Back at the end of March, I attended ACRL 2017 in Baltimore. I hadn’t attended ACRL before, and I was able to go with two of my colleagues in Access Services. There were a few sessions and events I enjoyed at ACRL, including Roxane Gay’s keynote and hanging out with folks from the Library Marketing and Outreach Interest Group, but I found that I was just really tired and couldn’t get myself going in the mornings. I was wiped out by the last day, so much so that I also missed the Librarian of Congress’ closing remarks. I didn’t even look at any posters, which is also very unlike me. (The three-hour time change may have had something to do with it.) A colleague and I were able to visit Ft. McHenry for about an hour or so before grabbing lunch and hitting the airport back home.
Looking back through the conference booklet, there are quite a few sessions, papers, and posters I want to dig into, but here is what I attended:
- Liberty and Justice for All: Critical Information Literacy for Business and Professional Students
- Kenny Garcia and I are on the Instruction for Diverse Populations committee together.
- Here is the LibGuide with the presenters’ slides and a reading list.
- Here is another document from their session.
- Improve Instruction with Tech Tools: An Interactive Workshop Introducing Tools for Video Creation, Gamified Assessment, and Collaboration
- This was supposed to be a three-hour workshop, but the WiFi wasn’t working, so I ended up leaving after 30 minutes. I felt badly for the presenter.
- Here are a variety of documents and links I found related to this session:
- Exploring Diversity through the Lens of History
- This was a letdown, but I did meet the executive director and co-founder of the National Women’s History Project.
- ‘Let Me Learn’ or ‘Just the Answer’? Research Consultations and Dweck’s Theories of Intelligence
- This session reminded me about good reference practices to help encourage students’ growth. I shared this contributed paper with my colleagues during our last instruction brown bag session.
- Around the World in 180 Minutes: An International Library Adventure
- Anchoring Our Practice: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Libraries
- I attended one of Margy MacMillan’s sessions at Library Instruction West, and I really like her work, so I made sure to attend this session.
- Here are some online handouts from the ACRL session.
- “I Don’t Know What I’m Looking At”: Understanding Student LibGuides Use with Eye-Tracking Software
- This confirms research I have read and my own thoughts about LibGuides (as a reference and as a learning tool; you can do one or both, but it looks like some students treat them like the actual search tools themselves). I was able to update our internal guide about best practices for building LibGuides with some information from this presentation, in addition to some other sources. One of my colleagues also shared about this paper during our last instruction brown bag session.
Find more conference papers here. Find the conference’s complete proceedings (available as a PDF) here.
Lindsay Ann Davis 