ACRL @ 2016 ALA Annual Conference

Going to ALA Annual for the first time? Not sure what to expect? Check out the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) recorded webcast to help first-time ALA Annual Conference attendees make the most of their first ALA Annual Conference experience. This one-hour interactive session provides tips and personal recommendations on how to prepare for your trip to Orlando, what to bring, planning your schedule, networking, conference etiquette, ACRL programs of interest, and more!

Details about ACRL's activities at the upcoming ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, FL, June 23–28, 2016.

Registration and housing information is available here.

The ALA conference scheduler allows attendees to search for ACRL's many discussion group meetings, forums, and committee meetings, and can also create a customized itinerary for each attendee.

President's Program

Strategies and Partnerships: Tailoring Data Services for Your Institutional Needs

In nearly every discipline, understanding how to find and use data effectively and how to create and manage your own data for re-use are emerging critical competencies in higher education. Approaching data services at the institutional level requires coordinated communication and collaboration across units and/or externally. The speakers will address multiple approaches for academic libraries of various sizes to tailor their engagement with data services to their institutional priorities. Interactive elements of the presentation will enable participants to leave with concrete ideas for their home institutions.

ACRL 101

During this interactive session ACRL leaders will meet with first-time attendees and highlight opportunities for engagement with ACRL at all levels of the association.

Preconferences

Building a Curriculum on the Intersections of Scholarly Communications and Information Literacy

This half-day, hands-on workshop will build librarians’ capacity as leaders on issues and projects of campus-wide interest that involve elements of scholarly communication, information literacy, and their connections (i.e., data literacy, intellectual property, open access, etc.).

Crossing the Threshold with Threshold Concepts: Redesigning a Library Instruction Lesson Plan

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education offers a more conceptual approach to information literacy instruction by providing a set of “interconnected core concepts” rather than standards. In this full-day preconference, participants will learn and put into practice strategies to incorporate these threshold concepts into lesson design.

Teaching Data Information Literacy: A Hands-on Introduction

This interactive preconference, presented by the ACRL Instruction Section, consists of two parts. First, presenters will share their experiences in developing instruction around data information literacy. Part two will be conducted through hands-on exercises, in which participants will have the opportunity to formulate what they see as the most important skills for their target audience to acquire.

Forums

Lessons from IMLS Funded Communities of Practice

Learn about Communities of Practice (CoPs), a concept coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Representatives from IMLS, ACRL’s Assessment in Action, YOUMedia Learning Labs, STAR_NET, and other national and state-based CoPs, will share new perspectives about CoPs to inform both research and practice about learning and effective facilitation of library-based and online learning in and through CoPs. The goals of the forum are to: 1) build capacity for creating CoPs, 2) identify new synergies resulting from exploring lessons learned from a variety of CoPs, and 3) foster promising, equitable, and engaging design work around the idea of communities of practice.

SPARC-ACRL Forum

Through its standing Research and Scholarly Environment Committee, ACRL sponsors a regular forum at both the ALA midwinter meting and annual conference to broaden the base of librarians who are knowledgeable about and engaged in scholarly communication issues. The highly popular forum series is co-sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The topic and speakers are chosen 60-90 days before the conference based on issues that are most relevant at that time.

Update on Value of Academic Libraries Initiative (ACRL)

Learn about the range of activities being undertaken by ACRL as part of its VAL initiative.

Programs

Magical Digital Encounters of the Social Science Kind

ACRL-ANSS

What do librarians need to know about emerging trends in digital social sciences? Many digital research centers encompass digital humanities and digital social sciences. What about digital social science both sets it apart from digital humanities and could open up self-awareness and new areas for research? This program brings together a digital social scientist and librarian focused on digital social sciences to give librarians insight into this trend in scholarship.

Academic Libraries and Open Educational Resource: Developing Partnerships

ACRL-CJCLS

Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives are being widely discussed and implemented throughout higher education. Academic libraries are challenged to understand what constitutes OER, how their adoption impacts faculty and students, and where libraries can play a critical role in supporting and promoting their implementation. Panelists will examine OER programs with strong library connections, discuss benefits and challenges to use by students and faculty, and explore OER initiatives’ implications for libraries and parent institutions.

A Spectrum of Digital Initiatives: Project and Pedagogical Collaborations in Digital Humanities

ACRL-DHIG

Our proposed program will demonstrate the spectrum of librarian engagement in digital humanities. Four panelists, drawn from academic libraries in the Southeastern U.S., will discuss project- and pedagogically-based approaches to engaging with digital humanities. Each panelist will discuss a different use case, ranging from creating research data content in special collections to teaching digital tools. The program will reveal diverse methods by which librarians can collaborate on Digital Humanities initiatives at their institutions.

Starting from Scratch: Build Your Digital Scholarship Center Program

ACRL-DSCIG

The most frequently asked question about Digital Scholarship Centers (DSC) is “How do I get started?” The options are many and the decisions made can significantly impact the DSC’s chances for a successful launch. What services are offered? Who are the partners? This program features experienced DSC developers who will share their stories and expertise about how they got started, what they learned and what they’d do today if they were starting from scratch. This program is co-sponsored in name only by the ACRL Digital Curation Interest Group and the ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group.

Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: A Critical View

ACRL-IS, ACRL-EBSS

Five invited panelists who are ongoing practitioners of critical pedagogy will offer their insights on the ACRL Frame “Authority is Constructed and Contextual.” In a talk show-style format, a moderator from the program planning committee will lead an engaging Q & A, with plenty of opportunities for audience input. This program is jointly sponsored by the ACRL Instruction Section and the ACRL Education & Behavioral Sciences Section.

Peeling Back the Layers of Publishing Opacity: Open Editorial and Peer Review

Publications Coordinating Committee, Research and Scholarly Environment Committee

Approaches to scholarly review are changing. Pre-print servers such as arXiv allow open peer commenting. Mega-journals like F1000Research seek to make transparent the peer review practices. Instances of “open” review processes are controversial, yet growing in numbers. This panel discussion will introduce and describe alternative open review approaches from diverse disciplinary and publishing perspectives. Panelists will discuss their experiences as authors, publishers, and reviewers in these emerging and transformative models of editorial and peer review.

#BlackLivesMatter: Documenting a Digital Protest Movement

ACRL-RBMS

This program will focus on the #BlackLivesMatter movement, spurred by police shootings and other incidents across the country. This is a "hybrid" grassroots movement, with robust digital and physical presences. Documenting such movements for both short-term use by students and scholars and long-term preservation is a serious challenge for 21st-century libraries and archives. The program will explore the ways that activists, academics, archivists, and librarians are collecting and providing access to the history unfolding today. This program is co-sponsored by the ALA Committee on Diversity and the ALCTS PARS Digital Preservation Interest Group.

Collections at the Crossroads: Revising and Re-envisioning the Core Subject Collection

Resources for College Libraries Editorial Board

What is the role of core subject collections in a rapidly-changing collection development landscape and how do shifts in liaison roles, acquisitions, and assessment all factor into this conversation? Featuring speakers from community college, undergraduate, and research institutions, panelists will address current practices, historical benchmarks, and future trends in using a core subject collection such as Resources for College Libraries to grow, evaluate, and weed library holdings.

Data to Discourse: Subject Liaisons as Leaders in the Data Landscape

ACRL-STS

This panel presentation will discuss how librarians can:

• Partner with researchers to support academic discourse by advising data management that promotes discoverability

• Partner with researchers to identify appropriate data and repurpose that data into new research questions

• Create and collaborate to design instruction sessions that teach students to successfully find appropriate data

• Obtain the necessary data skills to tackle these new responsibilities and partnerships.

Taking Our Seat at the Table: How Academic Librarians Can Help Shape the Future of Higher Education

ACRL-ULS

Academic librarians need to be involved at the highest levels in shaping the future of higher education, but there are many ways to accomplish this goal. In addition to being librarians, we may act as publishers, instructional designers, data analysts, change agents, and more. In this panel, four diverse speakers will discuss innovative ideas and partnerships that go beyond traditional academic library work and empower academic librarians to take our seat at the table.

Connecting Individuals with Social Services: The Academic Library's Role

Individual Proposal

As public libraries earn attention and kudos for connecting their users to needed social services, the question arises as to the role of the academic library in connecting our users with resources on services for mental and physical health, food security, housing, child care and other societal needs. Join a researcher into how libraries provide these connections along with a panel of student service providers for a lively discussion of the academic library’s potential role.

Expanding Your Assessment Toolbox: Creative Assessment Design for the Novice Instruction Librarian

Individual Proposal

Assessment can be a challenge for any instruction librarian and it increases with the introduction of the new Framework for Information Literacy. In this session, participants will develop a creative assessment for library instruction designed around introducing a frame. This interactive session will encourage small group work as each participant will rotate through two different stations in order to create their own assessment, which will be shared at the conclusion of the program.

Framing Out New Partnerships: Redesigning Library Instruction and First-Year Writing Programs through Shared Understandings

Individual Proposal

This presentation offers a rationale for using shared threshold concepts in information literacy and writing as the foundation for library-writing program partnerships. We will describe a multi-session approach to integrated library instruction that focuses on shared threshold concepts between our disciplines, and we will share information from our IRB-approved study that investigated this approach. Participants will learn methods for assessing students’ learning of threshold concepts and strategies for creating partnerships on their campuses.

Joyous Paranoia: How Libraries Misunderstand and Mismanage Disruptive Innovation

Individual Proposal

The theory of disruptive innovation has been used to explain everything from steel manufacturing to Wikipedia. Now it seems every technology is hailed as “disruptive,” but are ebooks, QR codes, natural language searching, and open access actually disruptive? Disruption has been so overhyped it is hard to differentiate truly disruptive innovations from the multitude of emerging technologies. Worse, this confusion may prevent libraries from adopting adequate structures and processes to manage change and withstand disruption.

Practical Instructional Design: Diverse Perspectives in Academic Librarianship

Individual Proposal

This presentation will explore the diverse ways in which academic librarians are involved with instructional design (ID), including instruction, assessment, and outreach. The presenters will introduce their perspectives on instructional design, including their research on librarians’ understanding of ID. Participants will be presented with a case study which they will dissect and apply ID strategies within small groups. Regardless of the participant’s familiarity with this topic, they will take away strategies they can immediately implement.

Strengthening Relationships and Experiences with Students through Personal Librarian Programs

Individual Proposal

Through personal librarian (PL) programs, academic librarians are helping students overcome any apprehension or confusion related to library resources, library services, or asking for help. PL programs typically focus on new incoming students, but the approach can also assist in relationship development and education of students beyond the first year. Three very different academic libraries all came to the implementation, maintenance, and assessment of a PL program through unique goals, styles, and approaches. This program is co-sponsored in name only by the ACRL Student Retention Discussion Group.

The Mindful Librarian: Bringing Mindfulness to the Academic Library

Individual Proposal

Participants will be introduced to concepts of mindfulness as they apply to the academic environment and be shown the results of a survey exploring current academic librarians’ knowledge of mindfulness or contemplative practice in education. Methods of bringing mindfulness to specific academic librarian roles will be shared based on the presenter’s research conducted and writing done towards the publication of The Mindful Librarian: Connecting the Practice of Mindfulness to Librarianship (published January 2016).

To Surveys and Beyond: Strategies for Assessing Large-Scale Outreach Events

Individual Proposal

Although surveys and information literacy assessments are commonly employed in academic libraries, assessments often are not used for outreach events. A large public university library recently began soliciting student feedback of its major annual event, Library Open House, in order to measure its impact. This program will discuss the library’s efforts to incorporate assessment into large-scale outreach events, including successes and lessons learned, and how to use outreach assessment to demonstrate the value of libraries.

Programs Co-Sponsored by ACRL

Digital Preservation Education: Choosing the Options that are Right for You

Sponsored by ALCTS/PARS and ACRL

The preservation of digital objects is a critical function for many libraries and information organizations. IT specialists, preservation administrators, and library administrators all have an important role to play in managing the digital preservation program. The objective of this session is to bring together a panel of experts to discuss what kinds of preservation education are available and how to choose what type and how much is appropriate for librarians within a variety of institutions.