This past year, Arlie Sims and Amy Killebrew from Columbia College Chicago Library each received a LIBRAS Professional Development Grant to attend the ACRL 2021 Virtual Conference held April 13-16. We’ve invited Arlie and Amy to share with the LIBRAS membership in their own words what they learned from this year’s conference.
Arlie Sims, Head of Reference and Instruction at Columbia College Chicago Library
What professional development opportunity did LIBRAS funding enable you to pursue and when was it held?
ACRL 2021 Conference (4/13/21-4/16/21)
How are the ideas and information presented from this event impacting your work?
- Practical ideas and approaches to teaching and working with faculty, students, and collections
- The program, “Citation as Empowerment: Motivating Undergraduates to Value Their Source Lists”, helped me see how to frame the practice of attribution as a positive experience of agency and value-driven research and writing. Generation Z is particularly motivated by community engagement, and citations can be seen as a way of connecting with, highlighting, and celebrating the sources they choose.
- “Beyond Zoom Zombies: Centering Critical Pedagogy in the Online Classroom” provided motivating content on how to engage students in critical thinking and affective engagement, even in a one-shot session. Also included was a reading list on critical pedagogy and virtual teaching.
- Reframing, and personalizing, of my thinking about systems and habits and practices that affect diverse groups of students in different ways
- Two sessions in particular challenged me in a new way to consider the experience of students and staff/faculty of color and to start imagining ways to look critically at the way the Library goes about its business with this in mind. The programs were:
- “Being Black at Duke: Partnering with Black Students to Learn About Their Campus Experiences” and
- “Latinas in the Library and Information Science World: An Interactive Discussion on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”
- Two sessions in particular challenged me in a new way to consider the experience of students and staff/faculty of color and to start imagining ways to look critically at the way the Library goes about its business with this in mind. The programs were:
What is one takeaway from the conference or professional development opportunity that may interest other LIBRAS members?
We are an overwhelmingly white profession, but our institutions are more diverse than ever and if access to quality higher education were more equalized, they would be even more diverse than they are. The content challenging the library profession to look hard and long at its passivity in the face of ongoing systemic racism – in libraries and all American institutions – and begin to move forward was tremendously timely and relevant. I really appreciated the LIBRAS-organized webinar “Empathy, Humility, Awareness, and Action: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion @ Macalester College,” which also centered these issues.
To whom would you recommend this conference or professional development opportunity?
I find ACRL conferences consistently to be the most relevant professional development and networking opportunities available to academic librarians, and specifically to my work in instruction, reference and research services, and in terms of the ever more salient need to address diversity, equity, and inclusion and social justice/anti-racism in our profession. While ALA conferences are have broad appeal and are exciting partly because of their enormity, ACRL is a smaller conference more focused on the challenging and swiftly changing field of college and university librarianship.
Amy Killebrew, User Experience Librarian at Columbia College Chicago Library
What professional development opportunity did LIBRAS funding enable you to pursue and when was it held?
The ACRL 2021 Virtual Conference from April 13-16, 2021
How are the ideas and information presented from this event impacting your work?
I appreciate how much of the information presented at the conference involved practical information and strategies for implementation. I attended many presentations on topics ranging from accessibility and web content strategy to information privilege and data ethics. Most presentations were about projects completed or in process and included advice or strategies for implementing these projects at other institutions. For example, I came away with new information about web accessibility and a list of free tools that will help me conduct an accessibility audit of our library website.
What is one takeaway from the conference or professional development opportunity that may interest other LIBRAS members?
I had many takeaways from the conference but one that I found particularly interesting was about information privilege and how to apply this content to information literacy instruction. This presentation is now freely available on the ACRL YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/eLA730coaaM.
To whom would you recommend this conference or professional development opportunity?
I would recommend this conference to anyone working in academic libraries.
Thank you to Arlie and Amy for sharing your takeaways from the ACRL 2021 Virtual Conference with LIBRAS!
Interested in applying for a LIBRAS Professional Development Grant? Visit our Professional Development Application page to learn more.