Session Descriptions

Wednesday, July 15th (Virtual)

20-minute virtual presentations: 

Teaching Literature Reviews by Using Restaurant Reviews

Lauren Ervin, Asbury University

10:00 a.m. - 10:25 a.m.

Among the types of assignments a librarian may help students prepare for is literature reviews. This assignment is often one that students are unfamiliar with and can be difficult to cover in one session due to the high-level analytical skills involved. The presenter, an instruction librarian, will present an activity she has used with both graduate and undergraduate students, online and in-person, that may help students grasp the organizational skills needed to write a literature review. The activity involves sharing a few reviews of the Lexington, KY restaurant, Ramsey's Diner, with students. Each student or group selects one review to summarize the key points and post the summary on a Padlet. The presenter then leads the class in a brief discussion covering: the trends they notice across reviews, characteristics that are unique to one review, contradictions that appear when comparing reviews, and potential research gaps. This discussion is intended to help students identify the key points of a work and, importantly, go beyond that to evaluate how sources compare to each other and draw conclusions based on a collection of sources. The presenter will show the activity, describe how she typically implements it, and recommend ideas for future improvement or customization.

Designing In‑Class Infographic Activities to Reduce AI Reliance

Sarah Drerup, University of Kentucky

10:30 a.m. - 10:55 a.m. 

As generative AI tools become increasingly accessible, librarians are grappling with how to support authentic student learning. This presentation shares a practical instructional model that intentionally shifts students’ first attempt at infographic creation into a low‑tech, in‑class environment to reduce AI dependency while strengthening comprehension, synthesis, and communication skills. Drawing on a library instruction session developed for an upper‑level undergraduate horticulture course, this presentation demonstrates how a collaborative and analog infographic exercise, using tools as simple as Post-it notes and markers, can effectively increase student understanding of scholarly articles before they encounter digital design tools or AI text/image generators. By focusing on the process rather than a polished final product, library instructors help students engage deeply with the research content while preserving academic integrity.

By the end of the presentation, participants will be able to identify how in‑class, analog assignments can reduce student reliance on AI tools during early stages of research communication and how to adapt a low‑tech, collaborative infographic activity for their own instruction sessions.

One Second One Shot: Training Student Assistants in Instructional Library Work

Colten Hoot, University of Louisville

11:00 a.m. - 11:25 a.m. 

The circulation desk serves as the first and most frequent point of contact for patrons seeking information about the library and its resources. These interactions are often brief one shots, lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute, but carry significant instructional importance. Through the student’s ability to articulate resources and standards of operation of the institute, their instructional impact is impactful sets the tone in our information ecosystem. Drawing from firsthand supervisory experience, this session focuses on strategies for equipping student workers with the confidence, knowledge, and communication skills necessary to deliver clear, accurate, and user-centered guidance in real time.  Viewing circulation work solely as transactional limits its range of impact, as this approach reframes circulation work as instructional to positioning student assistants as library advocates.  I will share practical methods for training student employees to recognize instructional opportunities within everyday questions at the circulation desk. This session addresses how supervisors can model effective one-shot instruction, provide ongoing feedback, and create a culture of learning at the circulation desk. By incorporating role-playing exercises, quick-reference tools, and structured training approaches, supervisors can ensure student workers are not only answering questions but also enhancing patrons’ ability to engage with the library more effectively.

From the Classroom to Congress: Teaching, Telling, and Advocating

Jay Stringer-Vaught, Maysville Community & Technical College

11:30 a.m. - 11:55 a.m. 

In February of this year, I attended National Library Legislative Day in Washington, D.C., where I discovered just how naturally library instruction translates into advocacy. As an academic librarian, I approached meetings with congressional staff by breaking down complex ideas, sharing student-centered stories, and making information literacy visible and relevant. I noticed this is exactly the kind of instruction I give in my classrooms but, this time, I was instructing our top officials in the US. These conversations felt less like policy briefings and more like moments of instruction and they were met with genuine interest and engagement by the representatives on all sides of the political spectrum. Throughout the event, I connected with library leaders and innovators from around the country, including Steve Potash, founder of Overdrive. As I was interacting with my cohort, I noticed a clear gap: very few academic librarians were present. This concern was echoed by the American Library Association and leaders like Lisa Varga. As one of only three Kentucky attendees—and the only academic librarian—I left convinced that our voices are both missing and deeply needed in these spaces. This presentation stresses the importance of our attendance at these diplomatic events. 

45-minute virtual presentations: 

Visual Literacy Instruction and Generative AI

Courtney Stine, University of Louisville

1:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m. 

This presentation will invite librarians to consider how they approach visual literacy instruction when discussing AI generated images with students. Visual literacy, or the ability to find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media, has never been more critical than in the generative AI era. Using the ACRL Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education, this interactive session will introduce how generative AI images are created, comparing the capabilities and limitations of popular tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. Through practical exercises, participants will evaluate the qualities of AI generated visuals, consider best practices for text-to-image prompting, and discuss the ethical considerations around AI-generated imagery. Participants will gain a better understanding of how generative AI intersects with visual literacy and ideas to incorporate into their library instruction lesson plans.   

Got To Be Real: Using University Archives to Connect Students to the Past

Sebastian Themelis, Western Kentucky University

2:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. 

How can archives help students see history not as distant and abstract events, but as something which continues to reverberate to this day? This presentation shares a one-shot archives workshop focused on the culture-war conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. The session used local archival materials to show how hot button issues, such as Vietnam, civil rights, the value of protesting, and institutional authority unfolded on WKU’s campus. Students engaged with a range of campus primary sources, including photographs of protests and sit-ins, campus newspaper coverage, underground student publications, protest flyers, and correspondence among student protestors, the university president, and local business leaders. Together, these materials revealed a more complicated story than any single source could tell. The session also introduced students to the university archives, demonstrated how to search archival collections through digital platforms, and modeled strategies for analyzing bias, perspective, and agenda across conflicting sources. This presentation will discuss the design of the workshop, the instructional value of using campus history to localize broader historical movements, and strategies for teaching primary source literacy in a one-shot setting. It will also share early findings from newly implemented post-class surveys of students and faculty to assess the impact of archives instruction.

Thursday, July 16th (In-person at Eastern Kentucky University)

75-minute concurrent interactive sessions: 

Reflections from AI 101: Lessons Learned from Developing an AI Microcourse for a University Campus

Lori Bird & Katrina Salley, Transylvania University

11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Are you fielding questions from your campus community about artificial intelligence? Wondering about your library's role and responsibilities when it comes to AI? Are you looking for a way to educate your campus about AI, but don’t know where to start? Transylvania University made ChatGPT Education and Gemini for Education freely available to its students, staff, and faculty in the 2025-26 academic year without a formalized plan to introduce students to these tools. Librarians quickly realized a need to educate students on how to ethically use these generative artificial intelligence tools. This presentation will explain the multi-stage process of developing a GenAI microcourse for a university campus, including the research stage, the selection of topics and development of lessons, the identification of community partners for the editing stage, the creation and analysis of course assessments, plus marketing strategies, and collection of feedback. Transy librarians will share the obstacles they encountered and lessons learned as well as future steps. Reflecting on this experience, participants will plan a course of action that will contribute to educating their community about AI literacy based on their campus needs. Participants will identify an AI literacy project for their campus and then determine learning mode, potential campus partners, available resources, initial tasks, and timeframe. Attendees will also receive access to the GenAI microcourse, related materials, and a curated list of AI resources.

Yielding Space for Finding Meaning: Students Need Time to Connect with Themselves

Rachel Riffe-Albright

Eastern Kentucky University

11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Have you ever asked a student to state their research question or topic and received an answer like, “sports betting?”     Coordinated Management of Meaning theory argues that by developing and then sharing our internal worlds through dialogue we recursively negotiate the world we live in. This cognitive framework has practical applications when considering the frames Research as Inquiry and Scholarship as Conversation. Researchers aren’t something we become- we’re born asking questions and exploring our world. Similarly, I argue scholarship isn’t fully encompassed by the formal research cycle. It begins with our own questions and interests then progresses through dialog with others close to us. As we grow as inquirers and writers, our circle expands through publications, social media, etc. But it starts with us, and requires time, space, and folks who support us as we ask complex questions.     To illustrate how we can facilitate this as teaching librarians, I will be sharing two in-class activities which ask students to reflect on their interests and experiences and then turn these experiences into researchable questions with the help of their peers. You will then take part in a modified version of the lesson plan I developed for the two-session spring Health Communication course I host in spring. You will leave with a new approach to reflective research question refinement and an explorable research question pertaining to your own professional interests.

45-minute presentations: 

Old Man Yells at Cloud, and You Can Too! An Information Literacy Gripe Session

Rob Detmering, University of Louisville

2:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. 

Why won’t Professor So-and-So stop giving “brief” lectures at the start of my carefully timed one-shots? Why won’t the skeptical Vice-Assistant-Associate Dean of Tedious Bureaucracy support my shiny new student success initiative? Why can’t my library colleague revise their lesson plan on the privacy perils of MySpace? In this interactive presentation, I will share a few of the immense annoyances and petty pains that have driven me to hide under my desk on the worst days of my nearly twenty years in information literacy. Participants will have the opportunity to air their own grievances and consider how moments of frustration, exasperation, and exhaustion can be transformed into opportunities for deep reflection on our professional practice. What do these moments tell us about ourselves, why we do what we do, and what we want to accomplish as instruction librarians? Despite substantial social and technological change, why have so many of our complaints remained the same? We will examine together how broader organizational and professional structures may contribute to demoralization and burnout as well as think through actionable steps we can take to preserve our well-being and persevere in our educational mission. I will focus on the role that emotional intelligence and transparent communication play in working through concerns and conflicts with faculty, administrators, and our fellow librarians, with a particular emphasis on navigating organizational hierarchies and individual needs. Sometimes we have to accept the things we cannot change, but we also need a chance to vent–and hopefully learn along the way.

From Retreat to Redesign: A Librarian: Faculty Partnership in Research Assignment Design

Cindy Judd & Angela Dial, Eastern Kentucky University

3:00 p.m. - 3:45 p.m. 

This presentation highlights a two-year collaboration between a Teaching and Learning Librarian and a Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) faculty member that began immediately following participation in a librarian-led Research Assignment Design Retreat. Using principles of TILT (Transparency in Learning and Teaching), information literacy, and intentional research assignment design, the partners reimagined a 400-level FCS research course to better support student learning and engagement. Together, the librarian and faculty member redesigned research activities, scaffolded assignments, and incorporated instruction that emphasized source evaluation, research confidence, and student success. The session will share practical strategies used throughout the redesign process, including ways librarian-faculty partnerships can strengthen course outcomes and improve student perceptions of research. Attendees will hear reflections from both the professor and librarian about what worked well, lessons learned during implementation, and how applying best practices in research instruction resulted in positive student feedback and a more meaningful research experience for students.

Kindness as Resistance

Julie Howe, Centre College

4:00 p.m. - 4:45 p.m. 

As a direct act of resistance against the influx of technology, this presentation will look at kindness and beneficence as an for students, faculty, and staff. Based on the concepts from Catherine J. Denial ‘s The Pedagogy of Kindness, radical kindness, and beneficence, this presentation will look at how implementing kindness, in opposition to niceness, in the classroom and in one-on-one research sessions can affect change among the experiences of students, particularly othered or marginalized groups. Goals for this presentation will include examining theories of kindness as resistance; learning and strategizing ways to implement best practices for these concepts; and recognizing various barriers and ways to address those. Students deserve to have a safe place to learn and we can create this in our own small spaces. Active learning and private and personal reflection will be incorporated throughout. For participants: Please bring examples of small acts of kindness have changed your experiences as we look at these to examine their effectiveness.