Professional Development Opportunities

Those who maintain library systems (including IT staff, systems librarians, or “accidental IT” people) are on the frontline of the battle to secure our IT infrastructure. This class will help grow your knowledge of security concepts, and provide actionable steps to improve your security.

Want to learn how about the latest free(ish) web-based tools and apps can be implemented implement at the physical reference desk? Explore a variety of top online tools, from social media platforms to virtual chat spaces, to apps, and more. Learn how to utilize several free or low-cost online tools in your reference activities to better help patrons at the point of need.

Collaboration with faculty is a key component of librarians' jobs. Working with faculty on assignment design, instruction, student, support, programming initiatives, and research projects are a few of the ways in which librarians and faculty partner for student success. In this session, attendees will be introduced to best practices for working with faculty. Dr. Lauren Hays will share practical examples of how to approach collaboration and how to keep the momentum for collaborative projects.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide students with an opportunity to learn applied skills while tackling original research questions. These experiences go beyond a typical analysis paper and instead focus on research as an iterative, collaborative process. Special collections librarians, archivists, and other staff working with rare and unique collections can advocate for CUREs to enhance undergraduates’ learning experiences and closely collaborate with course instructors. This can draw undergraduate students into special collections and support more engaged, creative uses of archival and special collections.

Information security and privacy are key concepts for librarians to understand in order to protect their patrons. Library decision makers should understand the various ways their decisions can affect the privacy landscape in their organization. In this class, you will learn why privacy is important and how to help your patrons protect theirs, no matter what kind of decisions you make at your library. In this session, we will talk about how to manage vendor relations in order to ensure they are working to protect your patrons’ privacy as well as how to create a culture at your library that emphasizes the importance of every staff member’s actions to protect patron privacy at all times.