SENYCon: SENYCon2017

Claudia Depkin, Haverstraw King's Daughters Public Library

Casey Conlin, Poughkeepsie Public Library District

Following up on last year’s SENY-Con presentation, the NYLA Sustainability Initiative would like to provide an update on our exciting progress in the last year. We’ll cover the Road Map print and app editions, benchmarking tools that can be implemented now, and the kickoff of our training module Agents of Change at NYLA Annual 2017.

Lois Parker-Hennion, Tappan Zee High School

Looking for inspiration and support? Teaching Tolerance provides educational materials—from articles that make you think to presentations you can share. These resources are designed to help teachers improve their practice and turn K-12 schools, colleges, and public libraries into strong communities that welcome diversity, giving all people an opportunity to learn. In this workshop librarians will be introduced to the Teaching Tolerance website, its magazine, the free materials available to every school and library, the webinar series, and Perspectives for a Diverse America, literacy based curriculum that marries anti -bias social justice content with the rigor of the Common Core Standards.

Sarah Hughes, Dominican College

Rodney Hoffner, Dominican College

What started out as a simple organizational change in how books were physically arranged on shelves evolved into a reinvention of Sullivan Library’s course reserves service. Historically, the library had difficulty finding out what students needed each semester due to lack of communication from faculty and instructors.  Despite sending out multiple plea emails and creating an easy to fill out webform for placing reserve requests, faculty was still not biting. Aiming to please our students, we did the unthinkable. We approached the library bookstore asking for their master list of what faculty requested. The bookstore list along with the creation of student request form located at our circulation desk proved to be a winning combination.  The library was able to expand the niche collection that had largely been ignored. We found that students highly satisfied that we purchased expensive texts that they could not otherwise afford. Additionally, our reserves circulation stats have significantly increased. We will detail all the steps we took along the way, the unexpected challenges and how to approach staff members who have difficulty dealing with change to a collection’s organization.

Working Creatively

Heather Gorman, Newburgh Free Library

In this training, emphasis will be placed on working as a creative process. Cultivating a creative process in our work life will allow us to change our work from an impersonal process to a personally innovative and inspired future. The topics we will cover: work process, automation verses analog, procrastination, collaboration, accomplishments, and acknowledgment.

Gretta Tritch Roman, Bard College

Mary Verrelli, Bard College

Noah Segal-Gould, Bard College

Arti Tripathi, Bard College

Emma Popkin, Bard College

Sahal Hussain, Bard College

Over two weeks during the winter break of 2017, five Bard College students (with the guidance of the Experimental Humanities Digital Projects Coordinator and the expertise of the Experimental Humanities Developer) conceived, designed, and built the content of an interactive website on the subject of apple cultivation in northern Dutchess County, New York: https://projects.eh.bard.edu/hvapples/ The students enriched their project, connecting it to place and their experience, by building relationships with local historians at Historic Red Hook as they worked in their archives, as well as a community of apple growers in Dutchess County, informally interviewing them on visits to their farms. The aim of this project began with the intent to provide a case study of economic changes in agriculture as they affected apple farming in northern Dutchess County. During the two weeks of the project's production, however, we realized how studying the cultivation of apples instead demonstrated the economic changes. In order to study the rise of apple crops in Hudson Valley agriculture, we traced a family tree of Red Hook family, the Fraleighs, the owners of Rose Hill Farm, from the 18th century to the present, alongside the history of apples as they emerged as an essential crop on Hudson Valley farms. Other features of the website include a database of 800+ apple cultivars, a scientific investigation of the historic process of cider making, and reflections on visits with local growers.

Jen Park, Mount Saint Mary College

In order to further library outreach efforts to students outside the classroom, focus was placed on reaching out to Resident Assistants (RA) through Residence Life at Mount Saint Mary College. A program menu was created to promote possible presentation topics. Each topic showcased an aspect of the library’s services and/or collection. Program titles and details listed in a campy diner menu format were presented to new incoming RAs. Whereas previous outreach to Residence Life was met with little success, the semester following the inception of the program menu not only saw a sharp increase in RA-driven library programs, but also strong attendance at these programs. The presenter will showcase the program menu, discuss why the menu resonated with the RAs, provide the most popular topics, and touch upon current and future collaborations that have resulted from this creative approach.

Courtney Wimmers, Mid-Hudson Library System 

This presentation will inform viewers about popular games that may not be on their radar, how to start programs related to those games at their library, and why such programs are important and can benefit the communities they serve.

Tina A. Kiernan, Dutchess Community College

With the implementation of LibGuides v.2.0, it was apparent that a significant restructuring of our research guides was necessary to make use of LibGuides updated functionality. As such, the Ritz Library redesigned their home page to provide a single entry point to our resources and also developed a template for subject research libguides reflecting best practices, thereby giving the library, faculty, staff and most importantly, students more detailed resources at their fingertips.

This presentation will briefly review our new homepage and will take a step-by-step look at the subject-guide template as well as discuss the feedback garnered by our focus group study.

Marla Gruner, SUNY Ulster County Community College

Tess Hartman-Cullen, SUNY Ulster County Community College

We are teaming up with faculty on specific research assignments. It began with a Western Civ project that requires students to find a specialized encyclopedia entry, a scholarly journal article and a biography. Students were required to have their sources verified by a librarian. This increased our quality contact time with students and gave us the opportunity to demonstrate our value in a tangible way to students and faculty. We are expanding this semester with the Human Services department. The best part about the project has been interacting with students who would not normally seek assistance from a librarian. Many of the Western Civ students have come back to ask for help on other projects as well. Anecdotally, we've heard that the grades on the project improved too.

Jeremy Hall, Bard College

A presentation on Bard College's use of Digital Commons as its institutional repository and the challenges that we have faced.

Stephan J. Macaluso, Sojourner Truth Library, SUNY at New Paltz

Katherine Zipman, Sojourner Truth Library, SUNY at New Paltz

Eddie Faro, Sojourner Truth Library, SUNY at New Paltz

Reflective, creative exploration of objects -- even the most ordinary objects -- can greatly enrich our thinking and embodied knowledge.  Manipulating, listening to, or watching an object closely can help you conceptualize ideas and develop metaphors; and stimulate new ways of understanding the world around you.  This arts-informed research practice, which draws from collage and found-object sculpture, can be a powerful way to build empathy with staff and with patrons.

In this presentation, participants will interact with ordinary objects in order to unpack SENYLRC’s new mission and vision statements, and develop a multi-layered concept map of words, phrases, metaphors and emotions.  This technique can be used to elicit user feedback for any library documentation or service, resulting in greater insights into whether what your library intends to say is what your patrons understand and value.