(Please excuse cross-postings)
The ACRL Technical Services Interest Group (TSIG) is meeting during the ALA Annual Conference in Philadelphia and invites you to join us for a program of three short presentations.
Date/time: Sunday, June 29, 10:30-11:30 AM
Location: Pennsylvania Convention Center, in room 118C
Presentations
The Unified Order Form: consolidating ordering streams to simplify Acquisitions workflows (and increase selector satisfaction!), presented by Thumy Webb
Like many academic libraries, our selectors are able to self-order some collections materials via services like GOBI and Rialto. All other orders must be processed by the Acquisitions team, who accept orders in different ways depending on the material type, but these multiple order streams create extra work for Acquisitions staff and cause confusion among selectors, especially new selectors. In an effort to make the ordering process more efficient for library staff, we created a unified order form, a one-stop resource for all orders that require Acquisitions' attention. The presentation will describe the process of creating the unified order form and will include preliminary research, selecting a technology, designing the form using Drupal 10, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and deployment (the form will go live on July 1, 2025).
Presenter Bio:
Thumy Webb is the Original Cataloging Librarian and former Electronic Resources Librarian at Rice University's Fondren Library in Houston, Texas. Thumy is Chair of the Core Conference Program Coordination Committee for ALA Annual 2025. She holds a BA in Mathematics and MLISc in Library Science from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Engaging Technical Services Librarians in a Professional Learning Practice to Improve Teaching Preparedness, presented by Junli Diao
This presentation reports the results of action research addressing the gap between having all librarians teach and technical services librarians' under preparedness to teach in a large university library system. A professional learning community (PLC) among technical services librarians with various teaching experiences was developed as an intervention to improve participants' teaching preparedness by sharing, discussing, and reflecting. The PLC learning topics included library teaching basics, motivating students, self-assessment, planning to teach, using Wikipedia for critical thinking, embedded librarianship and credit-bearing courses, teaching and research, and building a teaching portfolio and librarianship portfolio. The PLC used an implementation journal, reflective writing, and interviews to collect qualitative data and evaluate the learning outcomes. Based on the results, the presentation offers two practical implications for academic libraries, including valuing gap analysis to identify organizational problems and valuing internal librarians' talents to promote organizational learning. This presentation summarizes the value of PLC as a collaborative, bottom-up, democratic, professional development approach to improve the quality of technical services librarians' professional lives.
Presenter Bio:
Junli Diao is currently the Head of Cataloging and Serials / Associate Professor at York College Library, The City University of New York. In addition to technical services work, Junli equally participates in public and instructional services in the library. His current research interests focus on emerging issues in academic librarianship, including identity construction, information literacy pedagogy and innovations, text analysis of LIS professional literature. His previous research focused on the intersection of library, history and writing through the lens of comparative perspective.
Reimagining the Library Acquisitions Unit, presented by William Midgley and Kavita Mundle
Since 2020, our Acquisitions Unit experienced several significant staff member retirements and an increase in orders for electronic material, especially streaming media. Financial constraints limited the number of positions we were able to refill, but drawing on the skills of, and training opportunities for, current staff and librarians, we devised and implemented a thematic, hierarchical re-organization of the Acquisitions and E-Resources Units which allowed us to declutter and clarify various employees' duties and workflows. This model allowed us to consolidate payment processes and provided new opportunities for staff training and specialization, and created new managerial opportunities for staff. This presentation will describe the rationale for our Acquisitions Unit reorg as well as the process of implementing it and the various challenges we overcame in implementing it.
Presenter Bio:
William Midgley is the Acquisitions Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Kavita Mundle is the E-Resources Librarian and Head of the Resource Acquisitions and Management Department at University of Illinois Chicago.
Thank you,
Alyssa Koclanes (ACRL TSIG Convener)
Isabella Pilar (ACRL TSIG Incoming Convener)
------------------------------
Alyssa Koclanes
Head of Cataloging & Metadata
Georgetown University Law Library
She/Her/Hers
------------------------------