Time

Event

9:30-9:50am

10:00-10:50 am

Opening remarks: Kristine Woods, TSRT Chair & Julie Pinnell, NLA C&U Chair, and time for conversation with virtual coffee & donuts

Keynote Address by Jon E. Cawthorne, ACRL President

11:00-11:50am

12:00-12:30pm

12:30-12:55pm

BREAKOUT SESSION 1

David Arredondo

Using Open Data Tools to Inform an Accelerated Large-scale Withdrawal Project

In August of 2020, mold was discovered in the print periodicals collection at UNK's Calvin T Ryan Library. The entire 135,000 volume collection was found to be compromised. Due to health hazards, librarians had 3 weeks to review the collection, seek faculty input, and make decisions on what to retain. Using open data tools like OpenRefine and Tableau, along with subscription-based WorldCat API, librarians were able to reach decisions effectively. This presentation will describe the process, show how these tools provided valuable assistance, and touch on the shortfalls due to an accelerated timeline.

This presentation will include PowerPoint slides and a walkthrough of the actual data interactions which librarians used to make decisions and seek faculty input.

These tools enabled an efficient approach to an otherwise grueling and time-consuming project.

Tammi Owens, Heidi Blackburn

From Shark Tank to American Idol: Rethinking and reusing teaching outlines across the curriculum.

We’ve all been there. A request on a Monday for a Wednesday class presentation. But what if the class has a new size, classroom, and instructor? To level up the difficulty, how about delivering it all online and making it fun and interactive? How can you beg, borrow, or steal curriculum and scale up your activities for a class of 100 students?

The setting: A Music faculty member experienced the original activity, a team-based exploration and presentation of different databases, in a Business graduate course. She wondered if it could be modified for music students and presented in lieu of the typical “Welcome to the Library” spiel for all majors. This, the faculty member hoped, would expand music majors’ ideas of the resources available to them and help them begin doing research on their own.

The solution: With new COVID restrictions and not a whole lot of time, the Music Librarian turned to the Business Librarian to work smarter, not harder, together to modify an activity that would be delivered to a completely different student demographic.

In this presentation, we’ll share the planning process of converting and scaling library instruction from one discipline to another, including meeting similar student learning outcomes with a different frame of reference. We’ll talk about what worked (and what didn’t!), our lessons learned, and faculty feedback on the project. Participants will be encouraged to share their own experiences with scaling up classroom activities or modifying lesson plans from one discipline to another.

TSRT Business Meeting

C&U Business Meeting

1:00-1:50pm

2:00-2:50pm

BREAKOUT SESSION 2

Claire Du Laney

Moving Outreach and Archival Displays Online: A Case Study for UNO Libraries' Archives and Special Collections

The shift to remote learning and working has presented unique challenges and opportunities for outreach and archival displays. As the Outreach Archivist at the UNO Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections I had to identify ways in which the items that are normally exhibited in-person could be showcased remotely. Additionally, I had to find ways to highlight the student work that was informed or inspired by archival materials. Over the last year, I have used three different methods to translate traditional, physical displays through various online platforms.

In this presentation, I will discuss how a Library News article, Instagram, and virtual tours have allowed the department to maintain engagement with remote viewers as well as support student work and teaching faculty and instructors. Each outreach project had a campus collaborator and the platform used supported different outcomes for each partnership. A Library News article was written to highlight the longstanding collaboration between UNO Librarians and a Sociology instructor whose students created zines that were donated to Archives and Special Collections. Instagram was used to celebrate artist’s books created by Art students, driving users from the Library’s Instagram account to the class website. Finally, a virtual tour, mimicking remote instruction sessions, will be created to share a recently installed department exhibit with the campus Alumni Association members who cannot currently view the display in-person due to COVID restrictions. The programming has been well received by campus collaborators and will inform our social media outreach presence, post-pandemic.

Charles Fisher

Activating Library Tech Investment Through Game Design Programming

With many libraries making a push into the makers movement through programming and the creation of dedicated makerspaces, we all hope to get the most out of expensive technology investments. By using the example of UNO’s Creative Production Lab and our seasonal game jam events, we hope to put forward an option for activating every possible creative library technology towards a common goal of game design and development. Paper printing, die-cut machines, laser engravers, and 3D-printers can see expanded use as board-game production elements. Computer hardware and software packages like Adobe CC present opportunities for patrons to fully engage with video game development. Open source software and free gamedev engines can expand current hardware. Game Jam events, where participants are given a theme and a deadline to make any kind of game they can, put patrons in a position to test their skills or learn new ones while hopping between available technology offerings with a key goal in mind. From an outreach perspective, game design activities undertaken with library technology create accessible artifacts for future play when made part of collections, installed for use on local devices, or offered via the web. We also present the capacity and means for game dev and design programming to shift to online meeting spaces and digitally accessible platforms.

BREAKOUT SESSION 3

Heidi Blackburn, Maison Horton, Tyler Pieper

Is face-to-face instruction better? Assessing business student citations during COVID-19

Does information literacy instruction really help business students use authoritative sources? With one-shot information literacy presentations, we rarely see student papers to assess if students truly applied what they learned on their own. Online learning can make assessment opportunities even more sparse without the authority to require completion of library modules or to review student work. In short, do students remember to use the library databases we promoted at the end of the semester? Does it matter if the presentation of the same content was online or in-person?

At UNO, the Business Communications class is a prerequisite for all business majors. We typically provide one, 75-minute in-person presentation to about 400 students each semester. Faculty teaching online sections use a Canvas module that meets the same student learning outcomes and between 6-8 sections use this resource per semester. The module was created at the same time as the in-person curriculum in 2017 but was truly thrust into the spotlight when COVID-19 forced most sections online and in-person library instruction was halted. In this study, we specifically assessed sources used by business students immediately prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as analyzed a cross-section of teaching methods. In this session, attendees will compare findings from the different levels of instruction and come away with ideas for implementing a team assessment project for their own instruction programs.

Angela Kroeger, Meg Mering

Migrating During a Pandemic: How the UNCL ILS Resource Management Working Group Worked Smarter, Not Harder

One idea behind having the five University of Nebraska libraries share a cloud-based Library Service Platform was that it would be more efficient from both economic and workflow perspectives. The bulk of the migration to Alma and Primo VE occurred in 2020, after the pandemic pushed the majority of staff into working from home. Contrary to expectations, migrating during a pandemic turned out to be a surprising boon to efficiency, because we never lost time to travel and all of our resources were in the cloud. We were able to access everything we needed away from our libraries. The Resource Management Working Group members perfected the use of Basecamp, Zoom, and Box, resulting in highly-effective communication, moreso than we would have experienced had we relied on face-to-face meetings and email. We honed our skills problem-solving between institutions. Triumphs include development of shared policies and expertise and pooled resources in a cloud-based system. However, in some ways, we are still thinking as individual libraries. We still have lessons to learn from the other successful UNCL collaborations, such as Digital Commons and Special Collections/Archives. This presentation will focus on lessons learned and issues still to be investigated.