Back in Circulation Again 2024

Do you want to learn how to build "Themed Engaging Activities that Motivate" and inspire your TEAM? This presentation shows how to start from a need or a simple idea and craft training to meet the needs of your team using the time you have available. In this workshop you'll learn meet the training needs of your team including promoting excellent customer service, safety, shelf maintenance, team cohesiveness, and more. Twelve monthly activity training template ideas will be provided as a resource, such as Customer Service Bingo, Skill Balloon Hunt, Snack Chats, I SPY and more. In addition, you will have the opportunity to build your own training activity and specialize it to meet your team and organization's needs during the workshop.

"Ready, Set, Advocate" is an entire advocacy toolkit for any library to utilize for building a platform from which to create an advocacy platform from. It is robust enough to appeal to all library types, and the speakers have experiences in a variety of libraries. The presentation talks about a continuum of the advocacy process from concept development through execution and beyond. “Ready” covers the development of the issue to advocate. “Set” covers the prep work required to form the message. “Advocate” covers the execution of the plan. All three topics are covered in this broad based presentation. The intended audience of this presentation is all library staff; from entry level through executive.

Learn more about how our library has implemented kanban boards to enhance our student assistant experience. Kanban boards are a tool to help manage and visualize workflows and processes. They have helped our students become more independent in their work and has strengthened their decision-making skills while increasing productivity. During our session, we will help you create your own personal or shared kanban board and tell you more about how we have successfully utilized them in our library!

We often equate hard work with progress. However, the key to true productivity and fulfillment lies in working smarter, not harder. This session will focus on efficiency, innovation, and effective time management.

By leveraging technology, streamlining processes, and prioritizing tasks, we can achieve more with less effort. Working smarter means setting clear goals, delegating when necessary, and continuously seeking improvement. It's about finding the optimal path to success, rather than continuing a process because we have always done it that way.

In fall 2023, Technical Services and Access Services at The College of New Jersey began cross-training staff members. Due to attrition, we were short staff members who have the authority, skills, and experience required to make professional judgments in regard to unique patron interactions in Access Services. Tasks for each of these units have dramatically changed over the years due to increasing electronic resources and technology advances allowing for more automation. With continued budget constraints, we needed to holistically rethink workflows across all library units. As a step in ongoing organizational realignment, four staff members from Technical Services agreed to work two hours a day at the Circulation desk to ensure positive patron interactions with patrons and to keep the desk open during key business hours. Our presentation will map the shared knowledge and skills that the Technical Services staff members already possess with the knowledge and skills needed In Access Services. We will also discuss the benefits of having staff members in both units working closely together as they collaborate on shared workflows and recommend further streamlining. Direct feedback from staff members reflecting on how their cataloging and other technical skills benefit the work of the Access Services (and how being immersed in the processes of Access Services benefit the work of Technical Services) will be presented.

What kind of "personality" does your academic library have? If it is anything like Fondren Library’s was pre-pandemic, it might be described as traditional, quiet, serious, or staid and the events offered by the library would probably fit into that description as well. That is until Fondren staff got the library party started by creating an events’ committee for promoting library resources and services! This session will explore the evolution of Fondren’s library events and events’ committee beginning with our offering of minimally planned "study breaks” organized by the Circulation department, to scheduling online events during the pandemic, to planning and implementing major year-round fun events involving all of the library staff and departments for library promotion. We will also discuss how to bring often introverted library staff together to form an events’ committee and provide practical tips as to how any library can get the party started! We will also review what events have been wildly successful at the library as well as some of our “duds'' and why the events turned out that way.

Session participants will learn how to plan and implement small to large events, how to make the events more inclusive, how to truly listen to students for the kind of events they would like to have, and how to include non-patron facing library staff in collaboration for the event.

Libraries, especially public libraries, went through a major service model revamp as a response to the pandemic. As we reviewed services, programs, and how we interacted with the public, it also revealed how much public libraries need to rely on the perspectives and expertise of all staff to provide meaningful services and programs. As middle managers, how do we do that? In the past two and a half years as a branch manager, I have consciously attempted to share decision making and authority with employees while concurrently providing clear expectations and support. Join me in this discussion. I’ll share how I’ve built relationships with employees to help them identify their expertise and ability to problem solve with their colleagues and stopped being an obstacle for my employees being able to recognize and embrace their leadership skills and the challenges I encountered or am still encountering. I look forward to learning from participants what strategies have worked for them or what they are working on changing.

Over a decade ago, the Wisconsin State Law Library shifted many of its manuals and documentation to an internal staff wiki. Learn how the library set its initial goals for an online staff manual, and how those markers of success have changed over the years. Walk away from this session with a step-by-step plan to develop and improve your own knowledge sharing platforms.

What strengths do librarians who have previously worked in public libraries bring to the academic library environment, specifically the Access Services unit? Public librarians sometimes struggle to get their foot in the door when applying for academic librarian positions but often offer specific strengths to this new environment. Access Services, with its strong public-facing role in the library, can be a particularly good fit. This session considers the similarities and differences between public library and academic library Access Services as well as the strengths and different perspectives that public librarians bring to this area of the academic community, some of which may be overlooked. Pulling from her own personal experience transitioning from public to academic libraries and from research, the presenter will explore this experience to suggest our profession broadens our perspective when hiring.