Somehow, when the ACRL conference organizers were picking dates for their 2025 biennial conference, they didn’t consider that it falls at the same time as my kids’ school’s Spring Break. I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and although this year’s conference is just south of my city, beyond the 49th parallel, in Minneapolis, I just can’t make it work with my schedule. With the political climate in the US as it is, and with increasing reports of Canadians being detained or being denied entry at the US border, I can say, at least at this moment in time, that it is a relief to not have to be potentially disrupted on a trip to the US.
While I’m not attending ACRL this year, my research collaborators and I have a poster accepted and one of our collaborators will be presenting at this year’s conference. We’re presenting our initial findings of the use of author contribution statements in library and information science (LIS) scholarship, and how gender plays a part in what research contributions (e.g., methodology, writing, project administration) authors play. Are LIS journals using or requiring the use of author contribution statements, such as CRediT? Which research contributions are most common in LIS scholarship? Is there any correlation between specific contributions and gender? These are the research questions we’re looking into.
Our project on contributorship in LIS literature has got me thinking lately about the different ways my colleagues and I all contribute to each other’s work. In a lot of ways we’re siloed as liaison librarians, developing library services and responding to requests for our assigned faculties and departments. But also, in a lot of ways, we inform and contribute to each other’s work, in much the same way a research team contributes in different ways to their research study.
Whenever I meet with a colleague for coffee, I’m always interested in hearing about what they’re working on. Occasionally, at some point in the future, something will come across my desk and I’ll remember the conversation we had. At that point, I can touch base with my colleague again for their input or if I’m in a hurry, I can use the knowledge I received from my colleague to inform my own response. I’m also a big fan of proactively reaching out to one of my colleagues if I run into a challenging situation, to get their take on it and what they would do, or what they have done, if they’ve experienced something similar.
It’s the same whether I’m working on something in the course of my professional duties, or throughout my service work, or in my research. It’s almost like a CRediT statement, but throughout your entire body of work: some of my colleagues may contribute and collaborate a lot on the things we work on together, or they may contribute in lesser—but equally important—ways, when I’m taking the lead on something or the person responsible to accomplish a task.
But to bring it all back to ACRL—I haven’t made it to an ACRL conference yet: I didn’t attend the online conference in 2021 and had prior commitments in 2023 to attend ALA’s LibLearnX and Annual Conference; maybe ACRL 2027 is the year I finally make it.
For all those not attending ACRL, you can view the poster my research collaborator will be presenting here: https://osf.io/jb6vp. If you’re attending, be sure to say hi to Caroline Monnin in the Exhibit Hall (Poster #12) on Friday, April 4 from 2:00-2:45PM!