The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) (a part of the American Library Association) Annual Conference is being held in downtown Minneapolis on April 2-5. Over 3000 librarians from across the state and nation (and from around the world) are converging at the Minneapolis Convention Center to share ideas, challenges, and innovation on Libraries, research, teaching, collections, outreach and more. The event has over 500 sessions, posters and programs along with 200 vendors in the Exhibit Hall (free books!).

Here are just some of the sessions with UMN Libraries staff presenting and showcasing their research and work:

Empowering Education: Leveraging Special Collections for Transformative Learning and Collaboration
Fátima Ortega Barba, MLIS Student, Virginia Moran, Anna Opryszko
This panel highlights the use of special collections as catalysts for impactful student learning and faculty collaborations, and will be presented by a special collections librarian at a small liberal arts college, an assistant curator at an R1 university, and a recent first-generation Latina graduate of a small liberal arts college. The complementary experiences of these presenters will provide a broad perspective on the many multidisciplinary uses and opportunities inherent in special collections, regardless of institution size or type, and the lasting impacts that instructional sessions can have on students at many points in their education and academic/professional development.

Academic Freedom Under Threat: Stories from Librarians and How to Fight Back
Heather Bush, Brea Henson, Jessica Simpson, Danya Leebaw, Maria Atilano, Martin Brennan
Description: It seems like every day brings a new story of anti-DEI legislation, censorship, defunding, and other threats to our libraries. Our panel features librarians from Texas and Florida who will share experiences of having their work in outreach, programming, and instruction significantly curtailed or prohibited. Their stories will be situated within the broader history of academic freedom for academic librarians, and why it has never mattered more. While raising awareness of the seriousness of this current moment, we’ll also lean heavily into hope and empowerment by offering examples and ideas for solidarity and fighting back.

From Bad to Worse: Gender Equity in LIS Journals During COVID-19
Jenny McBurney, Cody Hennesy, Mariya Gyendina
Long-standing gender disparities in LIS publishing were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic but evidence has been limited and sometimes contradictory.  At this session, learn how computational methods and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) were used to analyze citations from over 55,000 articles in eighty-nine LIS journals between 2002 to 2023, finding a statistically significant reduction in the percentage of women authors publishing between 2020 to 2023.  Participants will explore gender inequities in LIS over the last 20 years, and learn how computational methods can leverage new forms of data access to improve our understanding of the field.

Movin’ on out: An experiment in IDEA-centered decision making within a large-scale collections move
Sunshine Carter, Kat Nelsen, Nicole Theis-Mahon, Kim Clarke, Malaika Grant, Wanda Marsolek
Many libraries are confronting how structural and systemic racism shows up in their collections. Learn how a sub-committee at a large R1 institution is experimenting with ways to make diversity part of collections decision-making processes. Attendees will learn about the methods and findings of an experiment examining the viability of metadata from various sources to identify racial diversity in monograph collections. A summation of final outcomes and recommendations for diversity criteria that will be used in a large-scale collections move will be shared. Authors will discuss roadblocks, insights, and opportunities for future enhancements.

Embracing Failure: Accepting and Addressing Imposter Phenomenon for Growth
Paloma Barraza and Maggie Shawcross
Our roles as librarians span teaching and research, yet surrounded by subject specialists, doubts about our knowledge can arise. This community chat invites discussion on these doubts and strategies for success. We’ll address the Imposter phenomenon’s impact on careers, factors that contribute to our imposter feelings, and lastly, building strategies to help us move forward. We aim to foster open discussions among library staff, exploring how embracing failure can enhance learning and cultivate a more responsive workplace.

Getting early undergrads started with faculty-sponsored research: Skills, connection and empowerment
Jennifer Endres (staff in UMN CLA), Kat Nelsen, Shristi Patel (Peer Research Consultant), Kate Peterson
For early undergraduates, getting started with faculty-sponsored research is hard. At a large research institution, librarians have built a variety of ways for students to learn about undergraduate research and build needed skills, confidence, and connections. Our current model is a three-pronged approach including 1.) non-credit, asynchronous mini-course 2.) individual consultations with peer consultants and 3.) a one-credit, first year experience course. Join panelists, a student, staff from the College of Liberal Arts, and course instructors librarians, to hear their perspectives and experiences working with these programs and the challenges and benefits of helping students get started with undergraduate research.

Stories to Inspire and Infuriate: Teaching Information Ethics through a Social Justice Lens
Moderated by Lindsay Matts-Benson with speakers Emily Simmons, Kate Garretson, and Rebecca Yowler
Instead of warning about the consequences of plagiarism, what if librarians could inspire students to use information ethically by stimulating their empathy, and sense of fairness and inclusion? Find out how librarians used examples of real people who never got the credit they deserved to present information ethics through a social justice lens. The panelists will discuss different versions of an activity in which students investigate instances when people didn’t receive the credit they deserved. By taking on the perspectives of those who were overlooked, left out, or cheated, students better understand why ethical use of information is important.

Navigating Knowledge Landscapes: Empowering Librarians with ACRL Framework Companion Documents
Moderated by Lindsay Matts-Benson with speakers Carl DiNardo, Rebecca Orozco, Amy James, and Christina Jones
Learn practical applications for the ACRL Framework companion documents as four academic librarians from different institutions share their experiences creatively applying these resources. The companion documents not only add disciplinary context to the Framework, they also add a measure of currency to the Framework and give librarians tools to better address information literacy issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, open access, authority, and more! From enabling deeper conversations with faculty and lesson planning to program assessment and grant writing/fulfillment, the Framework companion documents have a lot to offer librarians who are disciplinary experts and novices alike.

Invited Presentations:

Mapping Prejudice in Minneapolis: telling community-powered stories of racism and resistance
Kirsten Delegard
Dr. Kirsten Delegard leads a team in the University of Minnesota Libraries that works with community members to identify and map racial covenants, which were clauses that were inserted into property records that prohibited people who were not White from buying or occupying certain pieces of land. This process of community co-creation generates new knowledge that illuminates why Minnesota has some of the highest racial disparities in the country. It also surfaces stories of racism and resistance, fueling new efforts to repair the damage done by structural racism. Delegard will use one of these stories to narrate this complex history, describing the rise and fall of Sixth Avenue North, a Black and Jewish neighborhood in Minneapolis first created and then destroyed by the ideas about race that spurred the spread of racial covenants across the landscape of the United States.

Workshops:

Systematic searching for evidence synthesis: Practicing and demonstrating search competencies
Amy Riegelman, Molly Bostrom, Molly Blake, Scott Marsalis, Megan Kocher
A 2017 systematic review competency framework includes competencies (e.g., comprehensive searching) and specifies 3 levels of proficiency: knows, shows, does. While some trainings focus on the first level (knows), practice and demonstrating knowledge application is needed for the second level (shows). Utilizing [redacted] hosted practice sets and Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS), instructors will guide participants to practice searching by incorporating information, active learning, and self-assessment while being supported by expert searchers. Participants from low resourced institutions who do not have the opportunity to practice searching with support from peers will benefit from the hands-on workshop.

Posters:

Library at the Concert Hall: An Interdisciplinary Library Outreach Strategy for Unexpected Spaces
Jessica M. Abbazio, Michael J. Duffy IV
This poster highlights strategies for staging pop-up libraries aligned with campus events. The presenters share perspectives on connecting with campus affiliates and community members at performing arts venues at two separate institutions, and share longitudinal data that illustrates the value of this outreach strategy for engaging a range of potential library users. Attendees will explore ideas for highlighting connections between potential visitors’ interests and library collections, and discover strategies for collaborating with library colleagues across disciplines to meet these needs. Participants will learn methods for leveraging this flexible approach to fit their own capacity and collection parameters.

Let’s talk: Launching a polished podcast with no budget
Hannah Cabullo & Stephanie Sparrow
Podcasts offer a unique medium for building community and engaging with information, especially amid the textually- and webinar-heavy environments of higher education and professional development. In this poster, we describe the “materials and methods” of launching a podcast, with essentially no budget, no podcasting experience, and adhering as closely as we could to an open and accessible model. While we reside at an R1 university, we offer suggestions for those with fewer institutional resources, so this poster may be a quick-start guide for all.

Access for All: Improving Accessibility of Library-Published Content
Kate Sheridan & Laureen Boutang
Find out how a library publishing program at an R1 institution assessed its web content for accessibility, what web accessibility errors were most common within our catalog, and how we planned our remediation efforts to comply with updated federal regulations.

Investigating Sources for Identifying Preprints in Comprehensive Searching
Amy Riegelman, Zahra Premji (University of Victoria), & Sarah McGill (University of Victoria)
Preprints are self-archived, publicly shared versions of a manuscript often prior to journal publication. Preprints, as grey literature, are irregularly indexed and challenging to discover. This research investigates and compares preprint aggregators in order to inform how and where to search for preprints to maximize coverage while balancing efficiency and cost. The authors applied eligibility criteria to select aggregators, extracted key characteristics, features, and search functionality, and built a comparison table. Findings show that coverage and ability to design a comprehensive, reproducible search varies. This study will help searchers make informed decisions about database and aggregator selection when targeting preprints.

Sustaining a Spatial Collaboration: Leveraging Social Infrastructure to Support Technological Growth
Ryan Mattke, Karen Majewicz, and Amanda Tickner
The proliferation and significance of geodata have continued to outpace the development of adequate search tools and high-quality metadata, prompting the necessity for streamlined geospatial data discovery. In response, this program established, maintains, and continuously enhances a geoportal that federates geospatial metadata. Team members also built a significant, collaborative, supportive social infrastructure. The poster will provide an analysis of the evolution of the program and an exploration of the open-source technology landscape, noting possible future directions and highlighting key success features. Examining the trajectory of the program and the factors behind its achievements yields valuable insights for comparable multi-institutional endeavors.

Roundtable:

Scholarly contributions beyond the traditional research article
Hannah Cabullo
Scholarly contributions, including peer-reviewed research articles, are commonly a requirement for librarians in faculty or faculty-like positions. While traditional scholarly research has an important role in LIS, there are other ways to join the conversation and other ways of knowing. What would our scholarly conversations look like if they commonly took place in a wider variety of modes and formats? In this roundtable discussion, participants will share experiences and ideas for other forms of scholarly inquiry, professional conversation, and knowledge sharing. The discussion leader has nascent experience in podcasting, but any and all formats are of interest for discussion.