2024 Core Forum

Neurodiversity within the librarian professional is often neglected as a subject of scholarly conversation. With higher rates of neurodivergent students approaching traditional college-age, it is more important than ever to embrace neurodivergence within the academic library. This starts with fostering an inclusive environment for library staff, faculty, students, and patrons. Hiring a neurodiverse library staff creates a safe space for neurodivergent students through example. Neurodivergent library staff can also work with library administration to incorporate inclusive mental and physical spaces within the library. The concept of the library as a safe-space for college students is a familiar narrative, and this sentiment should be extended to library staff as well.

Today's libraries are challenged with engaging busy customers who see thousands of ads per day. This session will provide key strategies for staff at all levels to cut through the noise to increase customer engagement. Panelists will cover award-winning library marketing methods and ideas used by other industries. Two award-winning library marketing directors will share key techniques to position your library in the public eye by providing strategies to address common questions such as: How do you prioritize program promotion? What materials make the biggest impact for promoting events and services? How can I get more people to my program or to utilize this service? Panelists will share how you can move the needle even without a giant marketing budget or dedicated department. Key scalable techniques like developing a style guide, embracing the marketing funnel, and focusing on specific promotion outside your library's walls will be shared to help strengthen brand awareness, position your library in the public eye, and develop efficient workflows that allow more time serving the community.

The Core Competencies for Cataloging & Metadata Professional Librarians provides an important framework to assess professional-level cataloging and metadata skills, knowledge, and behavior. This presentation will introduce attendees to the revised (as of 2023) Core Competencies document and discuss ways it can be utilized for professional growth, mentoring, employee evaluation, and curriculum assessment. Additionally, presenters will facilitate an interactive exercise that will offer attendees a template for evaluating their own or employees cataloging and metadata proficiency.
Session materials available in this Google Drive folder Mapping Your Skillsets.

AI tools are being pushed by tech companies to do everything for us from writing emails on our behalf to creating visuals to match the most outlandish prompts we can think of. Join this presentation for a 101 overview of where these tools come from, how authors are using these tools, and what generative books and art mean for libraries.

For decades we have discussed what the libraries of the future would be to have a direct impact on the health and wellbeing of those who work and visit. For decades we have forecasted building designs that could have a direct impact on climate change. Those libraries have been built, are being built, and are in design. The 2030 challenge for buildings impacting climate change is upon us in a few short years.

Come and learn the best practices that are having an impact on the lives of so many community members across the nation through the healthy and sustainable libraries they have built and how they are contributing to diminish climate change through the 2030 challenge and COTE Top Ten Principles. This session will provide information from case studies and current methods that are being successfully used and implemented along with ways to fund these needed methodologies such as how to access federal funds from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Technical services librarians do not often participate in library instruction. At our university, the technical services librarian partnered with an instruction librarian and teaching faculty on a DEI grant to explore issues of information privilege with students in first-year foundation classes. We are investigating existing systems of information collection and dissemination, with the premise that such systems are often inequitable and potentially harmful. We are teaching students how data algorithms play into information distribution, the reasons for missing and marginalized perspectives in published research, and privilege in access to information. Our experiences with this grant showcase how metadata and collections librarians can share their expertise in electronic resource acquisition and collection development, as well as show the principles of critical cataloging in metadata and classification are relevant to patrons.  We will demonstrate how our instruction sessions have made students more successful in finding and evaluating information.

In 2022, our library migrated to a new library management system, joining an established shared implementation of Alma and Primo. Integrated resource sharing and document delivery was partially available to our user community at go-live, and expanded considerably over the following year, with the addition of a new network and new partners. In this presentation, we will share our experiences over the past two years. We will discuss challenges that we have encountered with an expanding resource sharing network - both high-level and "on the ground" for our User Services staff - and how we have worked to address them, as well as the benefits we have found. We will also share insights on how making our collections, especially our legacy physical collections, more visible has opened them to new users beyond our local community and supports the larger movement in academic libraries toward greater emphasis on sharing collections across institutions.

This study aims to investigate the alignment between a university (UW-Madison) library’s resources and the research outputs of the university’s scholars. By comparing citations in university publications with the library collections, we seek to quantify the degree to which the library supports academic research at the university. This analysis will involve comparing research outputs, extracting cited references, and assessing the library collections of overlaps and gaps. This study will rely on data from popular bibliographic databases such as Web of Science, and the library cataloging records. The project’s merit lies in providing evidence-based insights for library collection management, enhancing support for academic research, and optimizing resource allocations in university libraries. Findings will inform strategic decisions in collection development, ensuring resources are closely aligned with the university’s research needs. This endeavor will not only improve library services but also contribute to the broader scholarly communication field, offering a replicable model for similar assessments at other institutions.