A sensory room in the library

As the new semester gets ready to kick off, among other things, I’m getting ready for a new Project SEARCH intern. In preparation, we’re thinking about the work they might do at the library, including working on our sensory room.

Which brings me to the topic of this post: the sensory room itself. Before I get too deep into things, I want to add the disclaimer that I’ve only tangentially worked on the sensory room; it’s really my boss who’s done the bulk of the work, and all credit really should go to her. Now onto the post!

First of all, what is a sensory room? You can read the Wikipedia article on sensory rooms for yourself to learn more about some of the theory. The goals for our sensory room were to provide a place for library visitors to find stress relief, relax and work through emotions, and use items related to different sensory experiences.

To get this project going, we needed a combination of administrative buy-in, funding, and direction. Again, my supervisor was responsible for all of this while I mainly just looked on from afar. We luckily had a donor interested in funding a sensory room, so the preliminary phase of the project largely involved researching sensory rooms elsewhere to develop a plan for how ours would work. This included drawing up a set of guidelines for use of the room and a list of items to purchase.

You can find a complete list of what our sensory room includes online, but I’ll say here that it covers a wide range of items. There are different sorts of seating options, including a bean bug chair and the very popular egg chair (very similar to the Oberlin College Library womb chairs). There are also all sorts of lighting options, including a dimmer switch for the overhead lights, a light therapy lamp, and a hanging fiber optic light that changes colors. There are then all different kinds of sensory tools and toys, ranging from a weighted shoulder wrap to coloring books to a meditation tool in the shape of a sloth to a Bop It.

The room is decorated with sensory artwork—designs with different textures and colors. My boss also recently added a mosaic-like piece where visitors can follow numbers (in a paint-by-numbers style) and use different colored stickers to create a design together. We also have another space on the wall where visitors can provide feedback with sticky notes—people usually leave nice messages, which are fun to read.

As for how the room runs, we specifically have left it unlocked and without a reservation system, with the idea being that you won’t be able to predict when you’ll need a moment to regroup and therefore won’t be able to make a reservation ahead of time. The room allows for use by multiple people at a time, but there’s also the option to lock the door for thirty minutes. There are also sanitizing wipes available to sanitize anything that gets used.

In terms of maintenance, student workers or our Project SEARCH intern also sanitize high-touch items in the room. They are also responsible for completing an inventory of the room and noting down anything that’s missing or broken. In general, things going missing or breaking have been the biggest challenges we’ve had. We keep the room locked during the late-night hours to try to counteract this.

Overall, the sensory room has been a success. We’ve seen a lot of use just walking by and noting whether or not the door is closed. The feedback left by visitors has been nice to receive. We also have an online feedback form for those who don’t want to leave a sticky note. This feedback can be used to make changes to the room and to know what’s working well. Again, mostly from the sidelines, it’s been a project to get the sensory room up and running, but it has been worth it and does appear to be meeting a need.

As an aside, we also have sensory kits available for check out that work on similar principles. They include things like noise cancelling headphones, fidgets, and meditation tools. These are also inventoried and charged by student workers or interns, sometimes at the same time as they’re sanitizing and reorganizing the sensory room.

Do you have any unique or innovative spaces in your library? How were they set up? How have they been received? What challenges have you dealt with?

A Born-Digital Librarian’s Reflection on Digital Educational Tools

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Senka Stankovic, Head of User Services at the Jean-Léon Allie Library, Saint-Paul University.

As an early-career librarian halfway through a year-long parental leave contract at Saint Paul University, I’ve noticed that digital tools are fundamental to how we ideate and deliver educational workshops. Born-digital, recently a student, and new to the workforce, I’ve come to believe that many digital tools that are meant to improve learning instead strip away the friction that the acquisition of knowledge requires.

In this post, I explore three common classroom technologies: the slide deck, the laptop, and the gadgets[1]. I present how these so-called “tools” often get in our way, and I offer opportunities for reintroducing friction to the classroom in the classroom in the form of minor inconveniences. This friction can lead to higher engagement from, and connection with, our learners.

I believe librarians are in a unique position to pioneer a more hopeful use of technology in the classroom and beyond.

The slide deck

The slide deck is ubiquitous in academia and in white-collar work. In the classroom, slide decks turn teaching into a presentation where we strive for perfection. This is in part because slide decks, meant for presentations, allow educators to over-prepare their courses. If you’re presenting something you know well, then your slide deck is there to make sure you don’t veer off course. But off course is where you get to show students your own fallibility, which helps build meaningful connections through vulnerability. It also gives your students a framework for managing the friction that things like research inevitably create. In other words, your slide deck prevents you from modeling educational resilience by giving you something to hide behind.

Adding friction to the slide deck includes taking the time to ask whether a slide deck is the right method of sharing the information at hand. I find that very often, it isn’t. At my university, I’m responsible for delivering one-on-one Academic Integrity Workshops to students who have committed plagiarism. I was unsatisfied with the presentation-style workshop I had inherited, as I felt myself lecturing at students who were either on the verge of tears or completely oblivious as to their wrongdoings. In neither scenario were they primed for learning. I adopted a new approach that includes a self-assessment on their behalf and a print workbook where they can take notes. I still use a monitor where needed, such as demonstrating tools they can use for research instead of ChatGPT. My new approach has so far been fruitful. I’ve not had any tears since adopting it.

When you remove the slide deck from the equation, you make room for more creative methods. I saw this in April, when I attended a session at the British Columbia Library Association Conference titled “Throwing Out the PowerPoint: An Experiential Learning Approach.” Adair Harper, Chloe Riley, and Julia Lane replaced their library orientation slide deck with a zine and an accompanying exercise to help students learn to navigate library resources. Their new approach seems more communal in nature, and I’m curious to see what can happen when we start questioning why things are done the way they are.

The laptop

The laptop and the expectation that students all have one are detrimental to everyone’s learning. Besides the obvious financial inequity factor, laptops are also hugely distracting. As a student, I was frequently sidelined by the person in front of me watching Euphoria or tweaking their resume. I’m sure that my compulsive opening and scrolling of Pinterest every time I open a browser also distracted many folks sitting behind me.

Recently, I read about Dylan Kane, a middle-school math teacher and early adopter of Chromebooks in classrooms who has decided to jump ship. In removing laptops from his classroom for a month, Kane learned that “screens […] made it possible for a student to look busy for an entire class period” without him realizing they were stuck on a problem. In other words, learning is hard, scrolling on Pinterest is easy. Think of your own life. How often do you come head-to-head with something you find difficult and pull out your phone to avoid it? If we can’t muster the self-control needed to not use screens as pacifiers, how can we expect students not to do so when faced with the friction of learning?

Expecting all students to be fluent in laptops is also a barrier to those with less technological experience. Catherine Carroll, a mature student at Saint Paul’s University, describes her return to academia as a huge learning curve by way of technology. “It gets in the way of learning the actual material,” she says.

Adding friction to the laptop might look like encouraging writing by hand and taking the time to show students how to search the stacks. While these skills may not be frequently applied, I believe it would be beneficial. Born-digital students would be given an alternative, more tactile, framework for engaging with information. This may increase their attention to how information is created, accessed, and shared in the digital realm by giving them a point of comparison. On the other hand, mature students would be given permission to engage with knowledge in a way that works better for them.

The gadgets

Learning gadgets that advertise increased engagement reduce tactility and thereby advocate for the disembodiment of learning. Many of these tools are nothing more than a digitization of existing classroom activities. Miro is literally a virtual blackboard. With Quizlet, you can create digital flashcards, rendering the educational process of handwriting them obsolete. Kahoot replaces good, old-fashioned pen-to-paper trivia. They take away moments where students might otherwise be forced to write or move around in their learning environments.

Additionally, all these tools are privately owned by for-profit companies. This doesn’t sit well with me, as using them requires students to give out personal information in the form of email addresses or browsing data.

The friction of distributing papers to participate in an activity or having students physically get up to add ideas to a blackboard reintroduces a dynamism to learning that can pull us all out of the digital funk created by many learning technologies.

On the advantages of digital educational tools

The tools I mention have advantages. Laptops and slide decks both offer accessibility features, and removal of these technologies may lead to access friction – not the kind we’re going for – for learners with disabilities. The gadgets might encourage engagement, provide immediate feedback to learners, and provide educators with additional insights into their students’ knowledge.

The complete abandonment of digital technologies isn’t attractive to most of us, nor would it promote equitable access to information. Nonetheless, I believe that treating digital tools as a gold standard in education can be detrimental and limits our ability as educators to think creatively about the knowledge we share. By reflecting on ways to add helpful friction, while maintaining a balance for those that require assistive technology or prefer digital learning tools, we can create more positive learning environments.

A way forward

Adding friction to slide decks, laptops, and gadgets is a strong starting point to rebuild meaningful classrooms that center knowledge acquisition. It’s also a sign of hope that the world I want to live in is possible, one where learning is communal, present, and embodied. Librarians are in a unique position to advocate for the friction that learning requires, even when that means experiencing the friction of learning themselves.

In an interview, Kurt Vonnegut describes purchasing envelopes one at a time so that he has more opportunities to exist in the world. His wife believes it to be an inconvenience. He concludes, “And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.” For me, the image of librarianship that elicits joy is one with room to dance. Or fumble, or add friction, or whatever you so choose to call it.

[1] I use gadgets to loosely refer to novelty items aimed at digitally increasing student engagement. Some examples include Miro, a virtual blackboard; Quizlet, for digital flashcards; Kahoot, for quizzes and trivia; and Mentimeter, for polling. These attempts to reintroduce tactility in the classroom are simulacral.

Q&A: Open Educational Resources as a New High-Impact Practice

This project has major implications for the future of open education in the U.S.

If you follow open education news, you probably heard over the summer that AAC&U recognized Open Educational Resources (OER) as a High-Impact Practice (HIP). OER’s addition to the roster of 12 teaching and learning practices means AAC&U has deemed there to be “…significant educational benefits for students who participate in them—including and especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education.” To achieve the requisite degree of evidence, AAC&U commissioned what it describes as “the largest examination of OER to date.” Over two years, their research team examined around 700,000 student records along with qualitative responses from over 200 instructors who had implemented OER in their courses, drawn from 15 institutions across six Carnegie classifications.

This project has major implications for the future of open education in the U.S., not only as the path to OER’s recognition as a HIP, but also via rich, multifaceted data that requires so much labor to collect and analyze at scale. The insights from this study are valuable both as rationale for institutional support of OER and as practical considerations for open education advocates and instructors. Whether you consider open education a passion, a moral obligation, or a job responsibility, the full report is worth a deep dive. (And a quick unsolicited plug for Open Education Conference, where the AAC&U team shared early results from this study last year). My institution has an office dedicated to promoting HIPs on campus, as I imagine is true at many other colleges and universities. The opportunity to embed support for open education beyond traditional advocacy units (e.g. libraries, teaching centers) may be truly game-changing at institutions where that hasn’t yet happened.

Heather Miceli, Assistant Director of the Institute on Open Educational Resources and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at AAC&U, kindly answered a few questions about their study and High-Impact Practices for ACRLog.

I’m sure there are many possible practices that could be studied as potential high-impact practices. Why OER? In other words, what led to the initiation of this study, including but also beyond the guiding research questions?

Open Education, as we know it currently, is celebrating a milestone anniversary this year. Twenty-five years, a quarter of a century. And yet, the practice is still fairly siloed, sometimes completely unknown to faculty and instructors whose students would benefit from even just the affordability argument. However, we knew from multiple smaller scale studies that the potential to impact student success was there. But we also knew that there were small sample sizes, confounding variables, and conflicting results. So, we decided to take a shot at trying to gather as much data as possible, from as many different types of institutions as possible, to push forward the conversation on how OER impact student success. At the same time, one of the foundation pieces of high-impact practices (HIPs) is that they are most impactful “when done well.” We wanted to capture the instructor experience and connect it as much as we could with what we were seeing in the quantitative data.

The report describes some differences in instructors’ experiences between those who adopted an OER without revision vs. those who revised, remixed, or created OERs. How would you summarize/synthesize some those differences and what they might mean for librarians who support instructors making course material decisions?

We found considerable evidence across multiple contexts that when instructors choose to revise, remix, or create their own OER (high-level implementation), the withdrawal rates in the course are significantly lower than those who chose to simply adopt (low-level implementation). We attribute this to the fact that higher-level implementation of OER allows instructors to customize the texts specifically for their students, courses, and context – which has been shown in the literature to have a positive impact on student belonging and success.

We also found some interesting correlation in the instructor survey around high- vs. low-level implementation. 52% of instructors that simply adopted their OER as is were externally motivated, meaning that they were required to adopt the text by the institution or the department, as opposed to only 12% that revised/remixed/created their OER. Of those that adopted because they were externally motivated, 34% perceived their first implementation went poorly. We also found that 31% of those who adopted and had no support also perceived their first implementation as poor. These results did not surprise us—we know that support and internal motivation are going to be key variables in the quality of implementation. However, when we looked at instructors who adopted and who perceived their first OER implementation to be poor, we found that they overwhelmingly did not engage in any other teaching practice changes as a result of using OER.

Could you highlight a few other takeaways from the study that might be especially relevant to librarians and other open education advocates?

One of the most significant findings was that at doctoral institutions, withdrawal rates decreased at much higher rates than any of the other institutions when OER was implemented. It was especially impactful for students with a high intersectionality of historically minoritized characteristics. Doctoral institutions are likely the most heterogenous institutions in our study, and this result suggests that OER, on its own, could be a compelling retention strategy for students in their first year courses (the majority of courses in our sample from doctoral institutions were lower-level courses).

In terms of grades, we found that A grades increased across the board, with a small increase also in F grades—we attribute the increase in F grades to students finishing a course when without OER, they might have withdrawn from the course, putting their enrollment in jeopardy.

A frankly jaw-dropping finding at community colleges was that when students who had been enrolled for 4 or more years took 6 or more OER courses, their time-to-completion dropped by over a calendar year. This finding shows that institutionalized OER could be a monumental strategy in shortening time-to-completion for nontraditional students.

With the understanding that their operationalization might look different campus-to-campus, why does it matter for something to be recognized as a high-impact practice by AAC&U? What opportunities can that recognition present?

Since their inception almost twenty years ago, high impact practices (HIPs) have shaped the experiences of millions of students in the US and abroad. We know that when students participate in HIPs, especially those from historically minoritized groups in higher education, they report positive cumulative, additive effects on student success. However, when you look at the list of HIPs, a lot of the experiences require time and resources that aren’t available to all students. For example, not all internships are paid, and there are many students who can’t afford to give their free labor to companies to advance their education; study abroad programs are inaccessible to students that have familial or parenting responsibilities. So, we are starting to look to the future of HIPs knowing that a practice that is included on this list is valued highly by administrators and curriculum developers, so much so that some institutions require participation in HIPs for graduation. We hope that in adding OER to the list, with substantial evidence to support their use in many contexts, we can begin to see a shift towards further institutionalization of OER on campuses, including the necessary instructor support to ensure optimal implementation.

Thank you to Heather for her responses, and thank you to Heather and her research team for this study. We may not understand the full scope of this work’s impact on the field for a while, but I expect it will be significant.

Seeking First Year Academic Librarian Bloggers for 2026-27

As we enter a new academic year, we’re looking to bring on a few new bloggers here at ACRLog. We’d like to thank our 2025-26 FYAL bloggers Lisa Shin, M. Roberts, and Eleanor Ball for their terrific posts this past year in our First Year Academic Librarian Experience series. We’d also like to encourage new academic librarians — those who are just beginning in their first position at an academic library — to blog with us during their first year.

FYAL bloggers typically publish posts monthly during the academic year. If you’re interested in applying to be a FYAL blogger here at ACRLog, applications are due by Monday, September 14. Please submit an application through this Google form. 

Proposals are evaluated by the ACRLog blog team. When selecting FYAL bloggers we consider:

  • Diversity of race/ethnicity/sexual orientation/ability
  • Voices from a range of academic institutions (for example, community colleges, research universities, etc.) and job responsibilities within academic libraries (for example, instruction, cataloging, scholarly communications, etc.)
  • Clear and compelling writing style
  • Connection between day-to-day work and bigger conversations around theory, practice, criticism, LIS education, and other issues

Please send any questions to Justin Fuhr. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Learning from our Students as First Year Academic Librarians

This marks the last collaborative post as First Year Academic Librarians, and we wanted to take a chance to share some of our most memorable experiences – learning directly from students. From instruction to outreach, none of the activities and events we do would be possible without an audience, and we often found that we learned more from them, even when we were instructors.  

Eleanor: Trust Your Inner Student 

When I began working as a librarian, I was twenty-four years old. I had just finished six straight years of higher education, and I felt that one of my biggest strengths as a research librarian was my closeness in age and experience to our students. I was immediately familiar with the experience of being a student: zoning out during my Zoom night classes, drowning in busy work, debating whether I could afford eggs at Aldi that week. But although it’s only been a year, I can already sense a growing distance between me and my students.  

I have two instincts: a librarian instinct and a student instinct. Sometimes they align; sometimes they don’t. (For example, the librarian instinct says Copyright is the bedrock of our profession. The student instinct says Copyright? I just put back eggs because they were too expensive. I am not paying for this textbook.) Over the last year, it’s become harder to recall my life as a student. I find myself relying more often on my librarian knowledge and skills when making decisions.  

When a faculty member recently asked me to teach her senior seminar how to use microfilm, I was skeptical. As an undergraduate student, I would have loved learning about microfilm. But my brand-new librarian instinct said: Students in 2026 do not want to use microfilm. They always want things to be digital and fast. I will show them how to use NewspaperArchive, which they will obviously prefer, and then we can browse microfilm with the leftover time. 

Boy, was I wrong.   

The students were bored and listless during my valiant NewspaperArchive demo. But when we ventured down into the basement and I dusted off the microfilm machine, their eyes lit up. They were so excited to search the microfilm drawers for articles about Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, and 9/11. Even when they spent twenty minutes scrolling through a film strip and didn’t find what they wanted, they were not deterred. They simply sprinted back into the stacks to find another record.  

After class, I walked back to my office in a daze.  

My assumptions would probably have been true about some students, but I realized I hadn’t allowed myself to be surprised by the students I was working with that afternoon. I had to (re-)learn to trust students to lead their own learning journeys. After all, a passion for learning is more important than precisely following procedure; though sometimes, I think our focus on database search mechanics can obscure that truth, both to ourselves and our students. Most importantly, I (re-)learned that I shouldn’t think I know students better than they know themselves just because I’ve acquired new professional expertise. After all, when I was a student, isn’t that what frustrated me the most about my instructors?  

M: Letting Go of Assumptions

In library school, my assumption was that I would be working with undergraduate students as a librarian. Many of my more practical classes talked about the undergrad student experience, teaching first-year writing seminars, and more. In my work as a Graduate Assistant in an on-campus library, I also worked primarily with undergrad students, both for instruction and reference appointments. It seemed like a foregone conclusion that I’d be serving undergrads in my first full-time librarian job as well.  

That conclusion was upended when I accepted my current role and learned that the opposite would actually be happening – I wouldn’t be working with undergrads at all. In my position, I only work with master’s and doctoral students. When I started a year ago, I really didn’t know what to expect from those students. Would they all already know about library resources? Would I not be able to wow them with Boolean? Would they be totally unimpressed that we have 800+ databases and multiple AI tools?  

Looking back now, I think my lack of expectations and assumptions actually helped me. While some of my grad students do know about databases, other library resources, and Boolean searching, most of them don’t. Many of my students have been out of school for anywhere from 5 to 15 or 20 years – some have even talked to me about remembering card catalogs. The same things that I would show first-year students are the same things that I need to show master’s students. My Ph.D. students tend to be more familiar with library resources, often because they’ve been working with them for a few years, but my Ed.D. students also benefit from general overviews as well as more individual and detailed material, like subject heading searches.  

I also realized over the last year that some students I’ve worked with are hesitant to say that they could benefit from going over some library basics. I’ve started leaning into discussing my own experience meeting with librarians and getting help from them as a library science student, which I think has helped to make them feel more relaxed. I also say things in appointments like, “seven years went by between when I graduated from undergrad and went back to school for my master’s, so I totally understand feeling lost!” and “the most common answer I hear from students is that they don’t know what Boolean is! That’s totally okay!” For my students, hearing that they’re not alone and that it’s okay to be unsure about what they’re doing makes a huge difference in encouraging them to reach out.  

I guess in all of this, the number one thing I’ve learned from my students in the last year is to let go of any assumptions I have. Meeting them where they are, and being supportive and encouraging, is a much better approach than assuming I have all the answers and already know what they need. I’m really excited to be starting this second year with this lesson in mind and to see what more I learn from the students I meet this year. 

Lisa: Growing Alongside Students 

I remember the first consultation I shadowed was with a graduate student who I actually knew from back in high school. As excited as I was to see a familiar face, I was a bit worried about the blurring of personal and professional boundaries and the professional, competent image I wanted to present to students and researchers, even as a first-year academic librarian. The relationship between a librarian and a student though, is unlike no other. There are no elements of power and no grades assigned (unless the student is in a class that the librarian is teaching), and thus, an environment of a relationship that is open and transparent can occur.  

The close age between me and students was something I originally thought was a barrier and an obstacle, similar to what Eleanor had experienced. It turned out to be a way to create relationships faster, using my past and current experiences as an early career researcher fresh out of school and navigating the academic world. Actively expressing interest in the different avenues of information consumption and where students find out about different AI tools were some personal agendas of mine that I tried to incorporate into each research consultation when the conversation dried up. Questions about starting in academia ranged from how to make a conference poster to how to write a rejection email to a conference a student couldn’t attend anymore, allowed me to explore the grey areas of academia with students and help them navigate relationships with mentors and the greater academic community beyond the university. Being asked if I wanted to grab coffee or lunch together with PhD students was a great way for me to build connections outside the library and develop relationships for further collaboration and library outreach beyond my office and the classroom.  

In the classroom, often being focused on the topics at hand on what slides I needed to cover was important, but so was actively looking for collaborators within the room and recognizing what students wanted to learn. In research consultations, being able to take in the complicated research topic without being overwhelmed and drawing links and connections between resources while cultivating relationships and creating a two-way street of learning is something I continue to strive for. As I look back on September until now, I am grateful to have had the trust of so many students, and I hope that my intentions have reflected in my approach as an academic librarian. 

Looking Ahead 

We are excited to keep growing and sharing our stories as academic librarians and wanted to thank you all for reading our posts through ACRLog. This year has reaffirmed to all of us on how amazing this community and profession is, and the daily work that makes up the incredible profession.