It's Academic

Library Liaison Lunch and Learns with Faculty

May 9, 2019

Brown Bag There are of course many ways librarians who play a liaison role reach out to departments and programs. One successful effort at Villanova’s library is the lunch and learn. Last summer the liaison librarians brainstormed topics around which they could in pairs successfully facilitate conversations with faculty members that were not oriented to specific academic disciplines. This provided an opportunity for the subject specialists to grow awareness about the expertise of librarians in other issues related to research and scholarly communication.

The outcome was regular informal drop-in meetings during lunchtime throughout the fall semester. It was marketed as a brown bag lunch series.

The topics with the blurbs we sent to faculty:

Let your research bloom with ORCID: Researcher IDs in academic publishing
The unique ORCID identifier number provides researchers with a free, secure, perpetual location to showcase their professional portfolio and allows them to choose the information they share with other researchers, funders, and publishers. Come to the Library to set up your ORCID identifier in less than ten minutes and pick up your FREE ORCHID (while supplies last). Librarians will be on hand to assist you with registration and to answer your questions.

Pixelated Pedagogy: Creating Digital Projects in the Classroom
This informal presentation and discussion will focus on initiating course-related digital scholarship and cover topics such as potential platforms, useful applications and resources, and tips on how to leverage various formats in a digital environment. Past projects will also be showcased and discussed.

Measures of Impact
We’ll discuss impact factors, fake impact factors, other citation measures, and altmetrics.

Staying Alert: Tracking New Books and Publications in Your Field
Let your inbox be your watchdog and get notified of new publications on your interests or new citations of your work. We’ll show you how to have Browzine, Google Scholar, and other common databases let you know when there’s something to get excited about!

Open Access Scholarship and Publishing
Review considerations for selecting open access journals for publishing and learn how the Falvey SOAR fund relates to these publishing efforts.

Use, Publish, Share: Creative Commons Licensing and Scholarship
We are all too familiar with copyright infringement on the web. But there is a wealth of open-access resources that can be re-used with proper attribution under Creative Commons (CC) licensing. What is CC licensing? How can you protect your rights as an author and share your work freely with the public? How can you find and use CC-licensed works? Come to this session for a discussion that aims to tease out some answers.

Citation Wrangling
Serious research projects call for no-nonsense tools for taming citations. Learn how to use Zotero and Mendeley to save, organize & share references.

The series was so successful we’ve decided to run another brown bag series next fall. This time however we’re asking faculty for feedback now, before the summer, on what topics would interest them the most. This is an early way of alerting faculty to the fact that we will be having the brown bags again. Faculty responses have started rolling in, which hopefully means we’ll have lunch and learns on issues that we know matter to faculty.

BUDSC19 Call for Proposals

May 2, 2019

by Jill Hallam-Miller

If you are involved with digital scholarship–supporting students or faculty with their digital scholarship, or doing your own thing–consider submitting a proposal! Some of the most popular BUDSC sessions in past years have been librarian presentations. The details are below…

Bucknell University will host its sixth annual digital scholarship conference #BUDSC19 from October 11th-13th, 2019. The theme of the conference is “From Wonder to Action: the Journey of Digital Scholarship.”

#BUDSC19 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, librarians, artists, educational technologists, students, administrators, and others–engaged in digital scholarship both in research and teaching who share an interest in the journey of digital scholarship.

This year, we are inviting proposals that include (but are not limited to):

Exciting new ideas, projects, or technologies that spark the imagination,
Activity flows that transform the spark into action,
Stories about how you share the wonder.

The Call for Proposals can be found online at https://tinyurl.com/budsc19

More information on the call can be found here: bucknell.edu/call-for-proposals/

More details on conference registration will be coming soon!

Feel free to reach out to Jill Hallam-Miller at jbhm001@bucknell if you have questions.

Registration for 2019 PA Forward Information Literacy Summit is Now Open

April 30, 2019

by Michele G. Anfuso

The summit is taking place on Monday, July 15 at the Conference Center at Central Penn.

Please see full details, including session descriptions and location details, by clicking here.

The 2019 Pennsylvania Library Association’s PA Forward Information Literacy Summit is focused on connecting people with resources and opportunities. This year’s summit is looking at information literacy and how it intersects with basic, civic and social, health and financial literacy, helping individuals navigate various information channels and understanding the role all libraries have in the discovery and application of credible information.

When: Monday, July 15, 2019, 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM

Where:	The Conference Center at Central Penn College 600 College Hill Rd Summerdale, Pennsylvania 17093 United States
Contact:	Brandi Hunter-Davenport brandi@palibraries.org 717-766-7663

Leveraging #EdTech for Library Instruction

April 30, 2019

by danajkerrigancv

As librarians we all wear many hats, and one of my unofficial hats at our small campus is with instructional design and education technologies due to my experience as an online faculty member, and mentor to new online students and faculty, as well as my reputation for being a “tech nerd” and early adopter.

I had the opportunity today to attend ADVIS’s (Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools) Innovation Workshop today with our Academy Dean (grades 7-12) and Systems Administrator so that we can begin brainstorming about how to better leverage free (and low cost) educational technologies on our campus for the next academic year.

The workshop was set up as “speed sessions” or lightning talks held in two rounds with 10-12 concurrent sessions each repeated 4 times in the round, allowing participants to choose 4 sessions from each round, attending 8 sessions total in under 2 hours! My head is still spinning with ideas that can be borrowed, tweaked, new technologies to try, and some frameworks and guidelines to explore.

My top 3 #EdTech highlights from the day that can be easily used in our college/university classrooms and libraries include:

PearDeck (The Essential Plan is free, and paid versions are available). Pear Deck is built to work with Google Slides, and helps incorporate assessment into presentations/discussions (and captures data). So, for those of us teaching one-shot information literacy sessions, this could be an easy way to embed assessment with our instruction.
TedED. Allows users to create or use existing lessons to engage students in TedTalks style lectures! (Still in pilot phase if anyone is interested…)
Educreations. Designed to engage users with video. Most of the examples mentioned in today’s sessions were for math students demonstrating how they solve a problem. I immediately envisioned that missing link in librarian’s studies of user-experience with web design, LibGuides, and database usage, where we can see how students approach a research task!

Where do you get your Ed Tech ideas? How do you engage faculty to experiment with new technologies in the classroom?

I like to follow:

Let’s get creative and have our students use their beloved technology to learn!

Student organizations as curators in the library

April 30, 2019

by Jessica Showalter

Penn State Altoona Library Display Banner

This month our library collaborated with a student organization, the Penn State Altoona Environmentalist Coalition, to curate a “Take a Hike” display as a celebration of Earth Day and National Parks Week. Here I share why and how we did it for librarians eager to try a similar project.

Part of my mission in my role as Student Engagement & Outreach Librarian is making more room for students to be active partners in the library. I aim to show students how our library is not just a space to study or a room full of books, but also a place for them to share their research with a broader audience, express their creativity, and build their resumes outside the classroom setting.

I’m inspired by the book, Students Lead the Library: The Importance of Student Contributions to the Academic Library, edited by Sara Arnold-Garza and Carissa Tomlinson. This book has so many great ideas for librarians seeking to incorporate opportunities for student leadership development, student engagement, experiential learning, and more. In particular, the sections “Students as Curators” and “Student Groups as Library Leaders” offered some helpful models for our student-organization-curated exhibit.

Working with a student organization has some built-in advantages. Members are already super interested in a specific topic and motivated to advocate for it outside the classroom. Plus, they can share the work as a group rather than one individual doing all the work.

So, how did we collaborate?

Reach out. I went to the Student Involvement Fair at the beginning of the semester, asked about each club and what they do, introduced myself and my role, handed out business cards, and brainstormed on the fly about ways our library could support their specific needs, address their challenges, and work together on projects. For groups that expressed interest (including the Environmentalist Coalition), I followed up with emails about a week later.
Be flexible. I had already started planning an April display when the Environmentalist Coalition approached me in mid-March. So, I happily threw out my plans and worked with them instead! Also, when the students later asked if they could bring in original artwork for the display, I enthusiastically went with their suggestion instead of sticking with our first idea for a green paper backdrop.
Be clear. The students had never made a display before, so I gave them a quick tour of the space and then gave them a clear checklist of things they could supply: a bibliography of 20 suggested books, a list of 5 suggested websites for the iPad kiosk, all delivered by a deadline. Plus, I gave them a clear break down of what my responsibilities would be (e. g. get approval from library director, resource acquisition, coordinate with office of strategic communications, installation).
Be a fan! I promoted their hard work with posters, social media posts, a news release, and announcements in the Student Newsletter and the Faculty/Staff Newsletter. I also emailed the group about 2 weeks after installation with positive feedback their display had gotten, and at the end of the month, I recapped their success, suggested how they might describe their work on professional documents, and offered to be a reference if needed.
Plan ahead. To wrap up, I made contact with their incoming officers to let them know that I’d be happy to work with them next year if they were interested.

A collage of photos of the library display.