ACRL2015 in Portland was an exciting whirlwind of learning and chaos for me –  and I was super happy to drive a few hours north than fly across county for the conference 🙂

 

As part of the coordinating committee –  co-chair of the Innovations committee  – we were in charge of running the “fun” stuff such as the unCon, yoga, smoothie bikes, BigFoot, battledecks, 1st timer bingo, conference reads, lounge, lunch/food trucks, etc.

 

 

 

 

I also had a blast presenting with an amazing group of librarians on a panel early Thursday morning – Keep it Green: Leading Sustainable and Successful Online Teams.  These are librarians I have worked with virtually and successfully within ACRL committees – all of them were also on Innovations.  We are hoping to present this panel talk again in a virtual format maybe through LLAMA or other venues as it was well received am I believe useful to many who are running online committee and groups.

I attended a number of other sessions, hit or miss at times (some poor speakers or not useful choices for me) but I always try to find at least one takeaway for any session.  One session slot had 3 different panels discussing student workers, advisory teams and using students in renovating a library, and a poster on empowering student workers all offered some ideas. Turning student library jobs into high impact practices talk shared ideas on setting up student workers with specific real world skills, connections to their courses, reflection time, and methods to connect with their  other student workers. By including students in this process the students could better use this library position in interviews and future employment. These librarians connected with other departments on campus who hired lots of students to share ideas, tips and co-training. The student advisory talk showed how the connection of student with the dean/director of the library really showed them how valuable their input was – but be sure not to include your student workers as they have a more biased view of the library.  If organized well, the advisory team could be a real boost to the students for their resume and skill set. The last speaker covered the design-model-build using students in an architecture department, to help assess, plan and design an outdoor sculpture area by the library. Working with students on real world projects  – wow great idea!  Though I have a feeling the Valley Library has already implemented a number of these ideas already so I hear…

I also attended a number of space planning, makerspaces, ethnographic workshops and UX sessions. I have read a lot about these concepts and done some of this work in past jobs so there wasn’t too much new information but always some takeaways. In the UX for the people talk, the biggest concept I took with me was “rethink when you have to say no to a user.”  The space planning/redesign session learned about new spaces such as teen booths or data diners created in little nooks, reservable and the 5×5 rule for weeding (is the item used less than 5 times, over 5 years and at least 5 in our consortium own it). Oh and the horticulture students creating a healthy snack option – an apple vending machine!  In the cognitive mapping session I found out about cartodb.com and floorplanner.com as tools for mapping. Interesting takeaway from their sharing was how our most heavily traffic areas of the library contained the most low identification items according to the students (items such as new books, librarian offices, journals, print materials in general).  The makerspaces session (pdf) included usingLegos in your library. Megan Lotts has some creative and inexpensive ways to bring creative and critical thinking skills to the library without buying a 3d printer and being high tech. There was also a session that shared survey results on academic libraries and resources lists (though the conference I ran on academic libraries and making missed his list 🙁

I enjoyed the lightening round sharing on Sustainability Across the Academic Library – there were a lot of panelist and a lot of ideas to follow up on from Charney’s  7 part sustainability action plan for her library, and Tanners Seed Lending Library tips. Most of this panel’s discussion is found in the book Focus on Educating for Sustainability: Toolkit for Academic Libraries by Jankowska.  And the BOF lunch with SustainRT folks is always refreshing!

On saturday I concluded with session on responsive web design (we already do that here  at the Valley Library, I now know!),  survey of our users (feeling questions and how do you use your time in the library were key), and applying  Universal Design and Accessibility to your website (design principles such as hierarchy, chunking, color, accessibility and layering were discussed)

Beyond that I enjoyed visiting the many posters, including some of our own, hanging with the ACRL bigwigs at the Chairs reception, and excitement over the next ACRL in my hometown of Baltimore in 2017!