I had hoped to hand my camera to a stranger and get a nice picture of me smiling beside the poster session on Friday . . . but something MUCH better happened. This is the only shot I got because so many people came by that I never got a chance. The crowds at the poster sessions this year were downright Biblical in size and it was so validating to talk with so many other teaching librarians who are having some of the same challenges we have at UMW.

How do you help professors to remember what it’s like to be an undergraduate and guide them to respond to their students with research help that is appropriate for “beginning” researchers and truly helpful?

How do you introduce professors to the overwhelming new formats and technologies that have sprung up since they were doing their own intense library research for their dissertations?

And how do you do both of these things in a way that acknowledges faculty’s strong intelligence and deep commitment to scholarship and teaching and that cements the relationship between professors and librarians rather than straining it?

At the session, “Why do they do that? Helping Professors to Understand Undergraduate Information-Seeking Behavior (And Vice Versa)” I shared some tools that I used to try to address these challenges in a workshop for our First Year Seminar faculty. All 300 sets of handouts disappeared and at least 40 more people gave me their cards for follow-up. Thank you! Word versions of the documents are available on this site under the Toolkit tab, and I will be updating and adding other versions and materials when I get back to the campus next week.

Craig Wheeler, Humanities Reference Librarian at Texas A&M, Commerce, and Maria Hudson Carpenter, Library Advancement & Communications Officer at Northeastern University in Boston, get ready to make some noise at the highly unusual workshop “Facilitation and Experiential Techniques for Changing Behaviors in Library Work Teams” on Friday at ACRL. Instead of quietly absorbing the usual panel discussion, forty happily surprised librarians found ourselves banging drums, clanging cowbells, and learning-by-doing in a drumming circle conducted by workshop leader Keith Russell, a University of Kansas librarian and organizational development expert.

Just the warmup we needed for the luncheon keynote address from Baltimore native son and outrageous filmmaker John Waters. What a stream. What a consciousness. What a stream of consciousness. Waters strode to the platform wearing silver sneakers, a retro polyester dude suit, and his trademark slick hair and slender mustache and launched an hour long NC-17 rated tour of his Mondo that would make Robin Williams look mainstream and slightly sedated. Too bad there were no recording devices allowed.
The takeaway? “If you can make the enemy laugh that’s the first step in negotiation.” Must be something to it, because I was whooping so hard I can’t make a valid case for having been offended . . . although even at the time I was thinking, “I cannot really be laughing at THAT!”

Well, it has started off with as close to a tent revival as 3,000 librarians are ever going to get! Michael Eric Dyson, the prolific and sometimes controversial author of more than a dozen books on American culture, dug down to his academic roots and to his training as an ordained Baptist minister and delivered a virtuoso keynote address this afternoon as ACRL’s 13th National Conference opened in Baltimore. There is no way to capture Dyson’s dynamic speech, which wove poetry-slam renditions and lit-crit of hip hop lyrics with dead-on impersonations of Bill Cosby and quotes from Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The man can teach. The man can preach. And his message was that academic and research librarians have the power to radically change young lives, the wherewithal to make sure that the truth gets found and heard in an oppressive ignore-the-people-at-all-costs political climate, and the downright sacred commission to do both. Call me a sap, but I’ve believed it all along. I’ve heard it a lot from the the ALA and the ACRL in watered down, insipid versions that quote Jefferson and yammer on about democracy. But Dyson made me proud. He made me want to shout and jump out of my chair. I would have given him an Amen if he’d asked for one. . . and the huge ballroom full of librarians present did give him a standing ovation. Well deserved. If I don’t get another dime’s worth of inspiration out of the conference, I will be satisfied. Kudos, too, to Joel B. Thornton–a Spectrum diversity initiative scholar who will soon earn his Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of North Texas. He introduced Dyson eloquently, gracefully, and with a lot of heart. Great start.