collaboration

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.

The Unexpected Overlaps Between a Don and a Librarian

Something that I try to think more about these days, is to find meaningful intersections between my current career and the various experiences I had in the past. Maybe it’s due to my lack of confidence due to lack of experience as an academic librarian, but I always find myself leaning on my past experiences whenever I encounter a question that I don’t know, or a new workaround to a problem that I hoping to solve.

One particular experience that comes back to me even throughout library school was my time as a student residence staff (aka a “don”). Residence dons are upper-year students who live on the floor with students who are often in their first years, or on exchange. When I started library school, there was a class called “The Information Experience” which was my first encounter with a whole new side of academia for information science and information behaviour, in particular. The major project for the course was doing our own study conducting information horizon interviews (IHI) with 3 participants who share commonalities between each other and discover their information behaviour. Being freshly out of undergrad and still in my 4^th year mind, the first thing I thought about was to ask my friends who were and are still student workers in residence. The interviews and conversations confirmed my gut instinct that indeed, the two professions had more in common than I originally thought.

A Librarian (in a different sense)

One of my favourite memories from working both in student housing and libraries always seem to be from the events that often took a lot of hard work and organizing. From screening the entire world cup tournament across 4 residences, to hosting campus-wide alumni reunion events at the health science library, being able to creatively adapt and proactively start initiatives is something I am grateful that I could pursue. Going beyond the open house booths and orientation day tables, programming combining both departments is something I wanted to bring to fruition.

During final exam time or programming that dons were recommended to host, some ideas that my fellow student staff and I had were around writing, academic integrity, time management, even things like using softwares like OneNote and Notion. ChatGPT and its related academic-AI friends unfortunately? fortunately? blew up after I finished undergrad, but I am sure this would be an interesting topic to tackle in a residence program that could be both fun and educational. Guest presenters were often invited as well, from off-campus housing, academic advisors, writing centre staff, and collaborative sessions across campus with other dons occurred often.

Outside of programs and creative field trips on and off-campus, regular questions would come at my way in the hallway, the shared bathrooms, the cafeteria, on the way to class, through text, through email, and so much more. Being able to direct the student to the correct resource, developing effective workflows depending on the subject area, and being a liaison to academic resources and the student were also just some day-to-day responsibilities (sound familiar? haha).

A Possible Untapped Synergy?

Often during graduate student consultations, library anxiety is something I realized was a phenomenon. Especially for first-year students and even undergraduate students, I realized that there was a hurdle to access resources and become familiar with the building, website, staff, and services. Because I had worked and volunteered in libraries since junior high school, I think that I automatically thought libraries were my comfort space, so I did not even realize this was a thing. So when the first student told me about this back, I was kind of shocked.

After doing more reading on this topic, I realized that there were ways to combat this, such as in-residence librarians (Nicholas et al., 2015). These in-residence librarians would work inside the first-year student residences bringing awareness and breaking down any barriers that may exist. I think that this anxiety is still a thing even for profs and grad students as I always recognize the same names popping up in my emails asking questions or requesting instruction. I love seeing familiar names and faces, but reaching those who have never encountered me or library services is something I would want to try by breaking down this invisible barrier. This extra step would be possible especially through collaborations external to the library, and what better way than with experienced student housing staff who already recognize student needs and wants!

Bringing this to a close, I just want to mention the existence of libraries inside many student residences based on personal experience. In the building I worked and lived in at Western University in London (Ontario, Canada), there was even a huge room on the first floor with a nice “library” plaque. Although the books were either donated textbooks or leftover belongings, the space that it provides for students and residence staff were similar to any other academic library especially during exam season and community building events. The residence at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto where I lived in during grad school was also equipped with an in-residence library with many books on subject areas that the college specialized in.

I hope that this at least sparks some interest and further discussion on being more involved within student housing and student residence staff as the interest is definitely there, and we share more similarities than we might think!

Resources

Hartel, J. (2017). INF1323: The Information Experience – An Information Behaviour Study Using the Information Horizon Interview. http://www.jennahartel.info/uploads/8/3/3/8/8338986/assignment_handout.pdf

Nicholas, P., Sterling, J., Davis, R., Lewis, J. C., Mckoy-Johnson, F., Nelson, K., Tugwell, Y., & Tyrell, K. (2015). Bringing the library to you!: The halls of residence librarian program at the University of the West Indies, Mona Library. New Library World, 116(5/6), 316–335. https://doi.org/10.1108/NLW-06-2014-0080

Funding Cuts and Collaboration

A few months ago, I wrote about how federal funding for international studies education, including language programs, was likely going to be cut and, indeed, recently national resource centers around the country, focused on various areas of the world, received word that their programs were no longer a governmental priority. This will have wide-ranging effects on programs as well as student scholarships, but that’s not actually what I’m here to talk about. Instead, I want to focus on work that’s still ongoing in area studies on campus.

Fall marks new exhibit openings at the art museum here, which this year include an exhibit entitled Mekong Voices: Transnational River Justice in Mainland Southeast Asia. The exhibit covers life and work along the Mekong, a river that flows through mainland Southeast Asia. It includes art about the changing environment along the river, as well as traditional handicrafts. Along with these tactile pieces, there are also a few film clips covering communities along the river and how climate change and global trade routes are impacting livelihoods.

The exhibit grew from the Mekong Culture WELL, a project on my campus focused—unsurprisingly—on the Mekong, agriculture, and community. Since its inception, it has had a library component, and I have often been brought into discussions on culture mapping, compiling historical data, and writing up reports for NGO’s—along with more standard instructions sessions.

The Mekong Culture WELL has been in existence in one form or another for several years now, and it has been rewarding to build relationships with faculty members and students over a long period of time. One lesson I’ve learned, though, is to pass queries along when necessary. Every so often in meetings of liaison librarians here, the question arises of how subject liaisons and liaisons with a specialized skill such as GIS can work together.

For me, this has never seemed particularly complicated, but it’s possible that this is because I’m lucky enough to have good colleagues. When a student or faculty member comes to me looking for technical knowledge that I don’t possess, I’m more than happy passing them along to a coworker, and my coworkers have also been gracious enough to receive them.

The one area where I do struggle is keeping on top of all the ways faculty members from my subject areas interact with the library. If someone, for example, is working on a digital project or a project with maps, I might never hear about it. The only solution I’ve found is getting out as much as possible, either talking to other librarians or, even better, keeping open lines of communication with faculty about their projects in general.

On the other hand, sometimes I’m just surprised. Right before the grand opening of the Mekong Voices exhibit, one of my faculty members called me. I answered, assuming we were going to discuss a research proposal I’d recently sent her. Instead, she said, “Come downstairs,” citing the presence of one of the Mekong Culture WELL faculty members. Downstairs I went, to find a group from the museum, including the co-curator of the Mekong Voices exhibit.

It turned out they were there for an impromptu tour of the exhibit on the Vietnam War currently on display in the Libraries. I had put together a popup display of related books that could be checked out, but the main exhibit used materials from the Michigan State University archives, definitely not my unit. Luckily, I’d already put together a guide for student visitors to the exhibit, so I did show them around, while relying heavily on my own previous research into MSU and the Vietnam War.

While they were there, we also visited an exhibit of African materials from the MSU Museum, a separate entity from the art museum. Because they are currently undergoing renovations, portions of their collection are on display in other locations, including in the area studies display cases in the library. Seeing the African materials prompted a discussion between all of us on how the memory institutions on campus work—or don’t—with one another. Some collaborations are happening, but we all agreed that there was room for more.

Over the coming year, I hope to work on these ideas more. Even in the face of funding cuts, I’d like to look for ways to work with people across campus to make sure that international studies maintains a presence.

How do you work with librarians with other specialties? How do you keep track of campus projects? Are there any interesting collaborations between your library and museums or other organizations on your campus or in your community?

What I did for my summer vacation: library edition

The summer, for many academic librarians, brings a lull, and for me that sometimes means that I have the opportunity to travel. Budgets here, as I imagine they are in many institutions, are currently a mess, but I was luckily still able to visit Southeast Asia a few weeks ago. I didn’t do nearly as much purchasing as I would have liked (see the aforementioned budget problems), but I was able to buy a few things and I also met a lot of great people to hopefully collaborate with in the future. So, without further ado, here’s a little bit of what I did on my summer vacation.

Kediri, East Java

My first major stop was Universitas Nusantara PGRI in Kediri, a city in East Java. For the AIFIS-MSU Conference on Indonesian Studies this past June, faculty at the university composed and choregraphed a piece for their students to perform as part of the opening ceremony, drawing on local performing arts traditions. They had a larger festival planned in July, so I, of course, wanted to attend. After I gave a (very embarrassing) speech about the importance of preserving cultural heritage, I relaxed and watched several musical and dance performances presented both by students and by community groups.

History students from the university also took me to see some important historical sites in the area, including Tegowangi Temple, where I met the woman in charge of maintaining the temple. She grew up in the area and it was her father who decided that the temple should be looked after and maintained. Kediri was home to a historically important kingdom in Java and it was fascinating to learn more about this history from the students and to hear what excites them about their studies.

Place Marketing

Everywhere I visited, I also stopped by a tourism information center, or found other ways to pick up place marketing materials for MSU’s collection. This meant everything from wandering through a Jakartan construction site looking for one of many, many malls to visiting an office located inside an Arc de Triomphe lookalike in the middle of Kediri. Collecting place marketing materials is always fun because they’re everywhere but it’s still an adventure hunting them down—a kind of library scavenger hunt.

“Academic” Meetings

Then, of course, there were the more standard library- and academia-focused meetings. I’m hoping to get more involved in collaborating on research with practitioners in Indonesia, either in traditional research collaborations or through other methods such as translating research papers into English so that they can be published for a different kind of audience, so I had several different meetings discussing ideas.

On the library side of things, a highlight was visiting the library of Surakarta’s Grand Mosque. The National Library of Indonesia and the provincial Regional Library have started a program seeking out so-called “hidden” manuscript collections: collections not found in libraries, but instead in private homes or in community institutions such as mosques. I was invited to sit in on a meeting at the mosque to go through their collection and identify which pieces would fit into the scope of the project. I got to see everything from books of tafsir with notes in the margins to student report cards, learned about different kinds of paper and what they signal about time period and preservation, and ferried a lot of archival housings between tables.

When I visit libraries overseas, I try to make note not only of what kinds of materials they have, but also how they can be accessed. If a student comes to me looking for Javanese Qurans, do I know the person they need to contact to gain access? Is there an online catalog? Even better, are there digitized copies available to browse? In the case of the Grand Mosque, there’s as yet only a paper catalog (currently out of print), but there are a large number of manuscripts that have been digitized and made available online.

My other big library meeting was with the Library of Congress field office in Jakarta. The Library of Congress has offices around the world that funnel books back to the US, including to research libraries. I can report that despite everything going on politically in both the US and Indonesia, operations at the field office continue. Shipping costs are rising and there are other unexpected hurdles that come up, but it was heartening to meet with everyone face-to-face and hear how things are going.

Zines

Finally, I planned my itinerary around a zine festival in Jakarta, a city whose zine scene I’ve watched from afar for some time. The festival was held at KONGSI 8, a small studio and café space, but they managed to fit in a good number of vendors as well as a large collection of zines from makers who weren’t present. I had to resist buying everything, and instead focused on political and environmental zines, as well as zines about identity.

Collecting zines for the library helps to provide immediate access to what everyday students, activists, and creators are thinking. The next step, of course, is making sure library users know the zines are available. One thing I’d really like to focus on in the coming year is communicating with students about the library’s zine collection and brainstorming with them ways they can use zines both as sources for their research and as a way of expressing their ideas and findings. But more about that in another post.

What have you been up to this summer? Any interesting projects? Any bright ideas? Are you ready for the fall semester?