ULA Annual Conference 2025

Outreach at academic libraries is vital in reaching and supporting students. However there are often hidden challenges for librarians attempting to start and maintain innovative and effective outreach initiatives. Outreach librarians from two different Utah higher education institutions will share their experiences and insights into how to navigate these challenges.

We will discuss the principles of experiential learning and how they can be applied to the development of student leads. These principles provide a strong foundation for enhancing the roles of student employees. Promoting student employees to lead positions can increase efficiency, collaboration, and connection within the workplace while fostering the lead student’s personal and professional growth. Student employee co-presenters who have been promoted to a lead position will tell their stories, highlighting how these roles have helped them develop leadership skills, refine their job competencies, and prepare for their future careers.

After a Library-wide realignment in 2023, USU Libraries created a new program, Archival Outreach & Instruction, to better emphasize outreach efforts for the Special Collections & Archives Department. This session will highlight the innovative ways this program has engaged with library, campus, and community partners, building systematic assessment tools, and securing administrative support to better highlight the unique collections and services the library provides.

Apart from having an unlimited budget, the ultimate library dream is to develop a future-proof, data-driven collection development strategy that is nimble and responsive to evolving technologies, user demand, and market trends. Easy, right? While this session does not have the secret holy grail strategy, it does provide A strategy . . . an A to Z strategy, to be precise.

This session will report on research done to better understand the landscape of archival publishing. This research compared the American Archivist with seven regional archival journals. The study used corpus analysis to compare the contents of the journals, an author analysis to understand who is publishing in the regional archival journals versus the American Archivist, and a citation analysis to examine the impact of the regional archival journals versus the American Archivist. The session will discuss how tools like corpus analysis, author analysis, and citation analysis can be used to understand the key issues in archival and library studies.

The updated RUSA guidelines encourage librarians to “engage in reference interactions that offer collaborative learning experiences.” However, the guidelines give little new information on how this can be accomplished beyond the traditional engagement tools that have always been encouraged. I suggest a way to change the reference transaction into a collaborative learning experience by drawing from educational tutoring theory and practices from writing centers.

The BYU library has housed the English’s writing center for the last eleven years. As part of this collaborative relationship, the English department trains and provides writing tutors to help students with their writing, and the library trains and provides research tutors to help students with the research process. Recently the library has begun to incorporate some of the educational principles taught on the writing side of this collaboration in addition to principles from the ACRL’s framework and RUSA guidelines for reference interviews. This new educational perspective on a reference interaction can have a transformative effect, making a reference interview become a richer collaborative learning experience for both the patron and librarian.

In the wake of rapid advancements in the general publics’ awareness and use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, the UVU Fulton Library has taken proactive steps to harness these tools for the benefit of its student community. This presentation will explore how the library responded positively to the rise of AI by educating our librarians and then developing and implementing a series of engaging workshops designed to educate and empower students to use AI tools ethically and effectively in the process of academic research. These workshops not only demystify AI tools but also provide practical skills that students can apply in their academic and professional lives. The UVU Fulton Library’s initiative to integrate AI education into its services has not only equipped students with valuable skills but also fostered a culture of innovation and curiosity. By sharing our story, we hope to inspire other institutions to embrace AI positively and create similar opportunities for their communities.

The BYU Library became aware of the history department’s need for internship opportunities that were on campus, paid, and relevant to historical research and potential employment opportunities. This session will outline how our library team developed internships to meet the needs of the history and family history majors, integrating into their larger, coordinated internship program. Students can select up to three modules to work on during their internship, giving them experience with multiple types of history related work done in libraries. We identified existing projects in our department to meet both the needs and interests of students in the history major and the ongoing work in our department. We hope that long-term investment in this internship program will pay off as these students move on to careers in the library field and possibly return to our institution or those in our community to work in the library field.

Since the arrival of the railroad in 1869, Ogden has been a place of diversity with people from different ethnicity, race, and religion coming to work and live within the city. For too long, the history of the area has neglected to acknowledge the impact of the various cultures and communities. The goal of “Ogden at its Core” was to change this scenario. This project began working with members of the various communities to gather, document, and preserve the history of the communities. We did not try to control or manage the narratives but provided them with avenues to preserve and share their histories.

Mid to late career librarianship is experienced differently by all of us, but can predictably have a powerful impact on our professional lives that can be measured and examined. For example, have you ever had a colleague say something like, "wow! you know everything about the library!" OR "you've been here that long!?" The mid to late career librarian can experience phenomena such as professional identity stressors, career plateaus, changing family responsibilities, leadership opportunities, burnout, political change, professional growth, working with younger generations, technology paradigm shifts, needs for refreshment & community, and plenty more. While this is well documented in the literature of management, private industry and elsewhere, the post-pandemic library is in a great position to foster this valuable conversation as we grow and contribute to the next generation of academic libraries. Panelists come from a variety of institutions in Utah and their panel interests follow:

This session will outline a process for achieving a participatory, function-focused organizational realignment on a 6-month timeline. Presenters will share an in-depth look at the activities, structure, and ultimate outcome of a recent reorganizational process for a collections-focused department that included visioning, conducting a functional analysis, and providing a space for participatory organizational modeling.

Libraries offer a range of programs and spaces that can be noisy, but many patrons come seeking a quite environment. We investigated the impact of noise on student stress in the library using wearable biomarker devices. We measured participants’ heart rate variability (HRV), skin temperature, and blood pressure while studying in loud and quiet areas. We also surveyed participants about their overall stress, well-being, and reasons for visiting the library. Our research can be used to inform future programing and space allocations in libraries.