#acrl15

One of my most recent outings.  The theme was “Creating Sustainable Community” - fitting for a conference held in Portland, OR, and a profession with sustainability at its core.  This was my 2nd ACRL (Association for College & Research Libraries) and the first to which I submitted proposals - 1 poster and 1 roundtable discussion topic. Having attended 2013 in Indy, and participated in some great sessions and workshops, I was a little intimidated to submit. 

Maybe the newness wore off or maybe it was due to the poster and roundtable taking up time that I would otherwise have spent in awesome sessions or workshops but I didn't feel 2015 was as good as 2013 .  Still good and definitely worth the trip though.  ACRL and DLSC (Distance Library Service Conference) are my go-to conferences.  It’s handy that they occur in alternate years. (Posts on ACRL 2013 and DLSC 2014 forthcoming.)

ACRL is viewed by many as the big-deal, national conference for academic librarianship and selects presentations/sessions through a blind peer-review process.  I know great librarians who've submitted interesting proposals without acceptance. This year, 33% of poster proposals and 42% of roundtables were selected.  I was pleasantly surprised and feel fortunate to have had both accepted (with Lauren Newton, coordinator of library instruction). The poster "Sustaining a Community of Change: Using Systematic Staff Training to Influence Culture Shifts in the Workplace" was well received - we got a lot of birds (”put a bird on it” from Portlandia was the method for up-voting posters). And the roundtable discussion "Distance Learning and Library Instruction: Creating Sustainable Connections" garnered a full table.  We were relieved to have so much interest and it was a great conversation. 

I generally try to pick sessions that could help me in my work (distance learning) but also throw in a few things that are just interesting.  This year, that random interest is digital humanities and digital scholarship.  I only recently started paying attention to what those phrases actually mean and they fascinates me. This is a realm that is so crucial to the future of scholarship, online teaching and learning, access to information; and people are doing some really cool things.  I’ll write more about that in another post.  On the work-value front, I attended several presentations that were formatted as panel discussion in which the panel facilitated audience participation.  These are always great for new ideas for teaching or to validate something you already do.  Some of these folks are experts and/or have a lot of experience and knowledge to impart.  I was honored to be counted among them on the conference schedule and fortunate that my school still offers faculty a travel budget so I can learn from them.

If you're headed to ACRL, or just able to get to Portland in March, please consider coming to the CritLib Unconference on March 25.

I've been working on the planning along with a handful of very thoughtful, wonderful librarians, and the unconference should be a day of very thoughtful, wonderful conversations. If you've never been to an unconference, it is sort of an open-agenda-ed conference. Folks make suggestions beforehand, and on the day of, we sort out what we want to talk about it. The overarching topic for this event is social justice work within academic libraries, the ways we all navigate and advocate within the oppressive systems we are often a part of. How do we support student retention efforts and resist the neoliberal behind it? How do we support student-led activism on our campuses? How do we use critical pedagogy in one-shots?

Registration is free, and is now open: http://critlib2015.weebly.com/registration.html

If you can't make it to PDX, but have some cash, we're raising money and in-kind donations to make the conference on our registry here: http://www.sokindregistry.org/registry/4347