Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Year in Review 2019

Dear friends,
I have been quite lax in updating my blog, so here goes nothing! We have a lot to catch up on. 2019 was jam packed - Here's a (hopefully) easily skimmable list of some of the notable, or just fun, things I've been fortunate to be involved with in the past 12 months:

  • Wrote a book chapter with Grand View University colleagues (forthcoming...whenever the date next gets pushed back. Hopefully 2020?)
  • Made great progress with the Curriculum Group in revamping the Library 160 curriculum to make it more accessible and student-friendly, both in terms of content and technology. (This is ongoing as we start our 2nd full round through the text.)
  • Got really excited when my Grand View colleague became my Iowa State colleague, helping make strides to improve accessibility across campus! Their work is going to impact so many students, faculty, and staff!
  • Worked with some fantastic colleagues from the Iowa Library Association Executive Board on the Iowa Libraries Transform task force to develop tutorials and customizable templates for Iowa librarians to use in their advocacy and community outreach efforts.
  • Continue to serve on Iowa State University's Project Search Steering Committee. I had the honor of working with colleagues who are so people-focused, ensuring the Project Search interns get valuable work and social skills guidance throughout their time in the program (and beyond). Hearing the students and their internship supervisors speak about their experiences at PS Graduation was a highlight of my spring!
  • Wrapped up my service on the Iowa Library Association Executive Board. We are so fortunate to have amazing folks serving throughout the state and I'm grateful to have had this role to connect me with librarians across Iowa, including but not limited to those who served on the Exec Board with me. Iowa has a vibrant librarian culture, full of caring helpers! 
  • Celebrated receiving the 2018 Downs Intellectual Freedom Award with the ILA Executive Board.
  • Part of my service on the ILA Exec Board was to continue on as Chair of the Committee for Diversity & Inclusion (CD&I). What an amazing crew of folks I worked with this past year! We accomplished so much! We became a full standing committee, continued to send out regular updates with DEI resources, facilitated an unconference session at the fall conference, hosted two cohorts of the 21-Day Racial Equity and Habit Building Challenge, established a membership award to fully fund membership funds for someone with identities that have been traditionally underrepresented, and crafted, proposed, and had the ILA Exec Board approve the Iowa Library Association Statement on Social Justice, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion. I'm so honored to have been a part of these efforts and am excited to see it continue on. 
  • Was elected vice-chair in 2018 and assumed leadership in as Chair of ISU Library's Librarian Assembly in 2019. I also continued on Librarian Council, a group of folks who meet regularly with the Dean of the Library to discuss a wide range of topics.
  • Began serving as a Managing Editor and work on the social media committee for the International Journal of Information, Diversity, and Inclusion. 
  • I am always excited and honored to be invited into classes on campus to work with students and faculty. This year I was able to visit more classes in Education (an area near and dear to my heart) and I love working with our international students in their International First-Year Experience Seminar! 

  • Took part in an early pilot for new Travel & Hospitality procedures ahead of a shift on campus to Workday for managing HR and finances, which was fully implemented in August. 
  • Speaking of travel, I was fortunate to have been able to attend several great professional development opportunities. I attended ILA Advocacy Day in Des Moines, the White Privilege Conference in Cedar Rapids, the Illinois Information Literacy Summit in Palos Hills, IL, the CALL Conference in La Crosse, WI, ILA ACRL in Cedar Rapids, the Joint ILA/NLA/NSLA Conference in La Vista, NE, the School Library Journal Day of Dialog in St. Paul, MN, ILA Planning Day in Johnston, and regular meetings of the ILA Exec Board in Grinnell! It's amazing that all of that was packed into a single year (one of my New Year's resolutions may be to go to fewer things this year)! It's amazing just how much travel money you can save when using Airbnb!



  • Served as facilitator for AAUW Start Smart Salary Negotiation workshops across campus. I love that Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) and the Margaret Sloss Center for Women and Gender Equity, along with other campus partners, led the efforts to purchase a multi-year license to continue these workshops!
  • Appreciated the experiences I had growing up and celebrated 100 years of orchestra in my hometown schools!
  • I've been fortunate to continue having regular meetings with my library mentor. It has been so helpful to have this time set aside for professional reflection and connection!
  • Survived the polar vortex...
  • Supported and advocated for Iowa's teacher librarians against harmful proposed language changes in state government. 

  • Was a cheerleader on Twitter for our students AND our faculty.
  • Enjoyed being part of the Central Iowa Symphony community.
  • Began coordinating pup volunteers for Barks@Parks (comfort animal event each semester) as part of my service on the ISU Library Events Committee.


  • And I did some fun reading, some hard reading, and some professional reading throughout the year.
  • Helped with both spring and fall Commencement - Congrats Cyclone Grads!


  • Made my dog part of my bad "dad jokes" in my Library 160 instruction.
  • Wished our Dean well on her new adventures.
  • Explored updates to the front spaces of our library.
  • Took advantage of several training opportunities on campus including CPR, Mental Health First Aid, and Suicide Prevention, in addition to library professional development and meetings. 
  • Began taking American Sign Language classes this fall, taking advantage of ISU's tuition reimbursement benefit. I'm excited to learn more about Deaf culture and American Sign Language grammar, vocabulary, and storytelling!
  • Welcomed many new students to the ISU family during summer new student orientation and library tours.
  • Collaborated with folks in SCUA to provide 4-H workshops in June focusing on preserving your heritage and family artifacts. 
  • Served on the Jean E. Coleman Library Outreach Lecture working group for ALA.
  • And loved on my pup, all year long. 




How was your 2019?

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Wednesday, December 12, 2018

ACRL Member of the Week

On December 10th I was featured as ACRL's Member of the week -- Check out my profile here!
https://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/archives/16835?fbclid=IwAR0aj9bbtYm3q3ROwEyCcYFDvHVUR4v2MzrCcH3Z1oDXLWrtZ4rxrtKl6ME

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Monday, November 12, 2018

MAC Fall Symposium 2018

I had the privilege of being invited to help lead this year's Midwest Archives Fall Symposium. What an amazing day! The theme was "From the Stacks to the Classroom" and we had such a wonderful day together exploring exciting topics, sharing ideas, and growing together! Many thanks to my co-presenters, Rachel Seale (Iowa State University Special Collections) and Anna Trammell (Pacific Lutheran University). I left feeling as though I had 34+ new friends to nerd out with about instruction!

We began the day with one of my favorite activities (that I borrowed from the Info Lit workshops I lead with Becky Canovan of University of Dubuque): Solution or Sympathy! Y'all, archivists and librarians are such kindred spirits and the questions or situations that were submitted and shared with the group were phenomenal! Here's how Solution or Sympathy works. Participants:
  • Write down instruction/archives-related questions or concerns;
  • Share the questions anonymously to see if the group has experienced something similar;
  • Offer up possible solutions, or sympathize, and let the person who submitted the question know that at least they're not alone.
What I love about this activity is that it works in almost any context with almost any profession! Everyone has problems and everyone wants to know either 1) what have others done to address/resolve this problem, or 2) who is here and can at least commiserate about this. Because, sometimes it's nice to just know you're not the only one.

We could have done Solution or Sympathy all day (seriously) but transitioned to an active learning/collaborative learning session primarily led by Rachel Seale. I LOVED the narrative building exercise she introduced to the group. To use this in your own classroom, divide your artifacts/documents into 4-6 groups. Similarly, divide students into the same amount of groups and ask them to read and evaluate the documents, preparing to share out with the rest of the class information about their resource. Because you have cultivated the collection, eventually through the sharing-out process, students will start to see a story emerge from the resources. By the end, the whole class should be able to pull together the whole story - either through a whole-class discussion, or by a volunteer student who can tie it all together. You can also discuss what's still missing from the story, or try to predict what happened next. Lots of great inquiry can be built from this example! Rachel also led another activity where groups taught each other about various Collaborative Learning Techniques. She recommended the resource Using Primary Sources: Hands-On Instructional Exercises edited by Bahde, Smedberg, and Taormina.


Rachel & I collaborated to lead a session on Growing Your Instruction Program. We set up table-topics where participants could self-select which conversation they wanted to participate in. We prepared some conversation-starter prompts, but essentially the participants ran each table independently. All we asked was that a recorder be assigned to each topic so those who are interested in more than one topic could still learn after the fact, despite not being able to be in two places at once, because the notes were shared out with participants after the conference. We did allow for participants to rotate tables partway through the activity, though most stayed at their original topic. The overarching topics were:

  • Building relationships with faculty
  • Building relationships with students
  • Building relationships with colleagues (librarians, archives, staff)
  • Advocating for resources
  • Marketing your archives

Anna Trammell led a session on Designing Special Collections Instruction Sessions Using a Social Justice Framework, and also shared out a session focusing on Utilizing Instructional Technologies in the Classroom. A few of the highlights from those sessions are found in my tweets, below.

I led a session on Assessing Your Instruction Program and presented 60 assessment ideas or tools in what was slotted for 60 minutes. I warned the audience that I'd likely be talking like the Micro Machines commercial guy or an auctioneer, and I did.
I also promised that if there was extra time, we'd go back and do some more Solution or Sympathy questions. Well, I was totally Micro Machines-y and wound up covering the 60 ideas in 30 minutes! So we dug back into the Solution or Sympathy, which also seemed to be a hit. It worked out well!

We closed out the day with an Instructional Design Workshop where groups used provided scenarios to develop a lesson plan that incorporated some of the elements covered throughout the day. Groups had ~1 hour to work on their plan and then reported out to the group:

  • A brief description of the scenario
  • Explanation of how they addressed communication barriers, incompatible expectations, and how they worked with the requestor to find out more about their needs to develop a plan. 
  • Identified their learning outcomes
  • Described or demonstrated how they incorporated active learning techniques
  • Described what items they used (from collections)
  • They also had the option to share out instructional technologies or social justice framework elements if they chose to include them
  • How they assessed the activity/lesson
What rich conversations were generated throughout the entire day! I loved learning from participants and helping facilitate activities! Below are my tweets from the day -- with tidbits and takeaways from the various sessions! Thanks again to participants for being so wonderful, and to MAC for inviting me to help plan and facilitate the day!










































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Thursday, November 8, 2018

ILA Conference 2018 - Cedar Rapids

What an engaging and exiting time we had at the fall Iowa Library Association conference (Oct. 3-5)! This year in particular, I felt like I was constantly on the go, trying to connect with the ILA membership, helping lead or session manage presentations, and it was all worth it! You know when you get that fuzzy-in-your-forehead feeling at the end of a conference (the one that tells you you've been too much of an extrovert for too long) then it's been a productive and engaging conference! I definitely had that and needed to retreat and process to recharge after I returned home, but in a good way!

Wednesday
The opening reception was held at the always-amazing Cedar Rapids Public Library. I am constantly impressed with their staff and facilities, and basically stalk their twitter account and Facebook pages to learn about their creative community programs. Everyone was so welcoming, and it looked like everyone was enjoying themselves! I ducked out a little early to go meet with my Thursday presentation group to do one last talk through of our presentation.

Thursday
Thursday was absolutely PACKED! I began the day by being in two places at once. The Exec Board members try to have representation at the official breakfasts that kick off each day of the conference, and Thursday we had the Leadership Institute Reunion Breakfast and the New Members/New Attendees Breakfast. I split my time between the two and enjoyed meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends!


After a warm welcome from city administrators from Cedar Rapids, Hiawatha, and Marion, Thursday's keynote speaker was P.C. Sweeney, who focused on the difference between advocating for libraries and becoming an activist, creating change, for libraries through voting actions and attitudes. This means not necessarily focusing on getting people to like libraries (they already do!), but rather taking concrete steps to support libraries through funding, voting, and action.



I took a shift or two at the ILA Booth and enjoyed visiting with attendees, and braisntorming & wondering aloud together about library issues. We also gave one final push for our Adopt a Library Puerto Rico partner impacted by devastating hurricanes. In the end, we together raised more than $3,000 to help with their recovery efforts!

The awards luncheon highlighted the efforts of some amazing people contributing blood, sweat, and tears to Iowa's library communities. Congrats to all who received awards! We are truly lucky to be able to call them colleagues and friends!

The afternoon was spent connecting through subdivision meetings...

...engaging in dialogue during the Diversity & Inclusion Unconference session I facilitated...

...and presenting on culturally respectful programs and collections.


The handouts/slides for this presentation can be found using these links:
Thursday ended with a rousing game of trivia, but this year I was helping lead it rather than participate on a team. From this I learned that I much more enjoy helping with the trivia than answering the questions (for most categories. This year they had a Gilmore Girls category and I would have totally carried my team if I were playing -- I got each one correct in my head, but tried to keep a poker face to not give it away to the teams). Next year we won't have trivia because of the new joint conference with Nebraska, but hopefully in the future we can bring it back! I'd love to help again!

I loved that other attendees felt excited and inspired throughout the conference, too!


 Friday
Friday was another packed day that started out with Breakfast with the Board. Then I popped over to the Conference Tweetup to chat in person with those we'd been following online.
I was sitting at the head table for Friday's keynote from Miguel Figueroa. He focused on forecasting for libraries, identifying signals, trends, and values for libraries of the future. Forecasting isn't predicting and waiting for something to happen; rather it's an educated examination. Examples and discussion points from his breakout session that followed the keynote are below:














Cathy Cranston from University of Iowa gave an absolutely phenomenal presentation on empowering student citizens to vote! This presentation was one of my top highlights from the conference!


















At lunch we did the traditional passing of the gavel...but this year Michael misplaced the gavel, so he gave Dan a replacement... in the form of a rubber mallet.

During this time, we also recognized the incalculable contributes of Melissa Primus, the association account manager/wizard extraordinaire. Melissa accepted a new position and this was her last conference with us. She has been amazing to work with and we wish her all the best with her new job!


We tend to wrap each conference by announcing the All Iowa Reads books for the next year, and then having the current year's AIR author do a reading/presentation.




The final selection was announced Oct. 29:


See you next year in the Omaha area!
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