It's Academic

Recordings of the two most recent Connect & Communicate sessions are available on our YouTube channel. Thank you to everyone who joined us live, and special thanks to our presenters.

In April, Allyson Wind of East Stroudsburg University presented “Promoting Inclusion in the Academic Library with a CILLS Program Internship.”

In May, Ashoo Kumar, Sandy Morgart, Eric Novotny, and Dan Peters from Penn State University Libraries presented “Microfilm Enters the Digital Age: A Big Evolution for a Microformat.”

Bucknell University invites librarians and their colleagues to submit a proposal to present at this year’s digital scholarship conference. Please see the call for proposals below.

Converging Paths: Digital Scholarship, Social Justice, and Intersecting Communities

Digital scholarship has often been rooted in the academy, although many of our projects seek to uncover community histories, lives, and events. In this year’s Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference (October 18-20, 2022; the event will be fully virtual), we seek to address the question: What are the paths through which digital scholarship intersects with communities and social justice?

The questions we pose to participants as jumping off points for proposals include, but are not limited to:

• How does digital scholarship help us challenge dominant narratives and ideologies? 
• Whose voices can be elevated, uncovered, and reclaimed through digital scholarship?
• How do we bridge the gap and promote engagement between the academy and community through digital scholarship?
• What does it mean to collaborate on and produce digital scholarship projects with communities beyond our own, and what ethical responsibilities do we share?
• How can we learn from and build on our experiences to sustain digital scholarship projects?

#BUDSC22 is committed to expanding the definition of digital scholarship to be more inclusive across diverse communities, both inside and outside of academia. The conference will bring together a broad community of practitioners — faculty, researchers, students, librarians, educational technologists, administrators, and others — collaborating on digital scholarship through research, teaching, and community engagement.

Submissions may take the form of interactive presentations, project demonstrations, digital posters (pre-recorded), panel presentations, work-in-progress sessions, workshops, or other creative formats.

We look forward to building on the success of our past conferences, in which we came together to discuss challenges, share working models, reflect on projects, and inspire new avenues for actively including students in scholarly pursuits. Want to learn more? Check out video highlights from our past conferences or search our archived sessions.

Submission Link: https://tinyurl.com/BUDSC22Proposal

Submission Deadline: July 15, 2022

Notification By: August 15, 2022

Conference Website: https://budsc.scholar.bucknell.edu/

Questions? Please contact the BUDSC planning committee at: budsc@bucknell.edu 

One of the most intriguing tasks that I have as a clinical and reference librarian at hospital library in which I work, is the work of supporting the scholarly activities of our clinical staff.

As I have learned this support comes in many different roles such as providing poster creation and design help for our nurse residency groups or conducting and maintaining author publication lists for our clinical and resident staff or simply answering reference questions in support of publication.

The goal of supporting these scholarly activities within the clinical setting is to ensure that the library is supporting the evidenced based medicine practice that ensures the best quality of care for our patients. I am proud to be a part of the team but wanted to make sure that I was supporting the team the best way that I could, so I turned to the Medical Library Association’s Professional Competencies (https://www.mlanet.org/page/test-competencies ) to ensure that I was on the right track.

I realized that I was meeting the competence of Health information professionalism by seeking out assistance  through the collaborative work of the MLA  communities(https://www.mlanet.org/page/special-interest-groups-landing-page) and their listserv emails list serves and by  utilizing the competency itself  to guide my work.

The competencies of supporting evidenced based practice and research, instruction and instructional design as well as the competency for leadership and management were helpful in providing guidance for managing the marketing to the various clinical groups and the implementation of the processes used to provide training to the nursing residency groups and in the fine tuning of the existing author publication reporting procedure.

Utilizing the Medical Library Association’s Professional Competencies assisted me and strengthened by abilities to support the information needs and provide the right information services to support the scholarly activity of my clinical staff.

Greetings!

Welcome to the Summer 2022 series of the Virtual Journal Club, sponsored by the College & Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association! The theme for this series will be faculty perceptions of information literacy.

We will meet on the third Thursday of the month from 2:00-3:00 pm. Meeting dates are June 16, July 21, and August 18. For our first meeting, we will discuss:

Huddleston, B., Bond, J. D., Chenoweth, L. L., & Hull, T. L. (2020). Faculty perspectives on undergraduate research skills: Nine core skills for research success. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 59(2), 118-130.

We will use the following Zoom link and passcode for each meeting in the series:
https://kings.zoom.us/j/93660828235?pwd=MmxaNUszSEZEUTFOcWk0Y3RBUTZnZz09

Meeting ID: 936 6082 8235
Passcode: 635767

Please reach out if you have any questions!
Have a great day,
Melissa, Alex, and Rebecca

Right now, many of us are wincing each time our gas tank is creeping towards ‘E,’ and we’re noticing our grocery bills are getting higher. The pandemic is still putting us through our paces, but we are not the only ones feeling the strain on our wallet. This year many of our colleges and universities returned to full-time, in-person instruction. With the return to campus, there were some notable changes amongst our students.

At Susquehanna University, where I work as the First-Year Experience Librarian, my colleagues and I were noticing that the café in our library was busier than normal. In fact, it would have a line out the door from open until close. The café manager shared that they were averaging one thousand meal swipes a week –at the school’s smallest eatery. Like many places, our Dining Services Office was struggling to find enough staff. Students were also still wary of COVID, and they preferred the grab-and-go options of the library café and other campus eateries over the large open and maskless space that was the main dining hall. Students were sometimes waiting two hours for food after submitting an order. Some were putting in lunch orders at breakfast or skipping the lines (and dinner) altogether to make it to class on time. Bottom line? Our students were hungry.

In my role I work closely with Student Life, and I was expressing to one of my colleagues my concerns over student food insecurity. She told me that there were two pantries on campus (one in our chapel and one at the Hillel House), but she lamented that the need was growing beyond what those pantries could provide. Considering the library is located on the opposite side of campus from the chapel, I and my colleague, Tracy Powell, proposed we started a third pantry in the library.

All SU pantries are funded by our Student Care Fund, which is a fund alumni specifically donate to in order to provide students with emergency supplies. Our pantry, like the others on campus, is stocked with lots of thought. Not all students have can openers, some students want to avoid the sodium levels that come with ramen noodles, some pre-packaged items still require fresh ingredients, etc. We try to find cans with tabs or ready-made pasta, and our chapel pantry has a refrigerator with milk, eggs, butter, etc. Our library pantry is also stocked with personal hygiene items. We have everything from soap and shampoo to feminine products, contact solution, acne scrub, and hairbrushes. In order to truly meet the students’ needs, we also have a notepad where students can write down items they’d like to see in our pantry. Many of the suggestions are for more organic items, fresh produce, and so on.

Over the summer, when the campus eateries are closed, students hit the pantries even harder. Those of us who host the pantries are considering making each location have its own specialty. For example, the chapel is the only pantry with a refrigerator for fresh products. The library seems to be turning into the hotspot for personal hygiene items. And, finally, the Hillel House seems to be getting more requests than the others for organic and vegan items. Times are changing and so are our students’ needs. Before we think about how best to teach them information literacy, maybe we should stop and wonder if they ate yet today. How can we nurture the student as a whole person in addition to supporting them in their research needs? What resources exist on our campuses that we can tap into, or where are there gaps in meeting our students’ unique and dynamic needs?