information literacy skills.
• Welcome, Critical Pedagogy: Engaging with Social Justice Concepts in Library Instruction presents two academic librarians sharing strategies, lesson examples, and outcomes from their incorporation of social justice topics into business and technology-related information literacy instruction.
• Would you like to know how a restructured academic library department used cross-training to improve their e-resources usage data collection? Then join us for Managing E-Resources Usage Data: Learning by Jumping in the Deep.
• The Power of POV: Emulating the First-Person Style of Mister Rogers and YourKoreanDad in a Library Orientation Video introduces point-of-view videos and how the style can be used to create a library orientation video. Session attendees will learn simple filming and production strategies and will hear plans to study how POV videos contribute to student self-efficacy.
• How’s this for a title? OER SWOT: Importance of Institutional Culture to Library OER Involvement This presentation, with its intriguing title, addresses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats facing academic library OER involvement.
• What You Need to Know about Digital Librarianship: A Discussion Among Digital Librarians is answered through a discussion among digital librarians at Pennsylvania libraries. This session will examine digital librarianship in action within different library contexts and explore its collaborative character.
• As if you don’t have enough on your plate to deal with, is lateness among student or library workers an issue for you? If so, this session, Why is no one showing up on time? Utilizing Retail Strategies to Manage Student Workers can help. In it you’ll learn how to boost accountability and increase productivity using personnel management principles from the retail environment.
• What is bias? How is it evaluated? Both are good questions but answers in the library literature are scarce. Using theory from media studies and rhetoric, the presentation: This Title is Biased: A Theoretically Grounded Approach to Evaluating Source Bias describes a grounded approach to source evaluation.

Did You Know? Conference Scholarships are Available! Grants to attend the PaLA Annual Conference are underwritten by some of our generous conference sponsors and are available to PaLA members.  For more information on these opportunities, go to https://www.palibraries.org/page/2021ConfSchol. 

Hurry, the deadline to apply is July 30, 2021