Session Descriptions

Better Together: Developing a Dynamic Team

Presenters: Gracie Armstrong & Christina Riedel

This session will focus in on the most important asset in the library….our team! Building relationships, utilizing talents, encouraging, empowering, and engaging staff to cultivate a culture that feels supportive. It is crucial in times of change and difficulty that strong teams rally to one another to be of service to their teammates and serve patrons to the best of their abilities. This training will include team-building ideas, ways to empower staff, developing your communication strategies and options to allow for more staff input. Infusing more joy, creativity, mercy, and grace can make amazing things happen in libraries!

Learning Objectives:

· Enhance culture and build dynamic team environments

· Strive to be your best for your teammates

· Discover ways to fully utilize your talents and the talents of your teammates

· Finding more joy in projects and strength during challenges because of your investment in your team

The Importance of Practicing Self Care in Today’s World

Presenter: Karen Swoopes

What is self-care and why is it important?

Merriam-Webster tells us that self-care means to “care for oneself.” While accurate, this does not really tell us much. Oxford Dictionaries does a better job and tells us that self-care is “the practice of taking an active role in protecting one's own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress.”

The seven types of self-care are:

• Emotional self-care.

• Physical self-care.

• Mental self-care.

• Social self-care.

• Spiritual self-care.

• Practical self-care.

• Professional self-care.

I will highlight strategies to overcome our resistance to practicing self-care.

Learning Objective: Participants leave with one thing they will begin practicing on their self-care journey.

Keep Growing: Continuing Education as a Lifestyle

Presenters: Caitlyn Haley, Cindy Matthews, & Anne Osborne (Assistant Directors at Red River, Stones River, & Buffalo River Regional Libraries, respectively)

Odds are, if you’re attending this conference, continuing education matters to you. We may be preaching to the choir here. But – if you feel boxed in by your current role, or limited in general, let’s talk about how to grow with CE. As support staff, you’re the most public facing group of people in the library. Y’all are the ones the public thinks of when they think of the library. As you begin to pursue trainings and prioritize CE, your ability to serve the public only gets better. You’ll learn about why we value certain ethics and why catalogers have their own secret language; why we have certain circulation procedures and why children’s librarians are a rare and special breed. The knowledge grows and you become more aware and understanding of the library as a whole. This also gives you the opportunity to voice your opinion, make suggestions, contribute to the betterment of the library, and pursue leadership opportunities. As libraries, we often encourage lifelong learning, but sometimes, we’re not so good at following our own advice. Let’s walk the walk. CE opens up doors. Come on in!

Expected Learning Objectives:

1. Understand the foundations of continuing education and how it contributes to a greater library

2. Discuss how to find opportunities to grow within the parameters of CE and training.

Public Libraries + Academic Libraries = Partners in Access to Information

Presenters: Caren Nichter, Cataloging Librarian, University of Tennessee at Martin And Ronne Jones, Library Supervisor, University of Tennessee at Martin

The Paul Meek Library at the University of Tennessee at Martin serves an academic community of about 7,000 students as well as partnering with the public library in serving our small college-town of roughly 10,000. In the Northwest corner of Tennessee, Martin lies about 150 miles west of Nashville. The Martin Public Library is in a new building that opened in 2021. Each library was impacted by Covid restrictions, but we are collaborating to implement events that pull our community together. With this presentation, we will share events on which the libraries serving Weakly Co. have collaborated and the ways we see these programs as having benefited our mutual communities.

Public Library Core Competencies

Presenter: Lauri Thompson, CE Coordinator / TN State Library and Archives

The Tennessee State Library and Archives is proud to introduce the Core Competencies Certification. The competencies consist of 28 areas that every staff member should be proficient in. These units are the basis for a new online self-paced training in our learning management system, Niche Academy. In this session we’ll discuss how to meet the standards, how it can be used for evaluating current and future employees, and for outlining personalized professional development.

Learning Objectives:

• Familiarize the public library staff with the core competencies certification skills list

• Introduce Niche Academy

Relational Management for the Common Good.

Presenters: Nick Polk and Katie O’Connell

Support staff positions do not often come to mind in discussions about leadership, as much of the literature and circulating presentations are rooted in the private sector and aimed at upper managers and other organizational leaders. The purpose of this presentation is to offer an approach to management that aims at achieving the common good for everyone involved in the library circulation process. To reach this goal, we will argue management styles should be developed and embodied for the instillment of freedom in support staff, in a relational focus rooted in human relationships. This allows support staff to develop in leadership themselves within their position, as we do under the librarians and leadership at our library, and further allows support staff to guide people they may manage, as we do with student workers. By shifting the locus of management from success through individual accumulation of power to the nurturing of shared wellbeing through the mutual need for recognition and creating space for others, libraries can better retain staff, share a collective sense of creativity, and inspire others.

Learning objectives:

· Learning about an alternative approach to management that focuses on and is rooted in relationships

· Gaining practical knowledge about how to implement relational management methods and procedures

· Understanding how relational management relates to circulation and the overall work of libraries

Study Room Utilization and Analysis with Tableau

Presenters: Ben Darling & Stephanie Morgan from Vanderbilt Libraries’ Walker Management Library

In 2017, the Walker Management Library underwent extensive, award-winning renovations. These renovations included 21 reservable Study Rooms, or “Teams Rooms” as we call them. The rooms can be reserved by Management School Students up to 72 hours in advance and by Faculty & Staff any time. We know these rooms are popular; thus, we have performed an analysis by pulling the data from EMS, our room management software, and visualizing it in Tableau. We would like to display and discuss these visualizations and what the data tells us as well as how they influenced the procedures for reserving rooms going forward. We will also touch upon how campus social-distancing protocols effected room usage and our attempts at developing signage to reflect these protocol changes as well as the challenges faced.

Expected Learning Objectives: Insight into how to use data visualizations to analyze space usage in your library

Toward Tomorrow: Decompressing and Reflecting on Supporting Your Self-Care, Life, and Work

Presenter: Krista Vaught

After two days of sessions, you're zooming away with a lot of new information, connections, and inspiration. How can you leverage the end-of-conference momentum and implement what you've learned?

Join us for this light, reflective and interactive session to support you in decompressing amid the cognitive overload, and in accepting that maybe you don't need to act on every piece of information and idea you've gathered. You'll have opportunities to reflect and share or listen, as you process your takeaways from the conference. Our goal is for you to leave this finale with practical ideas on how to inch forward in one or more areas of your life and work, including your self-care.

Utilizing Usability Testing for Designing Instructional Research Guides

Presenter: Jessica McClure, Virtual Instruction Librarian at the University of Memphis and Carl Hess

Description: Jessica McClure, Virtual Instruction Librarian at the University of Memphis will describe how to utilize usability testing, website navigation techniques, and library instruction methods to redesign the research guides for academic communities. She will describe how a team of librarians and library staff did this with their research guides to enhance the libraries’ online presence.

Learning Objectives:

• Develop task scenarios for effective usability testing

• Use qualitative data gathered to design an instructional research guide

• Incorporate scaffolding, multimedia, and website navigation techniques when designing a research guide