(via Joyce Garczynski, Towson University)
The ACRL Digital Scholarship Section’s Professional Development Committee is pleased to host a Lightning Talk Showcase on Wednesday, July 10, from 1:00 to 2:00 PM CDT. Please join us for an exciting lineup of presenters, including the following.
Kelly Karst, User Experience & Emerging Technology Librarian at California Institute of Integral Studies, will speak about proactively engaging the community in social justice via curated resource displays. Librarians became proactive by listening to what their community’s social justice concerns were via reference appointments, school events, school groups/committees, and circulation statistics. By staying on the pulse of their community, librarians were able to create drafts of resource displays and guides to share for feedback from community groups before publishing. This proactive stance increased collaboration, gave our community a sense of being heard, enhanced our collections, and often resulted in a deeper engagement and understanding of issues important to our community.
The presenter will share their strategies for brainstorming topics, connecting with the community, and rethinking traditional library display themes to engage more deeply with issues important to our users.
Halie Kerns, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Binghamton University, and Leah Fitzgerald, Instruction and Outreach Librarian at SUNY Canton will discuss CRAAP Attack, a digital scholarship project with undergraduate game design students. The speaker will share successes and failures managing a year-long Digital Scholarship project of an Information Literacy Video game to guide instruction in the library. The game, with a working title CRAAP Attack, was developed by several students from the Game Design Program on campus. By leveraging an underutilized president-funded internship program on campus, the project created nine paid internship positions for the students to gain experience in their chosen field. The students created their own workflows on platforms, including Unity, Github, and Discord, to collaborate with librarians and with each other both remotely and in person. Student roles included coders, designers, writers, and a graphics coordinator. At the end of the year, the group had successfully created a playable digital game that incorporated common information literacy skills taught in standalone and library science credit classes.
The presentation will discuss the project’s management, including inspiration, funding sources, planning, necessary digital platforms and skills, personnel structure, and across-campus collaborations to help guide the project to fruition.
Kai Fay, Discovery & Access Strategic Projects Manager at Harvard Library, will present Project Management as Community Building: Launching the Harvard Library Collections Digitization Program. It is easy to reduce projects to project plans, milestones, and measures of success, but at the end of the day, even a perfectly color-coded kanban board is only a tool. People, and the work that they do, are the driving force that moves a project to completion. This presentation posits a reframing of project management: What if we put the people first? Drawing on experiences from launching a large-scale collaborative digitization program, this presentation will highlight how project management can be used to foster innovation and community across the library. Our goal was to build on existing digitization experience within Harvard Library to transform a primarily siloed model into one where multiple collections could be digitized and displayed as part of a cohesive group under a common theme. Using a combination of strategies including open brainstorming meetings, cross-functional advisory groups, and transparent communications, we created a program with strong stakeholder buy-in and improved communication. Traditional project management tools such as timelines and kanban boards took on new roles as communication tools, and feedback on pain points shaped key discussions and training sessions. Although the skeleton of the project timeline was in place from the start, the details were intentionally left vague to respond to the needs of the community.
Building a successful, sustainable project means moving beyond project management as task tracking and Gantt charts to project management as facilitation of a shared vision. Putting people first encourages project managers to select tools that fit the project instead of forcing projects into predetermined systems that may not fit their needs.
Simon Ringsmuth, Digital Services Librarian at Oklahoma State University, will speak about planning and executing successful virtual panel discussions. A common barrier to digital scholarship is finding effective methods of sharing ideas and learning from experts, and one way to mitigate this is through virtual panel discussions. As Co-Chair of the Oklahoma State Board of Regents Council for Online Learning Excellence’s Advanced Technologies Subcommittee, Simon helped plan a virtual panel discussion in Fall 2022 related to the growing eSports presence in higher education, with particular focus on how this activity can involve students who want to engage in collegiate competition but are not athletically inclined. He then helped plan a similar online panel discussion about AI Tools and Technologies in Fall 2023, and a third panel discussion related to online proctoring in higher education in Spring 2024.
This presentation will focus on lessons learned from planning and executing these three panel discussions: what worked well in the lead-up to the events, tips for successfully moderating the discussion, and how to structure the format of the panel discussion to maximize participant interest and engagement. Attendees will learn strategies for planning similar panel discussions, find ways to involve a diverse set of stakeholders during such virtual panels, and learn how to host effective and engaging virtual panel discussions of their own.
This program is presented by the ACRL DSS Professional Development Committee, in collaboration with the DSS Outreach Committee and DSS Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee.
The program is free to attend. Register here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. A program recording will be distributed to registrants after the conclusion of the session.
Please direct any questions to Taylor Davis-Van Atta, DSS Professional Development Committee Chair, at tgdavisv@central.uh.edu.