Burnout is not a "you problem", it's a systemic problem. Combatting the question "How can you solve your burnout?", this session will analyze systems and structures that overburden staff and lead to burnout. It will focus on on-demand services, liaison librarian models, and how a whole team can set boundaries -- together.
Participants will: 1. Be able to evaluate their library's systems as they relate to librarian burnout. 2. Understand that burnout is a systemic issue, and is not a personal failing on their part. (This lightning talk intends to be validating and supportive to librarians experiencing burnout.)
For many schools implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is already a driving force for designing engaging and accessible learning spaces.This session will introduce you to LUDIA, the no cost AI-powered UDL thought partner. During this brief time I will demonstrate how to use LUDIA to create lessons for your credit-bearing classes or one-shots that align with the updated UDL 3.0 framework. The latest modifications to the UDL framework will also be discussed.
Participants will be able to: 1. use LUDIA, a no cost thought partner agentic chatbot aligned with UDL 3.0, to design a one shot which optimizes choice, supports multiple ways to perceive information, and cultivates community.
2. explain the purpose of using UDL as a mindset and not a checklist of strategies as they learn how to identify and reduce learning barriers, and discover the power of Artificial Intelligence for inclusive learning design.
This lightning talk highlights how collaborative teaching partnerships with community organizations can expand the reach of special collections libraries and make preservation knowledge and expertise more accessible. Through shared instruction and hands-on demonstrations, librarians and educators can provide practical guidance to diverse communities on caring for family and community materials such as photographs, books, textiles, and other primary source material. By addressing these issues beyond the library, we can assist the public in accessing environmental risks, and in setting preservation priorities. By working together as partners, we strengthen community engagement and help ensure that diverse histories are recognized, protected, and preserved for future generations. I offer a concise overview of a collaborative instructional model that features slides and samples of family treasures and their preservation.
Participants will: 1. See the value in going outside the traditional sphere of service and teaching and note the value of extending preservation teaching beyond traditional instructional settings
Thursday May 7, 2026 4:36pm - 4:43pm EDT Main Salon A
Student success librarianship is a rapidly growing area of practice, yet it remains conceptually fuzzy—positioned somewhere between traditional classroom instruction and student affairs programming. As a result, campus partners often struggle to understand what library instruction looks like outside the one-shot or credit-bearing course, and librarians struggle to articulate their instructional role within cross-campus initiatives.
This lightning talk explores that ambiguity as a starting point rather than a problem to eliminate. Drawing on collaborative work with multiple student success partners, the presenter introduces a cognitive, affective, and behavioral student success framework developed to create a shared language for collaboration, planning, and assessment. Rather than forcing library work into classroom or student affairs models, the framework helps partners understand how student success librarianship and cross-campus collaboration operates at the border of both—supporting learning, belonging, and student action through informal and co-curricular contexts.
Participants will be able to: 1. Explain why student success librarianship is conceptually ambiguous across campus contexts and how this ambiguity affects collaboration and assessment. (Bloom’s: Understand) 2. Apply a cognitive–affective–behavioral framework to articulate shared goals with partners, define measurable outcomes, and support sustainable partnerships supports scalable, sustainable partnerships within their own institutions.
Libraries invest significant time and resources in creating self-paced online learning resources, yet usage and engagement often vary. As our library transitions to a new Integrated Library System and discovery layer, we must redesign instructional videos to show patrons how to use them. This lightning talk shares an ongoing user research project examining student preferences for short videos, interactive guides, and text-based resources that are on our website. Using pop-up interviews and moderated usability testing, we explore how students choose formats, how content type influences those choices, and how feedback can inform evidence-informed, sustainable instructional design.
Participants will be able to: 1. Apply findings from user research to make evidence-informed decisions when selecting learning resource formats for different instructional needs. 2. Identify scalable assessment methods for evaluating student preferences and the perceived effectiveness of self-paced library learning resources.
Partnering with our university’s program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and with the local public library district, University of Northern Colorado teaching librarians have created course-embedded instruction that expands the library curriculum to include transition skills for using public libraries now and after graduation. Public libraries offer a strong sense of connection to students’ home communities and by interactively collaborating with public libraries and planning for long-term access, our hope is that these students will be active and engaged library users and community members after graduation.
Participants will: 1. Discover strategies for designing inclusive library instruction that supports undergraduates with developmental and intellectual disabilities. 2. Recognize how collaboration with campus and non-campus partners fosters life-long connection and library engagement for non-traditional learners.
Many academic libraries struggle to engage faculty with special collections and digital scholarship tools. At our institution, history faculty rarely visited a special collection located nearby, and use of a digital humanities platform had declined. Librarians and archivists addressed this gap by hosting a one-hour open house during the department’s fall kickoff. The event featured an interactive icebreaker, hands-on primary source stations, and a demonstration of a digital humanities tool. As a result, the special collections experienced increased class visits, research consultations, and digital tool use. This lightning talk shares a replicable model for strengthening faculty collaboration and library engagement.
Participants will: 1. Identify key components of a low-barrier, collaborative open house model 2. Brainstorm ways to design similar events at their own institutions
This talk demonstrates how instruction librarians can help colleagues in non-teaching roles recognize and strengthen the instructional dimensions of their everyday work. While many library personnel don’t find themselves in front of a traditional classroom, nearly all library roles carry an instructional component. Whether answering an email, delegating tasks, staffing a public service point, documenting a workflow, or demonstrating a process, these non-classroom interactions all benefit from learner-centered communication and effective knowledge transfer. This session emphasizes building teaching confidence within the library itself, creating a ripple effect for extending instructional culture. Drawing on a professional development workshop developed at WVU Libraries, the talk illustrates how pedagogical theory and best practices can be shared with and applied by library personnel outside the teaching and learning department.
Participants will: 1. Identify opportunities for creating teachable moments in the course of daily library work. 2. Adapt strategies for fostering knowledge-sharing skills among non-instructional library colleagues to fit participants’ own organizations
Numeric ratings tell us students are satisfied—but not why, or where we're losing them. This presentation shows how adding open-ended comment fields to tutorial evaluations and applying sentiment analysis uncovered patterns in student frustration, confidence, and engagement that scores alone missed entirely. Drawing on over 4,000 student responses, I'll walk through practical approaches to collecting and analyzing qualitative feedback using natural language processing techniques. Specific examples illustrate how clusters of negative sentiment revealed gaps in research instruction, while positive patterns pointed to what was actually working. Attendees will leave with applicable strategies for implementing comment collection, conducting sentiment analysis on library feedback, and translating findings into concrete tutorial improvements. Relevant for instruction librarians, assessment coordinators, and anyone working to strengthen information literacy programs through student voice.
Participants will: 1. be able to identify low-cost feedback systems that they can embed in their own tutorials. 2. be able to describe the types of feedback students leave and how they can be used to improve tutorial design.
Generative AI has rapidly emerged, and, with many good reasons, so has opposition. Moving quickly through a timeline of technological disrupters within the last few decades, this talk will address the similar reactions and responsibility shifts for librarians over time. This will not be an endorsement of AI but rather an encouragement to embrace change and for librarians to be leaders as new technologies trend today. The themes of this talk emerged from the literature review for a forthcoming paper on the use, experiences, and perceptions of generative AI in library instruction.
Participants will: 1. reflect on the historical waves of disruptive technology in academic libraries 2. evaluate patterns in the librarian response.
