Holly Heller-Ross
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Innovative, kind, environmentalist.
I just finished reading everything my library and interlibrary loan could get me by the Canadian writer Carol Shields. She's a wonderful writer! Now I am rereading Karen Catlin's 2021 book Better Allies: Everyday actions to create inclusive, engaging workplaces. I often have multiple books going at one time- professional reading and more leisure reading - often mystery or family drama novels.
Responsive, dedicated, inclusive.
Over my many years as a librarian, I've relied on ACRL for community, professional development, leadership on important issues facing libraries, excellent guidelines and benchmarks and statistics. My career was reinvigorated many times through participation in ACRL conferences, the Instruction Immersion Programs I attended changed my whole approach to teaching and then assessment, and the Distance Learning Section gave me an early professional home with amazing resources and colleagues for networking. I value all the services and programs ACRL offers.
As an academic librarian at SUNY Plattsburgh, I teach information literacy courses in our general education program, offer research help to individual students, serve on a subject specialist liaison team (currently to our School of Business and Economics), and engage in university service and my own scholarship. I've also had the opportunity to team teach courses in other areas, including a crossing cultures course for new international students, fundamentals of technology for education students, and a music research course for our Honors program.
For many years I've co-chaired our Feinberg Library Research Prize Committee, awarding scholarships to students who are recommended by their faculty for excellence in the use of library resources and services in their academic work. We make the awards at a ceremony in the library during National Library Week, and it is very exciting for the recipients and their nominating faculty.
I like to think that I also contribute to a sense of fun on campus. Over the years I've started wellness activity programs, free popcorn events (our library has a lot of fun with that), the library costume dinosaurs (we now have 4 that will randomly show up across campus- I'm the blue one), root and giveaway library plant slips every April for National Library Week, and organize lunches for our student employees and staff. I think that academic librarians have an obligation to engage with their campuses at every opportunity.
I didn't start out planning to be an academic librarian. I must say however, that this has been the very best of careers!
I have a B.A. in Environmental Science from Plattsburgh and an M.L.S. from SUNY Albany. I worked as a public librarian and then hospital librarian before joining the faculty at Plattsburgh in 1994. At Plattsburgh I worked as a faculty librarian for many years, then moved into administration as Associate Dean, and then as Dean of Library and Information Technology Services. Returning to faculty librarianship in 2021 has been like starting over, with all the excitement and thrill of reengaging with students as an instructor.
I've been able to connect with wonderful students and colleagues, research and publish, get involved with library and technology leaders, and explore the world. I've published in a variety of media over the years and have learned something new about writing every time. Examples include blogs for Letters to a Young Librarian and the EDUCAUSE Commons, articles in College & Research Libraries News, The Reference Librarian, MC Journal: the Journal of Academic Media Librarianship, the Journal of Library Services for Distance Education, Public Services Quarterly, and the Journal of Library Administration, a co-authored book chapter on distance learning in Teaching the New Library to Today’s Users (2000), and the 5th edition of Information Literacy & Technology, (2013), an introductory textbook for undergraduate research. I've published classroom exercises in Let the Games Begin! Engaging students with interactive information literacy instruction (2011), Empowering Students II: Teaching Information Literacy Concepts with Hands-on and Minds-on Activities( 2004), and Teaching Information Literacy Concepts: Activities and frameworks from the field,(2001). I was a Fellow in the Plattsburgh Institute for Ethics in Public Life in 2003, studying academic integrity as an applied ethical value, and then conducted research in Cairo, Egypt for two months as a Fulbright Scholar, studying information literacy and librarianship at the University of Cairo and American University in Cairo in 2007. I've given presentations at conferences in several states and in Canada and Puerto Rico. I don't think any of that could have happened in any other job.
Academic librarianship opened up a world of possibilities to me, and ACRL has helped make all those possibilities more real.
Pronouns:she/her
Credentials:MLS
Title:Librarian
Job Function:Librarian and Women in Technology (WIT) Founder
Workplace:State University of New York at Plattsburgh
Location:Plattsburgh, NY