About the Editors

Our Research

Throughout the pandemic and into the current era, Meredith Saba, Michael Stoepel, and Chris Furno collaborated together on several projects across our 3 institutions, including a set of presentations at the annual IFLA World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) in Dublin, Ireland (July 2022) on the topics of:

• Changing information literacy practices at 3 AMICAL institutions during the COVID-19 period

• Emerging Reference and Information Services: Three Institutional Perspectives on Connecting with our Communities in a Post-Pandemic World

After speaking with many other IFLA members at the WLIC 2022 at our poster and presentation sessions, we were inspired to write this book as a result of the conversations we had about these topics in person. We believe these are “hot topics” of global interest right now in the present and will be in the future, for an international audience. We also concede from our observations and experiences that the information landscape and user experiences are rapidly and constantly changing in response to the recent launch of different tools, including the AI tool ChatGPT, and emerging social media platforms such as BeReal. Through conversations with peers across academic libraries, we have learned that some teaching and services that moved online, in direct response to the pandemic, have remained as an alternative to prepandemic, traditional options. This has allowed libraries to extend outreach to their academic community that didn’t necessarily exist or wasn’t fine-tuned prior to the onset of the pandemic era. In order for libraries to stay current with new technologies that enhance teaching and learning (as well as respond to user needs), support through continuing education and training, peer-to-peer learning, conferences, and publishing initiatives must be available to us. We also see this publication as an opportunity for an international library audience to glean rich and robust ideas across culturally diverse peers. We trust that our global readership will be able to contextualize, adapt, and utilize applicable material that improves current teaching and information services within a local context.