This poster presents the development of a Spanish‑language collection at a community college designated as a Hispanic‑Serving Institution (HSI). The project advances culturally responsive librarianship and underscores the responsibility of academic libraries to cultivate collections that reflect and support the linguistic and cultural identities of their students.
The college enrolls a significant number of native Spanish speakers, bilingual students, and English‑language learners. Prior to this initiative, the library’s Spanish‑language holdings were limited in scope, outdated, and misaligned with student needs. Notably, the collection consisted primarily of fiction and lacked the academic and reference materials students sought to support their coursework. Through a community needs assessment, intentional and culturally informed collection development, and enhancements to cataloging and metadata practices, a robust and academically relevant Spanish‑language collection was established.
Early indicators show increased circulation and a rise in reference inquiries related to Spanish‑language resources. This project demonstrates how identity‑informed and community‑centered collection development can strengthen representation, foster a sense of belonging, and enhance academic success within community college libraries.
This poster chronicles an iterative, hands-on project to automate the generation of structured MARC holdings fields (853/863) from 866 textual holdings statements — and the challenges of making that process portable across institutions. Beginning with a colleague's existing automation script, the presenter adapted the tool to their own branch collection through self-directed learning, without a formal programming background. When it became clear that the pattern-matching rules at the heart of the tool would need to be rewritten from scratch for every institution's unique holdings formatting conventions, the presenter turned to AI — exploring several distinct approaches: using AI to write and refine those matching rules directly from sample data; using AI to survey and cluster the range of formatting patterns present in the holdings data; using AI to build a reusable pattern-detection tool; and using AI to interpret holdings statements record by record, bypassing hand-crafted rules entirely. The presentation evaluates the trade-offs of each approach and reflects on what these experiments reveal about where AI assistance is genuinely useful in technical library workflows — and where human cataloging expertise remains essential.
Starting a new leadership position often involves learning institutional culture, building relationships, and assessing departmental priorities. Beginning this role during a major facilities disruption, however, presents additional challenges. This presentation explores the experience of a new academic library director who assumed their position just as the library prepared for a significant renovation requiring the relocation of services, staff, and collections into temporary spaces across campus for approximately two years.
The poster presentation reflects on how managing a large-scale move and renovation project shaped early leadership priorities, communication strategies, and decision-making processes. Topics include supporting staff through uncertainty, maintaining core library services in temporary environments, and building collaborative relationships with campus partners during a period of significant change. The poster will also highlight lessons learned about flexibility, transparency, and change management while leading a library through physical and organizational disruption.
This poster presentation offers practical insights for new and aspiring library leaders who may encounter large-scale projects, facility renovations, or institutional transitions early in their leadership roles. Participants will gain strategies for navigating complex change while supporting staff and sustaining library services.
Does the term “operational planning” make you feel confused, overwhelmed, or disengaged? Traditionally, operational plans are developed through a top-down approach, with management setting goals that support the strategic plan. Beginning the summer of 2024, a large library division turned this approach on its head. By reimagining operational planning as a more intentional, collaborative, and inclusive process, they invited input and feedback from all division employees, regardless of position. Currently in its second full cycle, this presentation will describe the iterative process that enabled the incorporation of diverse perspectives and drew on the management team's expertise. The result? An operational plan that empowers employees at every level to take on leadership roles, contribute to decision-making, and collaborate across departments. This poster presents a multi-year case study of that iterative process. Now in its second year, with a third year of data available by the time of this presentation, this work demonstrates that collaborative operational planning is not a one-time experiment but a sustainable, evolving practice.
Through annual goals libraries can pilot new initiatives, realign their community focus, and enhance their core work. Although most teams have some kind of mechanism for goal-setting each year, forward-momentum on these projects can be difficult to maintain. Lack of buy-in from team members, missing accountability structures, and poor prioritization can often lead to languishing goals, incomplete projects, and low team morale. For annual goals to be successful, library teams need to ensure that the goal development and implementation process includes shared decision-making, accountability, and meaningful assessment.
This poster presents a practical project management framework developed and tested within an academic library department to support collaborative annual goal development and implementation. This framework includes a process for brainstorming library community needs, addressing library worker capacity, and ensuring the team’s professional development. Its implementation resulted in better departmental communication, individual and team accountability, and successful goal completion. This poster will detail a step-by-step process for team-led goal creation, a project timeline template, and best practices for setting realistic project benchmarks. This framework can be successfully scaled to all library types. Lastly, this poster will include methods for project documentation and assessment check-ins, as well as recommended resources for goal management.
Over the past year, we have seen changes in shipping across our non-US print serials. We were dealing with added fees and shipments being held until vendors could figure out what new rules meant for them and their business interests. This led to late shipments and inconsistent costs. Late shipments means that claiming is harder and we may not be able to replace lost issues resulting in an incomplete run and a backlog in our binding process. Also while the base cost of serials comes from Collection Managers’ subject funds, our shipping and extra fees come from a separate line. This poses an interesting conundrum as we also initiated a serial review in this same year to help offset future budget cuts. When Collection Managers are looking at past and projected costs they aren’t seeing the full picture. Will their decisions be offset by increasing fees? We will look at cost data and compare past years, along with providing examples of how we worked through these roadblocks with vendors and how we communicated with Collection Managers so they have the information they need to make the right choices for the library and our users.
Video games are increasingly acknowledged as significant cultural artifacts and valuable sources for interdisciplinary research. As interest in gaming continues to rise across fields such as computer science, digital media, and human-computer interaction, libraries have a unique opportunity to enhance their collections to promote both academic scholarship and student engagement.
This poster outlines the development of a circulating physical video game collection at an academic library. It details the transition from informal support of gaming resources to a structured collection development and service model. Key areas of implementation include defining the collection's scope, acquisition strategies for retail media, considerations for cataloging and processing for games, and circulation workflows for multi-component materials.
The poster also explores how gaming collections can support student success and contribute to the library's role as a campus community space. By treating games as legitimate scholarly and cultural artifacts, libraries can also support faculty and researchers working across disciplines where gaming intersects with coursework and study. Practical lessons learned during planning and implementation will be shared, along with recommendations for libraries interested in developing similar collections.
In an increasingly digital society, access to technology and digital skills is essential for education, employment, and civic participation. Yet many underserved communities worldwide continue to face barriers such as limited connectivity, affordability challenges, and lack of digital literacy.
This poster explores how libraries are actively promoting digital equity through community-based, low-cost initiatives that expand access and inclusion. Using practical examples from Indian libraries, it highlights strategies such as free public internet access, digital literacy training for diverse age groups, mobile library outreach, and partnerships with local organizations.
The presentation connects these grassroots efforts with global library trends focused on access, equity, and community empowerment. It demonstrates how libraries, regardless of size or funding, can become digital inclusion hubs that support lifelong learning and social participation.
By sharing adaptable approaches from a developing context, the poster encourages cross-cultural learning and offers actionable ideas for libraries seeking to reduce the digital divide in their own communities.
Shrinking library budgets are a constant reality. In recent years acquisitions and collection librarians have worked to find the compromise between staying within the budget and meeting the needs of their users. Each year that goal gets harder. Finding transparent and reproduceable methods to evaluate journals year to year are necessary to keep libraries relevant and in-touch with their users. My poster outline the rubric I developed to evaluate journals and use in conjunction with cost-per-use.
The Open Rules for Cataloging (ORC) is an open-source cataloging code currently under development by practicing catalogers to provide free, pragmatic, and ethically grounded guidelines for describing library resources. ORC responds to the growing need for accessible cataloging standards that are not locked behind paywalls and that reflect current library workflows. The project focuses on bibliographic resources commonly encountered in school, public, and academic libraries, beginning with non-rare monographs. ORC adheres to the IFLA Statement of International Cataloging Principles while emphasizing user convenience, accuracy, economy, interoperability, and openness. The guidelines are designed to be straightforward, compatible with shared cataloging environments, and primarily usable in MARC-based systems while supporting broader metadata exchange. By prioritizing clarity, consistency, and data reuse, ORC aims to empower catalogers and support discovery across evolving technology platforms. This poster introduces the vision, scope, and principles of ORC, explains why a freely available cataloging code is needed, and invites participation from the cataloging community.
Therapy animals can be a low-barrier tool for promoting mental health in library spaces. Learn the process of developing and implementing therapy animal visits designed to support patron needs such a stress relief and reducing social isolation. Attendees will learn the science behind therapy animal visits and their mental health benefits, best practices for partnering with certified therapy animal organizations, and practical considerations like scheduling, risk management, staff training, and accessibility. Whether you're just curious or ready to launch your own program, this session offers actionable insights, inspiring examples, and a compassionate lens on how libraries can become healing-centered spaces. Attendees will have the opportunity to interact with therapy animals during the presentation and will receive a guide on how to run a successful program.
Large research universities have incredible library collections, fostering research across many disciplines and spanning decades of collection development. The library catalog returns a wealth of information, but how physically discoverable are those items on library shelves? This poster looks at the prevalence of collection mapping, particularly shelf or range-level collection mapping, at R1 universities. It also serves as a way to highlight a case study of implementing such a system at my large university library, hopefully making the process easier for other libraries to implement at their own institutions.
In lean academic library environments, role creep often produces overload, diluted authority, and blurred accountability—particularly in e-resources and serials work. This poster applies job crafting theory to Metadata & Collections practice, positioning it as a self-directed strategy for counteracting role displacement and restoring delegated authority. By comparing an original job description with current responsibilities and quantifying work through a time audit, the poster demonstrates how intentional adjustments to tasks, relationships, and cognitive framing restored role clarity. Outcomes included clearer documentation of continuing resource obligations, reduced duplication of effort, and improved supervisor clarity. The poster also explores the psychological dimension of role drift: when professionals are distanced from the work that defines their expertise and the rationale for evolving expectations is not clearly articulated, alignment between role and professional purpose can weaken. The poster argues that sustainable job crafting requires both individual agency and explicit leadership support and offers a transferable framework for technical services practitioners navigating role expansion and authority diffusion.
As textbook affordability remains a persistent challenge in higher education, libraries are uniquely positioned to advance adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) as a strategy for reducing financial barriers and promoting educational access. This poster describes how librarians used the GOST Framework (Goals, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics) to design and launch an inaugural Library OER Faculty Champion Award aligned with their Strategic Plan 2025–2030.
While briefly outlining the award’s development and implementation, the poster centers on how the initiative was evaluated following its first cycle. It examines how librarians assessed the award criteria and rubric, the nomination and selection process, promotional strategies, and the effectiveness of campus partnerships that supported the launch. Through this evaluative lens, the project identifies refinements for future iterations and demonstrates how recognition of faculty engagement with OER reinforces student affordability, inclusive access, and equitable teaching practices as core institutional values rather than peripheral initiatives.
In addition to evaluating the full process, this poster shares outcomes from the first award cycle, including faculty participation, campus response, and lessons learned related to OER visibility and adoption. Attendees will gain practical tools and strategies for implementing sustainable library initiatives promoting student affordability, student success, and inclusive pedagogy.
The Core Leadership and Management Competencies Working Group is conducting a comprehensive review and revision of the division’s leadership competencies framework. Since the last revision by LLAMA in 2016, the professional landscape has shifted significantly. Libraries are navigating increased organizational complexity, heightened attention to equity and inclusion initiatives, evolving workforce expectations, and rapid technological change.
This poster shares an in-progress update on the revision process, including emerging themes, proposed structural reframing, and areas under active reconsideration. In addition to updating language and scope, the working group is examining how leadership competency frameworks function within broader institutional and systemic contexts and power dynamics, including whose leadership is recognized, cultivated, and rewarded.
Attendees will learn about the revision methodology, key areas of expansion (including culturally responsive leadership, inclusive decision-making, and organizational context awareness), and be given opportunities to provide feedback before the revised competencies are finalized in 2027.
This session invites community input to ensure the revision process reflects the realities, values, and future direction of the Core community and the broader profession.
How many of your team members are second-career librarians? Have you wondered how this might affect their approach to librarianship and the skills they bring from previous careers? After surveying more than 500 academic librarians across the United States, we found that nearly 70 percent did not begin their professional lives in the library field. These findings challenge the long-held perception of librarianship as an early or primary career choice and highlight trends with significant implications for library education, recruitment, leadership development, and burnout prevention. This session's speakers will detail the findings and discuss how library leaders can leverage their team's diverse experiences. Further, as burnout remains a leading issue in librarianship, understanding the motivations and needs of second-career professionals may offer new pathways for strengthening the future of the academic library workforce.
How does a library with limited staffing address problems with legacy metadata? At [NAME] Library, the answer is to pinpoint the greatest need. In this case, we have started "Subject Heading Triage." This poster will show how we identified and remediated outdated, insensitive, and harmful subject headings in a large academic cataloging.
The project focuses on a specific pain point: "CarP" records—minimal-level entries migrated from the physical card catalog in the 1990s that have remained largely untouched. We utilized an article by Steven A Knowlton (2005) to isolate the most egregious subject headings of the 20th century. Then using a shared spreadsheet, the department located and updated these subject headings that would otherwise be missed.
Viewers will learn how to: 1. Isolate legacy record sets (like CarP) in need of remediation. 2. Prioritize remediation efforts using established scholarship. 3. Execute a "worst-first" strategy that makes the catalog more accessible despite limited resources.
To be strategic, libraries commonly track numbers for an exhaustive list of services and systems. We track numbers for reference, teaching, hires, seats, square footage, loans made or received, resources catalogued, clicks on pages, downloads, money spent, etc. We use these numbers to evaluate if we’re meeting service needs, to anticipate future needs, and to follow changes over time. But when we list out all of the questions we wish we could answer (and answer now), we can’t always match those questions to the data we currently gather.
In order to prioritize assessment work and devise an assessment plan at our library, I began by collecting information about both what data we already gather and what answers we wish we had. The results highlighted a gap in our data collecting, which has been heavy on numbers and light on the qualitative assessment that would answer questions like: “what do students do when they run into a dead-end in our discovery tool?” “What do students like and dislike about our spaces?” “Where else are students going to find resources if not to resources we provide (and are they successful)? This poster will document my method and findings.
In an increasingly complex and global open access publishing landscape, collaboration among stakeholder groups is more urgent than ever. Through storytelling and network visualizations, this poster will reveal how the transformation of scholarly communication requires bringing together individuals with expertise in publishing, licensing, information technology, metadata, digital preservation, and marketing as well as research, teaching, and learning. All libraries and library workers have meaningful opportunities to engage in various ways with open access. From our vantage point at a nonprofit membership organization, we contend that radical interdependence lies at the heart of the strategic collaborations needed to advance open access. Our partnerships with libraries of all types and sizes, publishers of all sorts, and library consortia around the world have surfaced many inspiring examples of radical interdependence in action. All too often, those examples are invisible to stakeholders beyond those directly involved. By visualizing interconnections and sharing stories in this poster, we seek to facilitate discussion on how all library workers and other stakeholders can work together more effectively to fulfill the promises of the open access movement.
Organizations committed to equity often focus on representation, yet cognitive diversity is frequently overlooked in conversations about inclusion. Many professionals with ADHD and other neurodivergent traits bring creativity, pattern recognition, and innovative problem-solving to their roles, but traditional workplace structures may unintentionally discourage these strengths. This session explores how leaders can better recognize and support diverse thinking styles within teams. Drawing on lived experience with ADHD and leadership perspectives from organizational environments, the presentation highlights how neurodivergent professionals often develop resilience, adaptability, and unique approaches to complex challenges. Participants will explore practical strategies to foster inclusive collaboration, reduce barriers created by traditional workplace expectations, and create environments where diverse thinking styles contribute to stronger teams and more innovative outcomes.
