It's Academic

C&CS Presents: If Not Us, Who? Privacy Literacy Instruction in Academic Libraries with Alex Chisholm and Sarah Hartman-Caverly

September 3, 2019

Connect and Communicate Presents

If Not Us, Who? Privacy Literacy Instruction in Academic Libraries

Presented by Alex Chisholm and Sarah Hartman-Caverly

September 27th at 12pm EST

Join us as Sarah and Alex showcase current privacy literacy instruction practices in academic libraries. They will feature activities from the librarian-led Privacy Workshop Series at Penn State Berks and encourage participants to adapt them to their communities’ needs. Participants will preview privacy literacy activities; access the facilitators’ privacy literacy toolkit featuring resources for future privacy literacy programming; gain working knowledge of contemporary privacy challenges and solutions to build professional self-efficacy; and leave inspired to engage in privacy literacy education or advocacy. Sarah and Alex, who conduct ongoing research in this area, will frame these activities with emerging scholarship on intellectual freedom and privacy literacy practices in academic libraries. This session prepares librarians to answer the call for privacy education and advocacy articulated in Article VII, recently added to the Library Bill of Rights.

Presenter Biographies

Alex Chisholm

Sarah Hartman-Caverly

Alexandria Chisholm is an Assistant Librarian at Penn State Berks and liaison to the campus’ first year experience program and science division. She has six years of reference and instruction experience at both private and public baccalaureate- and doctoral-degree granting institutions. Her research focuses on information literacy, instructional design, and privacy literacy.

Sarah Hartman-Caverly is a reference and instruction librarian at Penn State Berks, where she liaises with Engineering, Business, and Computing programs. Prior to her current appointment, Sarah was a reference and instruction librarian at a community college, and was an electronic resources manager and library system administrator in both community and small liberal arts college settings. Sarah’s research examines the compatibility of human and machine autonomy from the perspective of intellectual freedom. Recent contributions include “Version Control” (ACRL 2017), “Our ‘Special Obligation’: Library Assessment, Learning Analytics, and Intellectual Freedom” (ACRL 2018), and “Human Nature is Not a Machine: On Liberty, Attention Engineering, and Learning Analytics” (forthcoming Library Trends 2019).

As a reminder, Zoom link will be sent approximately 48 hours before the session. We will mute participants on entry into the Zoom room. Session will be recorded and available on YouTube after the session. As always, we will do our best to provide closed captioning during the session.

Thank you to PaLA and CRD for continuing to sponsor these sessions. If you would like to present with C&CS, please contact Erin Burns or any member of the C&CS team, located on the C&CS page: https://crdpala.org/connect-communicate/

Call for Proposals: ACRL DVC Fall Program

August 29, 2019

by Matthew McNelis

The ACRL Delaware Valley Chapter is looking for proposals to participate in their annual Fall program taking place on October 25th. Information on the event and what they are looking for in terms of content is below.

Call for Proposals: Beyond diversity speak: Practicing cultural humility in your library

The ACRL DVC 2019 Annual Fall Program will be held on October 25, 2019 at Cedar Crest College from 9:00-3:30pm. This year’s program will be focused on incorporating cultural humility into equity, diversity, and inclusion professional development in academic libraries. Sarah Ahmed (2012) describes diversity initiatives as frequently being “happy talk” that institutions write into their strategic plans and mission statements to manage their image but then do not integrate into everyday practice. While some libraries make a concerted effort to provide diversity or cultural competency training opportunities, often the attention is superficial and/or uninformed. Nicole Cooke (2016) stresses the importance of cultural humility in serving diverse populations. Cultural humility is a cousin to cultural competency, but while cultural competency means learning about other cultures, cultural humility means continuously working to uncover how we and the institutions in which we engage are complicit in underserving some and overserving others and making ourselves accountable for rectifying the disparity. To do this, librarians and libraries need tools to help them reflect on themselves and their institutions, facilitate difficult discussions, and imagine new possibilities. Lorin Jackson, the Research and Instruction Resident Librarian from Swarthmore College and co-founder of WOC+Lib, an online community dedicated to amplifying the voices of librarians of color, will run an interactive workshop in the afternoon on cultural humility that promises to be fun, enlightening, and practical. We are now looking for proposals from academic librarians, staff members, and administrators for the morning session that examine the successes and failures they have experienced during their attempts to develop an environment of cultural humility within their libraries. We also welcome theoretical explorations of the concept and practical discussions on how to apply these principles. We are accepting proposals for presentations, panels, and lightning talks. You can submit your proposal here. The deadline to submit is September 23 with notification by September 27, 2018.

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cooke, N. A. (2016). Information services to diverse populations: Developing culturally competent library professionals. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Instructions for Proposal Submissions

Proposals can be submitted here and should include the following information:

Proposal title
Names, affiliations, positions, and email addresses of the presenters
Preferred presentation format
1. Option A – 20-30 minute presentations
2. Options B – 20-40 minute panels
3. Option C – 10-minute lightning round presentations
A 250-word summary of the topic you wish to present including the points you intend to make and the way(s) you intend to engage the audience, if applicable

Any questions can be emailed to acrlpa.dvc@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Library Legacies Project at Penn State session now available!

August 28, 2019

by Erin B.

Thank you to our presenter Jackie Esposito for sharing information on the Library Legacies Project at Penn State. The video session is now available on an unlisted link below:

Thank you to Sara Pike for volunteering to do the closed captioning for this session, and for everyone who stuck it out through our early audio issues.

We will be promoting our next session sometime next week, which is on privacy literacy! Stay tuned for the registration information!

Technical Services Round Table of PaLA… and Oh Yeah! Happy New Academic Year!

August 28, 2019

by Michele G. Anfuso

As I write this, I am observing an amazing sunset from my second-story living room window and taking in the beauty of the transformation from summer to autumn. As someone who adores pumpkin pie, hot cocoa, Thursday night football, and cooler weather, it should come as no surprise that I enjoy this time of year and the fresh start to the academic year that comes along with it. School is now in session and students and faculty have returned. Since this is my first time experiencing the start to the academic school year at my current job at Lehigh Carbon Community College, I am excited to assist with assignments and to answer the general directional inquiry.

Additionally, the voting came to an end on August 10th for various positions throughout the round tables of the Pennsylvania Library Association. I am so excited to report that starting on January 1, 2020, I will be starting my role as Vice-Chair to the Technical Services Round Table of the PaLA. After a year, I will then segue into the position of Chair. This two-year position and commitment have me looking forward to the challenges that it will bring, but I am eager to learn more about my profession and hope that it gives my career a boost. If time and money are in agreement with me (as is usually not the case, much to my chagrin), I intend on attending several conferences throughout Pennsylvania during my two-year stint, including the Leadership Orientation conference held this year on December 9th and 10th. (To my knowledge, I am not informed of the location of this particular conference – does anyone know?) Here’s to a productive and fulfilling 2019-2020 academic year and perhaps meeting one or two of you at a future PaLA conference!

Project Procrastination & End Panel Signage

August 23, 2019

by smartin592

As the summer (sadly) winds to a close, all the projects that have been put off now have to be completed quickly! Since our library renovation last year, we’ve been trying to figure out what we wanted to do for end panel signage in the stacks.

Many of our library staff members toured the Point Park Library in downtown Pittsburgh and fell in love with their chalkboard end panel signage, in addition to other interesting features of their space. So, we tried to think about a way that we could do something similar here. However, we didn’t seem to be able to find anyone with enough artistic talent to volunteer to do it.

Our Office Manager, Jayne, and I poured over library supply catalogs, signage websites, and other places trying to find sign holder options that were a little bit fancy but also affordable. We finally chose a sign holder and they arrived a month or so ago.

We then researched several options for hanging the signs so that we didn’t have to drill into the end panels. We tried command strips and heavy-duty Velcro. The heavy-duty Velcro seemed like the best option for us. So we went out and purchased enough Velcro to hang all of our signs and that sat for another week or so.

Then last week, one of our student workers cut the Velcro and applied it to the backs of the signs to make the hanging process a little easier.

Yesterday Jayne & I decided that we could not put this task off any further so we headed down to the stacks armed with a tape measure, pencil, and Clorox wipes. We cleaned the end panels then measured and hung all 60+ sign holders in a few hours. We both joked that we could skip our yoga class after all the bending and stretching we had done.

Now we just have to finalize the design for the inserts and print them so that they can be ready for the first day of school on Wednesday next week.

What projects have you accomplished this summer? And what projects have you let hang over you til the last minute?