M Roberts

Takeaways from Two Virtual Library Conferences

Over the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to attend two virtual library conferences – the 2026 Southeast Collaborative Conference, and the Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students 2026 Virtual Conference. I wanted to use my blog for this month to reflect on what I learned from both of these experiences.

Southeast Collaborative Conference

This conference happened first, over three days in the second week of March. I thought the pacing of the conference was helpful, as they included breaks in the schedule so attendees could check in on our day jobs without missing any of the content. Additionally, most of the sessions were pre-recorded, which allowed the speakers to be active in the chat throughout the presentation, answering questions and responding to comments. I thought that really helped to recreate how an in-person conference feels, and the emphasis on engagement made sessions fun. I also really appreciated that the conference made all of the slides and materials available to participants as soon as the conference ended. Knowing that I can reference them later, and see the materials from sessions I couldn’t attend, means that I really got the most I could out of the conference experience.

I was excited to see a presentation on Generative AI Literacy from two librarians that I know from my UNC-Chapel Hill grad school days, including one librarian whom I took a class with! I learned a lot from the presentation that I can incorporate into my own AI instruction and workshops (with attribution, of course). The presenters even shared that they’re going to be developing asynchronous tutorials for Generative AI in libraries that will be freely available to anyone, and let attendees know that all events about Generative AI at the University Libraries are open to anyone, not just university affiliates. I had no idea that I could still join any of the trainings that are offered online, and am looking forward to signing up for as many as I can attend.

Additionally, I thought the keynote was extremely powerful. It featured state librarians from five states – North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee. One of the only live presentations at this conference, these leaders spoke candidly and eloquently about the challenges facing all types of libraries and library systems today, and what they’re doing to meet them head-on. It was inspiring and made me glad all over again that I chose this career.

Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students

This conference was second, held over two afternoons in the third week of March. This conference took place over Zoom, in four-hour sessions each day with no breaks. The format was more challenging than the previous week’s, but still emphasized the importance of engagement between presenters and attendees. I was especially excited about this conference, because all of the programs I support are master’s and doctoral programs, and during this first year I’ve felt unsure at times of the best way to approach supporting these programs. I really hoped that I could learn some tips and tricks from the presenters.

Unsurprisingly, there were quite a few sessions about Generative AI at this conference as well. These presenters didn’t get into the nuts-and-bolts of how to get the most out of Gen AI the way the previous conference did, but I appreciated the contrast of this approach that focused more on platforms and how graduate students tend to engage with these tools. Between the two conferences, I was able to add a lot of different tools to my Gen AI toolbox.

Several presentations also focused on how to approach orientations and workshops for grad students differently than for undergrads. I present a lot of library orientation sessions, and librarians at my institution are currently being asked to make sure our workshop offerings are robust, so these sessions were especially relevant to me. I appreciated how presenters focused on acknowledging graduate students have unique needs and may be juggling additional responsibilities when compared to undergrads, so it’s important to make sure the library is giving them the tools and knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.

I do wish that the sessions had been a bit more focused on specific actions that attendees can take in their own libraries. It seemed like many presenters were focused on sharing their work and what was successful for them, but not as focused on how their successes could be adapted for other libraries. I would have liked to have a few more concrete programming ideas that I could take back to my own libraries. Perhaps that’s something that I could work on as a presentation of my own for a future iteration of this conference. I also wished that the conference had stretched an additional half hour to add a break in the middle. I think it would have helped with tiredness and staying on top of other work at the end of the day.

Overall Takeaways and Future Thoughts

Although I’ve been to several in-person conferences before, I had never participated in an online conference and wasn’t sure how the experience would translate. I love the feeling of walking into a conference and knowing that everyone is there to learn, meet fellow professionals and maybe make future friends, and get everything that we can out of the experience. I was worried that these conferences would be lacking in the camaraderie and excitement of an in-person setting. Although I didn’t get quite the same feeling as I do when I walk in the door of a convention center, I was really happy to find that both conferences were able to recreate similar vibes over online platforms.

It’s also important to recognize that online conferences lower a lot of barriers of participation for many people – including me! I’m lucky to be at an institution that strongly supports professional development, but even that support wouldn’t have been enough for me to travel to two conferences in subsequent weeks. Holding a conference online also means that the cost to participate is likely lower – or in the case of these two conferences, eliminated completely. I really appreciate both conferences’ commitment to access, affordability, and availability.

Overall, I had a great time and gained a lot from my participation in these conferences. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for registration to open next year – and maybe I’ll even submit a presentation proposal myself!

Learning from Lukewarm Library Instruction

I said in my November post that it wouldn’t be the only one I wrote about library instruction. As someone who is still new to teaching and class instruction, learning how to be an engaging, fun, and informative teacher is one of my biggest learning curves as a first-year academic librarian. So, a few months later, I’m returning to this topic – specifically to talk about a library instruction session that didn’t go as well as the one that I prepared in 24 hours.

Teaching graduate students

In my role as a liaison librarian, I work with a specific department at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. Within that department, I manage everything library-related for nine programs – five master’s degree programs, three Ed.D. (doctorate of education) programs, and one Ph.D. program. One thing you might notice from that list is that I only work with graduate students, which is something that I was both nervous and excited about when I accepted this position.

I was excited because I knew I would be able to relate to the students, having just finished two years of being a grad student myself. A lot of the programs I support are aimed at students who are coming back to school for a career change, or who want to further their current career by completing a degree while they continue to work full-time. As someone who worked for seven years before going back to school for my MSLS, I felt when I accepted the job like I would understand these students’ experiences, and working with them has confirmed this.

However, I was also nervous because I hadn’t worked with graduate students much before. I was a Graduate Assistant at a library at the university where I did my MSLS, but worked almost entirely with undergrads in that role. The only experience I had with teaching graduate students was one co-teaching experience with my supervisor.

The good news is that a lot of my nerves about teaching and working with graduate students dissipated during the fall semester. Most of what I was teaching was similar to what I had taught undergrads – the basics of Boolean and how to look beyond Google Scholar – usually with just a few more details or advanced database skills included. Although I knew I still had a lot to learn, I felt more confident in the content of my instruction sessions for graduate classes after a semester.

Teaching Ph.D. students – how different could it be?

Late in the fall, a professor asked me to teach a Ph.D. class of hers. She requested that I come for 10-15 minutes for a brief library overview, and if it went well, I could come back in the spring and teach the class again for a full session. I agreed, the fall session went well, and in December we scheduled a day for me to teach for an hour in mid-January.

Unlike most other lessons I had taught, this was a lesson that I needed to create from scratch. I had also never taught Ph.D. students, and had only a few vague ideas of what the professor wanted me to teach. However, I had worked with a lot of Ed.D. students one-on-one in the fall, so I decided to base the lesson on what I taught those students – the basics of Boolean, how to navigate a database, and an overview of the research-specific AI tools that we have. Both groups were doctoral students, I reasoned, so their needs were probably fairly similar.

I knew I was in trouble within the first five minutes of arriving at the classroom. I had prepared slides at the beginning of my presentation to explain who I was and give an overview of Vanderbilt Libraries’ resources – essentially a condensed version of what I had done in the fall. To my surprise, as I set up my computer at the front of the room, I realized that the group of students I was about to teach were the exact same students I had taught in the fall. Since this was the same class, I had figured the students would be different, because groups of students don’t usually take the exact same class in back-to-back semesters (or ever). But this was definitely the same group.

This made my first few slides obsolete, so I breezed through them like this was the plan all along, saying things like “since we covered this last semester, we’ll go ahead and move on!” I quickly reached my slides on Boolean. I cheerfully explained how databases speak a specific language, and that to be able to use them effectively, we needed to speak that same language. Then I asked how many people had heard of Boolean before.

Every hand in the room went up, and my heart sank. If all the students already knew Boolean, most of the rest of my lesson was also obsolete.

I pivoted as best I could, asking the students to generate terms for the example topic on my slide instead of explaining the terms I had already thought about. Then I used their terms to run some searches in the databases and talked about filters and peer reviewed articles. I was hoping to be able to move on to AI research tools and spend more of the lesson time there.

However, before I could change gears, the professor asked me to talk about searching by subject headings within a database. I hadn’t prepared anything on this topic but gamely pulled up the ERIC thesaurus and showed students how to use it for a search. No surprise that since it wasn’t a search I had prepared in advance, it didn’t return any results. My attempts to change the search or look for different subject headings didn’t help.

To make matters worse, by the time I moved on from subject headings, that conversation had taken up so much time that we only had 10 minutes left in the lesson to talk about AI tools – not nearly enough. Students had a lot of questions about the tools and there was no way I could answer them all. To finish off the fiasco, another event was taking place in the classroom right after the class ended, so as I wrapped up my presentation by telling everyone they could email me any time with questions, students were standing up and heading to the back of the room, where pizza was being set out in preparation for the event.

My hope from this lesson is that it will be one of the worst ones I’ll ever teach. If I only go up from here, I’ll be happy. I felt so awful about it all that when my friends and colleagues asked me how the class had gone, I mostly just said “It was okay” and left it at that. The only person I really talked to about it at the time was one of my former professors, S., who has become a mentor and friend over the last few years. I shared all the details with her and greatly appreciated how understanding she was. She didn’t try to sugarcoat it or to convince me that it probably hadn’t been so bad. Then, she gently moved the conversation to something even more helpful than empathizing with me – she started helping me think through what I could do differently to try to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future.

Lesson 1 – Ask the faculty member for details

S. asked how much I had known about the class and students before I walked into the classroom. When I said not much, she told me that it was okay to ask the professor for more details. I think one of the things I’ve struggled with this first year is not wanting to be a burden to professors. It’s often so hard to get them to invite us into their classrooms in the first place, that I haven’t wanted to ask them too many things or push too hard for information. S. helped me see that asking for clarification and details is actually a part of my job, and that I can’t worry (much) about frustrating professors with my questions.

Lesson 2 – Consider giving higher-level students a pre-test

One of S.’s suggestions that I liked the most was to give doctoral students a pre-test before I teach in their classes. While undergraduate or even master’s students might not be willing to take a pre-test, doctoral students might complete one. If the professor agreed to distribute it, the responses would help me understand what those students know and don’t know – and therefore would help me tailor my lesson to fit their needs.

Lesson 3 – It’s okay to be honest with professors

One of the things I said to S. was that I felt like I could do so much better with the lesson if I could do it a second time – but that I doubted the professor would ever invite me back. She encouraged me to be honest with the professor, reach out, and simply say that I know I could do much better and would appreciate another chance to come to the class next semester to prove it. I haven’t reached out yet, but plan to do so along with my other fall instruction outreach, and hope that being straightforward helps.

Lesson 4 – View professors as colleagues

Something that I thought about, and decided against, ahead of the lesson was sharing my slides with the professor and asking if what I was planning to teach was in line with expectations. Again, I chose not to do this because I didn’t want to burden the professor. I was also afraid that I would get edits at the last minute, and would have to scramble to make changes the morning of. However, viewing professors as colleagues instead of people that I’m working for changes the equation on this for me. The next time I create a lesson from scratch, I’ll definitely send it to the professor in advance and make sure it matches expectations.

Lesson 5 – Remember that I have colleagues and mentors who can (and want to) help me

I think this is actually the lesson that, in retrospect, makes me feel silliest. Librarians are some of the most helpful and giving people I’ve ever worked with, but I was so scared of looking dumb by admitting that I was unsure about how to approach a doctoral-level class that I forged ahead on my own and forgot how many times fellow librarians encouraged me to ask for help. During my entire conversation with S., I kept thinking how much better it would have been if I had reached out to her before I taught this class and asked for her advice – and if I had reached out to any of my other librarian friends, mentors, or colleagues as well. This is definitely one mistake that I’ll never make again.

Moving forward

As much as I wish I could, I can’t go back and change how the January class went. However, I can change what I do in the future, and hopefully I can even come back to this class in the fall and teach a successful lesson. After this experience, I also have a much better understanding of how much instruction is comprised of way more than just a lesson that’s taught in the classroom. It’s about working with the faculty and department, my colleagues, and the library system to make sure I’m setting students up for success. My hope is that a few years down the road, with a lot more instruction experience to rely on, I’ll be able to look back on this class not as a failure, but as a turning point in my library instruction journey.

Going Back to School (For a Month… or More?)

I’ve always been one of those students who really liked school. I love to learn and understand things, and as I’ve gotten older, that continues to be true. I think that’s one reason I chose librarianship – every time a student comes to me for help on a reference question, I get to learn something new.

However, after so many years of continuously being in school – kindergarten through senior year of college is a long time! – I was ready for a break after I graduated from undergrad. I always thought I would go back to school eventually, but grad school is a significant investment in many ways, and I didn’t want to get another degree just because I felt like it. It took seven years of working in other fields before I figured out that librarianship was the right path and I started my MSLS at UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2023. After my time away from education, I knew I was making the right decision and attending the right school for the right reasons.

I loved library school and I love where I went to school. But going to school in-person, full-time, while working one or two jobs and sometimes an internship was also not easy. There were a lot of late nights writing papers and early mornings going to class. I knew early on that I wanted to be in academic libraries, and I was dismayed when I realized that many academic librarian positions either require or strongly recommend a second master’s degree. I knew that I would need another break from being a student before I could even think about doing another degree.

I focused on applying for jobs that didn’t require a second master’s, and landed in a great library at a wonderful institution doing a job that I love. Knowing now that I didn’t have to have a second master’s in order to get my first job in my field, I told myself that I had to take at least a year off from even starting to think about another master’s program or a doctoral degree. I needed to focus on my current position, so August 2026 was when I would reopen the door of potentially being a student again.

What is curriculum mapping?

I promise that this will circle back to the topic of school. During the fall semester, the Vanderbilt library system let us know that all the libraries would be starting to do something called curriculum mapping – each subject librarian would be responsible for creating a curriculum map for each program that they support. With eight programs and counting, that’s no small task for me. Additionally, curriculum mapping wasn’t something I learned about in library school, nor a task that I had ever done before. The idea was straightforward enough – create a map of all the courses in the programs you support so that you can scaffold library instruction and make sure you’re teaching students the information they need at the right times as they move through their degree program. However, I really struggled initially to apply that concept to my programs. I couldn’t seem to take the explanation and actually go do it, and I was getting really frustrated.

Back to school!

I am very fortunate to be a librarian at an institution that values continuing education and professional development for its library staff. Not long after curriculum mapping was introduced as a focus, we found out that Library Juice Academy, an organization that offers professional development courses for library and archive professionals, would be offering a four-week course on curriculum mapping in December – and Vanderbilt’s libraries would cover the cost for librarians who wanted to take it. I said yes right away. If anything could help me learn curriculum mapping, it was a class!

It wasn’t until after we were all enrolled that I realized this could be considered a deviation from my resolution of “no thinking about school for one year.” But, I reasoned, this was just a short class. It was not any kind of degree program, just one that I would get a certificate for. And it was to help me do my job and be a better librarian – definitely worth it.

You can probably guess what happened. I completed the curriculum mapping course and learned a lot. Over the four weeks, every participant completed a curriculum map and shared it with the other students for feedback. Seeing how others had structured their maps and receiving feedback on my own map was incredibly helpful. I feel a lot more prepared to move forward with this project after taking the class.

Also, I’m now counting down until August of this year when I can start thinking about what degree program I want to do next.

What’s next?

After I started working at Vanderbilt, some friends asked me if I missed being a student. I said no, because I work with students every day and get to spend each day on a college campus – that’s exactly what I was hoping for in library school, and I was lucky enough to get it. But I realize now that what I do miss is being in school and everything that comes with being a student. I know I needed the break, and that taking time off instead of jumping into another degree right away was the right thing to do. But I love comparing course descriptions and choosing what to take! I love reading articles and taking notes and writing reflections! I really enjoy researching and writing papers and doing projects and getting feedback from professors! Yes, I know I’m a nerd. I think a lot of librarians are and I’ve learned to embrace it.

Whatever degree I do next will be a very different experience from my library science degree. But now I know that I will do another degree. I’m in a different phase of life, and I’m not going to leave a job I love, so any program I choose will be one that I can complete remotely and part-time. The good news is that there are a lot of programs like that out there. It will just be a matter of finding the right one for me.

I Have a Budget to Buy Books?!

Like many librarians, I love to read and can happily spend hours in pretty much any bookstore or library. So when I started my position at Vanderbilt, I was excited to explore the shelves in all the libraries on campus, including my library (the education library) and the main library (which has most of the popular reading material). You never know what you might find just wandering up and down the shelves – once in an academic library, I found all the bound scripts for the tv show The West Wing and spent several hours happily reading them when I should have been doing research for a project. All of this to say, I love browsing the shelves and choosing books to buy or check out. What I didn’t know when I started this job is that I would be doing exactly that for the department that I liaise with – or what the similarities and differences would be for buying books for a library versus my own bookshelves.

I have a budget to buy books?!

Starting this position, I didn’t have a lot of experience with library collections. I took Resource Selection and Evaluation in library school (my school’s name for our collection management course), but a lot of the course felt theoretical to me. “Select materials that your patrons will use” – of course, but how? It wasn’t clear to me at the time, but I wasn’t too worried. I wasn’t planning on being a collections librarian. I did get a little hands-on experience with collection development through my Graduate Assistant position at UNC-Chapel Hill, but because our library budget was very limited, we weren’t able to purchase any books. We were only able to sort through physical books donated to the library and decide from those materials which ones we wanted to add to the catalog.

When I started in my current role at Vanderbilt’s Peabody Library, one of the first things I learned was that I have a budget to purchase books and e-books that are relevant for the students and faculty in the department that I liaise with. Having a budget to buy books for the library sounded both like a lot of fun and a significant responsibility. I wasn’t sure where to start. Luckily, one of my colleagues at Peabody Library is an expert in collections, so I scheduled an hour with him during my first few weeks on the job to go over how everything works. I had a lot of questions: what is my budget and how does it work, how do I purchase books, how do I know what books to purchase, should I purchase e-books or print books, and more.

As we logged in to the online ordering system that Vanderbilt Libraries uses, I was overwhelmed. There were thousands of books, each available in multiple different formats, any of which was fair game for me to purchase. My colleague assured me that with time, I would get a good sense of what books would be most relevant for my specific department. In the meantime, he recommended setting up email alerts for newly published, pertinent books – and that the best way to set up those email alerts was by relevant call numbers.

Categories and Call Numbers and Cataloging, Oh My

Of course, I can read call numbers, find a book on a library shelf, and shelve a book in the right place (Shelving Wizard, anyone?). But cataloging was only offered once during my two years in library school, and I couldn’t take the class the one semester that it was being taught. I have friends who can reel off both Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress call numbers and their corresponding topics, but unfortunately that’s not a skill I have. To tackle this, I tried to think through all the steps: to buy relevant books, I needed to set up email alerts by call number; to set up email alerts by call number, I needed to figure out the topics that corresponded with those call numbers; to figure out those topics, I needed to be a lot more familiar with the Library of Congress system – and my liaison department.

By working backwards with this logic, I figured out where I needed to start – and then I worked forwards from there. I have almost the entire academic year to spend my library budget, so I decided to give myself a runway. I took the first couple of months at my job to make notes of books professors asked for and topics that students were researching. Then, in mid-October, I pulled up the list of Library of Congress call numbers and their corresponding topics. Any time my notes overlapped with an LOC topic, I wrote down that LOC call number. Finally, I set up my email alerts based on the LOC numbers I had written down.

Libraries can’t purchase books on Kindle

Finally, for the last couple months, I’ve had emails arriving in my inbox with books that were relevant for my students and faculty members that I could consider buying. The first, and probably the biggest, hurdle is now behind me. There are more steps to the process of actually purchasing a book, but the one that I really want to talk about is e-books versus print books – specifically the difference in cost.

Every time I decide to buy a book, I have to decide whether I want to purchase that book in print or as an e-book. There are pros and cons each way, and I’m starting to understand that balancing those is an intangible part of collection development. For instance, a lot of the students and programs that I support are distance learners. If there’s a book that I think would be particularly useful for those students, buying it in print won’t help them much, because they’re scattered all around the U.S. and internationally. I really need to buy electronic books for them.

The catch is that e-books are more expensive – typically, a lot more expensive.

One of the readings that stuck with me most from library school is a blog post titled “Hold On, eBooks Cost HOW Much? The Inconvenient Truth About Library eCollections.” In the blog post – complete with charts and graphs – the author breaks down exactly how much more expensive e-books are compared with print books. Libraries can’t just buy $1.99 Kindle e-books and then allow their patrons to access them – something that I’ve had to explain to quite a few friends. Because of copyright laws and other restrictions (again, I’m not a collections librarian so I don’t know all the ins and outs), libraries have to buy special library licenses for e-books which can often cost several times the price of the print book.¹ (Just as a note, the blog post I linked to is older, but a google search for “library cost of e-books” yielded many more recent articles.)

The big collections budget I thought I had definitely isn’t going to stretch as far as I thought now that I’ve purchased several e-books with price tags of a few hundred dollars each! It’s one thing to read about it and a totally different thing to see the price tag in my cart. But it’s also a bigger issue than I can solve as an individual, new librarian – right now, I just have to figure out how to spend my budget the best way I can to support my students and faculty.

I still have a lot to learn about collection development and managing the collections for my students and faculty. At some point, I would like to do a survey of faculty (and maybe students too) to find out what they would like to see in our collections and items that we don’t have which they would find useful. I also want to continue getting more familiar with Library of Congress call numbers and investigate whether there are any additional LOC topics I should add to my email alerts. But for my first semester, I feel good about the progress I’ve made in setting up alerts, putting in several book orders, and getting more familiar with the overall system. Next semester, I hope to continue refining my strategies in what I purchase and how I work with faculty to be more strategic in purchasing.

References:

Rothschild, J. (2020, September 6). Hold on, eBooks cost HOW much? The inconvenient truth about library eCollections. Smart Bitches Trashy Books. https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2020/09/hold-on-ebooks-cost-how-much-the-inconvenient-truth-about-library-ecollections/

Teaching with Twenty-Four Hours’ Notice

The Setup

This likely won’t be my only FYAL blog post about library instruction. When I started my master’s degree, I initially looked for a path in an aspect of librarianship that didn’t include instruction. I’ve never enjoyed public speaking, and although I got better at it before I went back to grad school, standing in front of a group of people with everyone’s eyes on me has never been in my comfort zone.

However, it didn’t take me long to realize that what I loved most about librarianship – working with students in an academic setting – was going to come with teaching as a job component. With that in mind, I made a point of finding opportunities while completing my MSLS to get more experience with instruction, working with my supervisor at my Graduate Assistant position on campus to co-teach library instruction sessions and taking Library Instruction & Pedagogy, which turned out to be one of my favorite classes.

The Situation

Fast forward to October. That month, I had a lot of one-on-one reference consultations for a specific master’s program. The small program is fully remote, but in mid-October a few students mentioned that they would be at Vanderbilt for a full program convening that upcoming weekend. After the second student mentioned the convening, it clicked in my head that, since I had worked with about half the students in this program already, this would be a great opportunity to meet them in person, as well as a chance to introduce myself to the ones I hadn’t worked with yet (and encourage them to make appointments too).

Thankfully, I had already had some interactions with the professor who runs that program, so I felt like it would be okay to reach out at the last minute. The very last minute. The Friday morning before the Saturday & Sunday convening, I emailed and asked if there was a break in the programming on Saturday when I could pop in and see everyone. I would have preferred to ask about doing some actual instruction, but I was hesitant to offer that with so little time to prepare. Coming by for some informal conversation seemed like a good middle ground.

The professor got back to me at 4:03pm on Friday afternoon. What a great idea! They would love to have me come by the convening! If it was convenient for me, they could give me time for a 20-minute presentation at 4pm on Saturday. 24 hours minus three minutes of notice for an instructional session.

As I read the professor’s email (twice, to make sure I had gotten it right), I could literally feel my heartbeat speed up. My palms started sweating. I hope to get more comfortable in the future with instructional sessions, but right now I prefer to have my slides done at least a week in advance and to be able to practice a couple of times to make sure I’m saying the right things and showing the best searching examples in each class. I didn’t think there was any way I could pull off an instructional session with one day’s notice. One of my work friends happened to be in my office when I received this email. “I just got asked to do an instructional session tomorrow afternoon. What do I do?!” I asked her.

The Decision

In my Library Instruction & Pedagogy class in graduate school, one set of readings that our professor assigned was about saying no to instruction requests. Those articles have stuck with me, because saying no to instruction – or really any faculty request – wasn’t something I had thought of as an option before I read them. The authors and librarians in the articles made good points about why they had said no to instruction, including a lack of preparation time. Now, just three months into my first job, the thought flashed through my mind: was I in a situation where I could – or should – say no to this instruction request?^{1, 2}

There weren’t many other options to think through – with so little time, and the students only here for one weekend, I felt like I could either politely decline the request or try to throw together a lesson in a day. I realized quickly that with only 20 minutes, I wasn’t going to be able to do much actual searching demonstration, which right now takes up most of my preparation time. That would make it more doable. Additionally, my predecessor in this role was incredibly organized and generous when she left, and gave the library team access to a lot of her materials – including slides and lessons. Was there a lesson for this group of students?

I checked the folder, and sure enough, a “library 101” lesson was there, tailored for this master’s program. I quickly clicked through the slides and felt myself calming down. Talk about the library; I can do that. Explain the basic resources and databases that are recommended for education students; check. Emphasize that I’m here and available for research help and any questions big or small; no problem. Maybe I could do this.

Despite all of those thoughts, though, my decision to say yes to this instructional request came down to feeling like I couldn’t say no – for two reasons. First, I’m a new librarian trying to find my footing and build relationships, and declining this opportunity felt like it would be a step in the wrong direction. Right now, every opportunity to teach a group of students about the library feels like a chance I can’t miss. Second, because I was the one who had volunteered to come to the convening in the first place. Even though instruction wasn’t originally what I had volunteered for… I did volunteer.

Either way, it would be a leap of faith – and a learning experience. Around 4:45 on Friday, I emailed the professor back and told her that I would love to come teach for 20 minutes the following afternoon. Then, I started updating and personalizing the slides for the next day.

The Outcome

We actually had a separate library event that Saturday, so after volunteering at that event, I spent a few more hours in my office working on my slides. Then I walked across the quad to go teach – a little less than 24 hours after setting up the session.

In this case, everything worked out really well. The students who already knew me were excited to see me, and their excitement was contagious. Maybe partially because the turnaround was so fast, I wasn’t very nervous and so I was able to be more myself while I was presenting, which helped me land the material better. I had more fun, and I think the students did too. My 24-hour teaching turnaround was a success. (I’m still a little in disbelief that I pulled it off.)

I also learned some important lessons from this experience that I can take with me moving forward:

Being more “me” while teaching made it more fun, and I think made me a better teacher, too. Hopefully, as I keep gaining experience, my nerves surrounding public speaking will continue to decrease and more of my personality can come through.
Building relationships with students and professors really matters. A big part of why I was able to do this was because I already knew the professor and about half the students in the class, so I knew I would be walking into a friendly environment.
Practice is key. I was supposed to teach for 20 minutes, but ran over, largely because I hadn’t been able to do a full run-through of my presentation with so little preparation time. I also got lost at one point and started mentioning Boolean searching, only to remember mid-sentence that I didn’t have time to fully explain and show what that meant. I ended up saying something like, “I can explain more about Boolean in research consultations” – not ideal, but not the end of the world either.
Only volunteer to “come by” a class if I’m prepared to get up and teach too!

References:

Meulemans, Y. N & and Carr, A. (2012). Not at your service: Building genuine faculty-librarian partnerships. In Reference Services Review, 41(1), 80-90. doi: 10.1108/00907321311300893
White, A. (2023, October 11). Let ‘no’ be ‘no’: When librarians say ‘no’ to instruction opportunities. In the library with the lead pipe. Retrieved November 10, 2025, from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2023/let-no-be-no/