At Georgia Southern University’s Armstrong Campus, library outreach thrives, comprising over 50% of University Libraries’ outreach initiatives and interactions during the 2022-2023 academic year across all campuses. Remarkably, this is achieved with just 31% of library staff based at Armstrong. Success is rooted in cross-departmental collaboration facilitated by the Armstrong Collaboration Team. This team identifies and promotes “signature events” aligned with each department’s mission, enhancing outreach efficiency. The presentation delves into the Collaboration Team’s structure and University Libraries’ role in signature events, cross-departmental scheduling, and partnerships. The presentation will offer guidance for replicating this model to amplify outreach efforts at other institutions.

Most students — and classroom teachers— in Oregon do not have access to a teacher librarian at their school. We are developing a continuing education course to support K-12 teachers who do not have a colleague focused on information literacy. This project has challenged us, as instruction librarians at a public research university, to broaden and refine our own understanding of information literacy, in order to present age-appropriate information for K-12 students, but packaged in a course for experienced educators who will incorporate it into their own practice. In this presentation, we will give an overview of the need for this type of continuing education in our state, our process for developing the content and materials, and invite your feedback on our draft modules.

Laura Semrau, a liaison librarian, and Elizabeth Rivera, an archivist, will facilitate a conversation focused on sparking and building momentum to cultivate successful collaborations. Briefly sharing their experiences of working with faculty, they will highlight ways to build bridges between departments, leveraging each other’s expertise to enrich the student experience. They will also explore how to engage students with active learning methods such as archival exploration and digital humanities tools.

Session participants will share their own successes and challenges partnering with internal and external constituents. For instance, we will explore the ways institutional structures foster or hinder productive movement. This inclusive conversation will foster opportunities for reflection while we glean valuable insights from each other, germinating seeds of collaboration for the future, leaving participants energized and empowered.

In response to the systemic oppression faced by transgender people, we created Supporting Trans Folx, a working committee charged with investigating how well the services, spaces, and collections of our University Libraries support and welcome transgender community members. Though the Library Science literature does not currently offer much guidance on fostering transgender inclusion, we explored several opportunities to intentionally address the needs of this community, and thereby foster progressive change within the broader Libraries.

In this interactive session, members of Supporting Trans Folx will present the group’s ongoing efforts and share its plans for diversifying collections, transforming spaces, and fostering inclusive services in collaboration with other campus partners, such as the campus Pride Office, academic departments, and individual faculty members. We would also like to hear about others’ work and similar efforts to help build a sense of safety and belonging for this vulnerable and often-neglected community within higher education.

When academic instruction librarians think about bridging gaps, we often (and rightly) consider how we are connecting with students and faculty. Perhaps because teaching is often something we do as individuals, it appears less common that we consider how our relationships to one another as colleagues influence our teaching practices.
Drawing on an ecological view of teacher agency (which takes into account the environments and relationships in which individuals and groups interact), the presenter will report on a set of findings from a study on academic librarians’ conceptions and experiences of teacher agency. This presentation will focus on one dimension of the multi-part study: the role of librarians’ relationships to library colleagues, managers, and administrators in their experiences of teacher agency. The findings can help inform library colleagues and library administrators in fostering workplaces in which librarians feel more supported in both their individual and their collective instructional work.

Since 2020, the landscape of library instruction has had to change in many ways. Between the Great Resignation and a series of retirements, institutional knowledge about instruction was being lost at our institution. To attempt to close that gap, the presenters created a central repository for library instruction lesson plans at Mason Libraries: the Curriculum Center. For new instructors, the Curriculum Center is a helpful tool to learn more about the teaching happening at Mason and to get a head start on lesson planning. For returning instructors, the Center provides an opportunity to learn more about colleagues’ work in the classroom and incorporate those ideas into their own instruction. In this presentation, the presenters will discuss the process of forming the Curriculum Center, benefits of the Center, new opportunities which arose from starting the Center, and lessons learned. Attendees will leave with ideas for starting their own repository.

This presentation introduces a pioneering instructional model aimed at enhancing student learning outcomes. Departing from the traditional one-shot instruction approach, this session explores the benefits and drawbacks of the new model while emphasizing the importance of faculty-librarian collaboration. The format features presentations by a librarian, faculty member, and student, each offering unique perspectives on the model’s implementation and impact. The librarian will discuss the development of a four-session library instruction program and its adaptability across different formats and faculty members. The faculty member will share insights into how collaboration with librarians has influenced teaching methods and student performance. Finally, the student will articulate firsthand experiences and the model’s effectiveness in preparing for higher education or professional endeavors. Learning objectives include promoting instructional flexibility, fostering collaboration for pedagogical innovation, and increasing support for transfer students in community colleges.

This presentation explores an ARL academic library’s revival of an instruction alliance between the library and the freshman composition program, which is mapped onto the University’s general education course targeting information literacy (IL).

Prior to 2020, a previous IL instruction coordinator dismantled the library’s role in the English Composition Instruction program, forcing composition instructors to utilize library created tutorials and/or teach IL themselves (train-the-trainer had helped implement this). In 2021, a new IL instruction coordinator was hired and upon arrival, given the directive to revive the in-person instruction program that was once the department’s “bread and butter” when it came to first-year IL instruction. Coinciding with this new position was the equally new hire of an English Composition Coordinator as well as a new Instruction and Student Success Librarian. Together, these instructors coordinated their efforts to assess, design, and implement IL instruction in a pilot with varied success.

What do you do when the students you’re supposed to serve cannot or will not tell you what they need from the library? How do we serve our silent stakeholders? This presentation will share how librarians at Kennesaw State University sought to give voice to the STEM students who were the least likely to engage with library outreach efforts through the use of an instructional survey specifically designed to capture STEM student needs. This presentation will share how the Librarian for the College of Engineering and the College of Science and Math and the Outreach Librarian teamed up to use the results of a previous study of KSU STEM students’ perceptions of the KSU Library System to create a custom instruction survey to crowdsource engagement ideas that actually appeal to STEM students.

Information literacy’s (IL) place in academic librarianship is well studied and widely represented in research literature. However, the collaboration between instruction librarians of differing forms of academic institutions is not. Despite the knowledge that students transfer in sizable numbers between college and university library environments, direct collaborations between instruction librarians across different institutional types is poorly documented in library science literature. This presentation will review the scholarly conversation around IL and transfer students and showcase the cross-institutional collaborative efforts that are documented. It will also present examples of steps currently taken by librarians across institutions and explore prospects for building more collaborative instructional relationships.