In addition to outside-of-work demands, library staff encounter a variety of situations every day that require emotional labor: In one library, an employee may have to de-escalate with a patron regarding a disagreement over checked-out items despite circumstances being out of staff’s control. In another, an employee may have to reinforce building policies or take in replacement fees they disagree with, while upholding a welcoming and pleasant demeanor. Elsewhere, staff are working within environments that may be subject to burdensome organizational policies that exacerbate emotional labor. This presentation focuses on the emotional labor often performed or taken on within Access Services departments as it relates to patron policies and processes and working environments. Specifically, this presentation will address ways that supervisors could assist in mitigating emotional labor through the lens of two different academic institutions, one public and one private. Lastly, the presenters will share current practices used at their institutions to acknowledge and offset emotional labor and improve services and working environments.

Chairs function as semiotic artifacts that communicate (and enforce) policies of access—belonging, permission, duration, visibility, care, and control—often more powerfully than signage or written rules .In a research library, access is often described in terms of credentials, circulation privileges, and opening hours. Yet the most persuasive access policies are frequently unspoken. They are built into the environment—into where we can sit, how long we can bear to stay, whether we can work with our bodies comfortably, and how visible we are while doing so. The chair, ordinary as it seems, is one of the library’s most powerful sign systems. Reading chairs semiotically reveals how the library communicates belonging and constraint, and it clarifies why Access Services—charged with welcoming, regulating, and caring for the conditions of use—sits at the heart of this material language.

A group of students is talking loudly in a designated silent study area. A staff member approaches, explains the policy, and asks them to lower their voices. The group quiets down briefly—then resumes. After a second interaction, the staff member must decide: continue negotiating, escalate, or walk away. Moments like this are routine in Access Services, yet the expectations for how to respond—and when to move beyond de-escalation—are often unclear.

In high-traffic academic libraries, staff navigate a wide range of situations, from low-level policy violations to repeated noncompliance and, at times, behavior that raises safety concerns. While de-escalation is an essential tool, it is not always effective, and in some cases may be unsafe to rely on, placing significant burden on frontline staff and leading to inconsistent or prolonged interactions.

Drawing on the experience of the Eugene McDermott Library at the University of Texas at Dallas, this session presents a layered, systems-based approach to safety. Attendees will explore practical strategies including clarifying policies so staff can enforce expectations consistently, identifying when de-escalation is appropriate and when escalation is necessary, and implementing security gates to define access expectations. The session will also cover defined escalation pathways based on the level of risk and structured incident documentation workflows. In addition, it considers how proactive measures such as aligning space and furniture with intended use and including matching seating types to noise expectations can help prevent issues before staff intervention is required.

Participants will leave with practical tools, language, and strategies they can implement immediately to reduce ambiguity, support frontline staff, and create environments where safety and access are mutually reinforcing.

As the cost of course materials continues to rise, academic libraries are increasingly called upon to provide innovative solutions that support affordability and student success. This presentation details a pilot initiative at a small research university with a diverse student body of over 2500 undergraduate and graduate students. Leveraging a donation-based, free-access model, this project provides textbooks to students with financial need on a prioritized basis and to all students thereafter, achieving a 61.4% circulation rate across our initial 166-volume collection.

Participants will learn about the strategies and workflows we have employed to launch and scale such a program, including
1. Interdepartmental Partnerships: Coordinating with campus partners such as Student Affairs to identify student needs and manage logistics.
2. Donation Strategy: Implementing the donation campaign and utilizing high-visibility donation spots across campus and residence halls.
3. Technology & Access: Managing a dedicated special collection in Alma with a two-phase lending program.
4. Community Engagement: Cultivating a culture of “paying it forward” by involving students in the project’s evolution, from identifying donation drivers via surveys to designing its visual identity through a logo contest.
5. Impact Assessment: Establishing metrics to measure success, including circulation statistics for the collection, student savings calculations, and qualitative feedback from borrowers to refine future iterations.

This session will provide a practical framework for libraries looking to extend their existing course reserve services into sustainable and community-based affordability initiatives.

In this presentation, we will share our article titled Interventions for Reducing, Preventing, or Overcoming Librarian Burnout: A Scoping Review published in the journal College & Research Libraries. This research uncovered more than four decades of research into burnout among librarians, revealing patterns of intervention and suggestions of little quantitative evaluation. Attendees will learn about the strategies recommended to manage librarian burnout going back as far as 1982. In addition to discussing the results of this study, we will outline the steps taken to complete the scoping review and share our suggestions for additional quantitative research. During Q & A, we hope to have a conversation about how Access Services librarians and library professionals are currently managing burnout as well as what the current perception of burnout and intervention is among the community.

Most academic library access services and circulation departments rely heavily on student employees, yet the cultures surrounding that work often develop informally, shaped more by habit than intention. Over time, this can result in unclear expectations, uneven accountability, attendance strain, and diminished student satisfaction. What happens when student workers are invited to help redesign the very structure they work in? Nevada State University Library undertook a collaborative, assessment-driven initiative in which student employees became partners in reimagining how an academic library access services department operates. Rather than imposing top-down policy changes, this project centered equity and shared responsibility by engaging student workers directly in defining employment policies, accountability standards, and the norms that shape their day-to-day experience at the desk. Grounded in data driven principles of student satisfaction and operational sustainability, the initiative tracked impact through retention trends, attendance patterns, and structured feedback including qualitative benchmarks measuring whether student workers felt satisfied, supported, included, and heard as members of the library team. This session will explore how co-design, transparent expectations, and intentional culture-building can transform student-led service desk models. Attendees will leave with adaptable, practical strategies for strengthening student worker satisfaction, promoting shared ownership, and building sustainable access services practices in their own libraries.

It began in June 2024 with the discovery of a virulent mold outbreak in the serials collection located in the Lower Level of a university library. It ended in June 2025 with a fire in the Lower Level. Between those two bookends of disaster, quite a lot happened…including the library enduring painful compromises with the university’s Safety and Risk Management team and experiencing fissures in its credibility with academic community allies. But the library also abided and endured and carried on with what needed to be done: serving its academic community. Due to those aforementioned painful compromises, the library lost 3,898 serial titles, 75,600 volumes, within the call number ranges of RC and Z in the Lower Level. In September 2024, mold was discovered on the library’s 3rd floor. Once again, parties met and discussed. But this time - the Library possessed the negotiation advantage. A remediation process of the whole 3rd floor, carried out by the same company who had worked in the Lower Level, took place between September 2024 and February 2025. Of the 530,186 books on that floor, only 29 were deemed at risk. And that should have been the end of the story. But…it was not. After university administration declared the mission accomplished, library staff discovered that books cleaned by the remediation company, a company who had performed similar work at other libraries, were out of order or upside down or not even on the shelves where they should be. Worse, it was all the books, on all the 3rd floor ranges. With no solution offered by university administration nor even an apology from the company, there was nothing left to do but to keep on shelf-reading and shifting, making things right again. As of April 2026 - 17,279 books on 107 ranges have been found out of order on the shelves on the third floor. Meanwhile, back in the Lower Level of the Library: On June 27, 2025 at 1:40am, a fire occurred. Fortunately, the fire suppression system worked as it should. Unfortunately, the combination of fire and smoke and water and soot still caused enough damage to keep the whole Lower Level shut down until a partial reopening on November 24, 2025. Thankfully, the remaining serials, though soot-covered, were unharmed (and, it was discovered by the new remediation team - these materials were also out of order or upside down or not even on the shelves where they should be). During the clean-up and renovations, services and staff were relocated to other floors in the library. What lessons can we and you, the attendee, take away from this tangled tale of moldy and charred woe? Though the library initially negotiated from a point of weakness, we found allies who added their strength to ours. At the start of this, the library and university administration bashed heads until both parties realized putting their heads together and creating solutions instead of conflict was the better strategy. Allies become foes and foes become allies. So do not burn your bridges because you might need to cross them again…and again. Finally - we all get knocked down but we get up again and do what we need to do on behalf of the community we serve.

Are your student workers wearing Meta glasses?

A patron’s right to privacy is a core value within the library profession. However, the rapid advancement of AI wearables has created a unique problem that must be addressed. In this presentation we will discuss some of the built-in smart features that are raising concerns surrounding privacy, including the ability to capture recordings with little to no detection. We will dive into why and how we created a “no AI wearables” policy for student workers to specifically address this dilemma, and share how we implemented it.

Facing significant and ongoing budget reductions, academic libraries are increasingly asked to do more with less – and sometimes, less again. This session presents a case study from a large academic library system that used data-informed decision making to navigate a 20–30% reduction in their student staffing budget. Presenters will share how they leveraged multiple data sources – including gate counts, occupancy data, and service point activity/printing demand – to make strategic decisions about hours of operation, staffing levels, and shift allocation. In addition, the student supervisor team developed a structured rubric to guide rehiring decisions for returning student employees, prioritizing reliability, communication, and job performance in a constrained hiring environment.

The session will also explore the implementation of more dynamic staffing models, including cross-training student employees and adjusting schedules to align with peak demand periods. Presenters will discuss both successes and challenges, including limitations of data quality, gaps in coverage, and the impact of reduced staffing on supervisors and full-time staff. Attendees will hear practical approaches for using data to inform staffing and service decisions, examples of tools and assessment methods, and considerations for adapting these approaches within their own institutions.

What happens when student employee training feels more like a game than a checklist? This session explores creative, game-based approaches to training and task management in an academic library setting. By reframing routine responsibilities as engaging, goal-oriented experiences, these initiatives increase motivation, deepen learning, and foster a stronger sense of connection to library work. This session will highlight practical examples, including a semester kickoff scavenger hunt, a platformer-style computer game, and a shelf-reading competition that promotes accuracy and teamwork. Attendees will see these approaches in action and gain adaptable strategies for designing interactive training experiences using a variety of media. Participants will leave with concrete ideas for making student employee training more dynamic, memorable, and effective in their own libraries.

After implementing Rapido, interlibrary loan activity grew substantially creating impacts on staff, staff training, and staff time. It also revealed substantial impacts on student success and research success for faculty and grad students. In this presentation I’ll discuss how we have approached balancing the impacts on staff in the face of limited resources, as well as how we are approaching promoting the value of resource sharing in terms of collection development, affordability, and the impact it has had on the campus.

When the Georgia Southern Libraries established the Emergency, Disaster Preparedness, & Sustainability Committee, its foundational charge was the development of a comprehensive Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP). This initiative successfully produced essential documents, including the formal Emergency and Disaster Preparedness policy, providing a theoretical framework for operational resilience.

However, the true test of this framework came unexpectedly. A widespread power outage, impacting not only the library and the greater campus but also the surrounding local community, revealed critical limitations in the initial COOP's practical application. The incident highlighted that while the foundational documents were in place, they did not adequately account for the minute-by-minute essential operational needs of front-line departments when all conventional technology and infrastructure failed. Specifically, the power loss exposed deficiencies in inter-departmental communication, staff accountability tracking, and the ability to maintain essential public services during total system downtime.

Spearheaded by the Access Services Department, this significant incident served as a catalyst for a departmental-level reassessment prompting a comprehensive departmental reassessment. Guided by external best practices like the Climate and Worker Health Scorecard from the Health Action Alliance, the department shifted from a general institutional framework to a human-centric, actionable continuity approach. This transformation led to implementing practical, low-tech, and institution-independent solutions, ensuring seamless communication. The presentation will detail this pivot, focusing on key department-specific tools developed for sustained preparedness:
- The Monthly Emergency Supplies Checklist: A mandatory, verifiable procedure for stocking critical non-electronic resources.
- The Revised Training Schedule: Mandatory, hands-on, scenario-based exercises for front-line staff on manual procedures and using new digital communication tools during simulated outages.

The Access Services team will share this evolution as a blueprint for other library departments to achieve true resilience by transitioning from theoretical COOPs to worker-supported operational strategies using real-world incidents and resources like the Climate and Worker Health Scorecard.

The frequent turnover of access services positions leads to a constant cycle of hiring, training, and administrative work. It can be exhausting. This presentation looks at the development of comprehensive onboarding and offboarding checklists designed to reduce stress and ensure that no critical step is missed. Attendees will learn how to create their own onboarding and offboarding checklists tailored to access services departments.

Learning Objectives:
Identify the core components of an effective onboarding/offboarding checklist tailored for access services.
Analyze strategies for maintaining and updating checklists to ensure accuracy.
Evaluate how checklists can mitigate supervisor burnout.

Access Services is often framed simply as an entry point in librarianship, but what if it’s actually a critical foundation for work across the library? This lightning talk traces my trajectory from Access Services student supervisor and circulating technology specialist to my current faculty librarian role, illustrating how public-facing experience directly informs all library practice. By examining how frontline insight of user behavior and circulation workflows translates into more effective technical services decisions, this session hopes to showcase Access Services as essential to work beyond the desk. Attendees will leave with knowledge on how I apply an Access-minded approach to my current cataloging and metadata work and how to articulate the professional and transferable value of an Access background in their own library career paths.

User Services staff became overwhelmed at the check-out (or circulation) desk by loaning out anatomy & physiology (A&P) models to students either prior to or during their practical exam weeks which occurs three times a semester. In addition, based on the quantity of the models, some students were left at a disadvantage of obtaining certain models due to our existing 2-hour check out policy during high traffic time periods. As a remedy, the User Services department teamed up with the A&P department to create a dedicated reviewing room (or study space) where A&P students could collaboratively access all required anatomical models in one space during their exam periods. Since its Fall 2025 inception, the space has welcomed more than 1,000 student visits, providing an invaluable resource for A&P exam preparation.

Improve your Library Management System implementation process with these ten tips! Implementation of library systems is often thought of as specifically in the wheelhouse of Library IT and Technical Services, and Access Services departments are often overlooked due to their front-facing role. However, Access Services staff are uniquely situated to help implementation projects succeed due to their understanding of patron needs, involvement in interdepartmental workflows, and knowledge of library services.

The presenters will share what they have learned through the past 18 months of their LMS implementation process, including best practices for Access Services Departments at a large, academic library. The Circulation and Stacks Management staff involved in this system transition will share helpful guidance for moving to a new LMS, including Ten Tips we wish we knew before beginning the process. These tips include setting realistic expectations and timeframes, effective communication amongst working groups, and hosting tailored training sessions. Emphasis will be placed on Access Services’ role and maintaining the human element throughout this process.

Attendees of this session will be able to identify and avoid potential pitfalls in system implementation processes. By the end of the presentation, participants will be able to confidently apply our experiences (Ten Tips) in LMS implementation for Access Services to their own libraries’ projects, whether they are major library systems implementations, or smaller change management projects.

As academic library collections continue to shift from print to digital, traditional interlibrary loan (ILL) models do not fully support the current landscape. Consortial borrowing services like EZBorrow, which have driven innovations in the sharing of physical materials, are looking to evolve the current strategies to support scalable sharing of ebooks and other digital resources.
This presentation will explore how PALCI (Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation) is addressing these challenges through the EZBorrow Digital Task Force. The task force was formed in response to the recommendations of PALCI’s 2025 Futures Task Force. The first outcome of the Digital Task Force was to develop and release a Digital Sharing Strategy. The hope is that the Strategy is the beginning of making e-book lending as seamless as physical borrowing by outlining pathways for enabling e-book lending across institutions.

We will explore the core challenges of ebook ILL today, including the lack of interoperable systems and the absence of workflows for digital lending that can fit all libraries, big and small. In response to the challenges, PALCI has put forward a set of foundational principles to guide this work that are grounded in practical and scalable solutions based on open lending standards like ISO 18626.

The session will also highlight early-stage pilot efforts and provide an update on outputs from two subgroups: the Legal Frameworks for Sharing - Licensing & Copyright Group and the User Experience and System Requirements Group.

By sharing PALCI’s progress, this presentation aims to discuss how libraries can help shape the future of digital resource sharing.

After a decades-long wait to receive state funding to renovate our aging medium-sized academic library, we began the design process to bring us up to date with accessibility and safety requirements, and to determine how we might increase student study spaces. Ultimately, that led us to the realization that we would need to reduce our stacks circulating collection by 30% and then transfer those removed items to either remote storage, to a non-profit for digitization, or to recycling. We’ll discuss our space planning and design processes, how we chose what to remove from the stacks collection and the methods of removal, the issues that arose and how we overcame them, and where we currently stand in our renovation timeline.

Providing exceptional customer service, efficiently and effectively circulating materials, and building confidence and durable skills in student employees is the responsibility of every academic library’s Access Services department.

Over the past few years the co-investigators independently created online courses within the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) in an effort to streamline student employee onboarding, training processes, and regular communications with student employees at their home institutions; a medium private university in Southern California and a medium public university in the Great Plains. This presentation will share preliminary findings of a cross-institutional study investigating the effectiveness of those Canvas courses. Our study, a survey of Access Services student employees at both institutions, seeks to better understand how effective the Canvas courses are at preparing students to perform their job duties; how well the Canvas courses build confidence in their ability to meet expectations; and which delivery methods of the information are most effective (week-to-week modules, up front training, videos, text, screenshots, quizzes, hands-on practice, and more). We also examine whether students return to the LMS as a functional knowledge base for troubleshooting during shifts, or if it remains a 'one-and-done' exercise. The study includes a pre-test survey to gauge student confidence before participating in the Canvas course and an assessment survey once they have completed it.

Our presentation will include an overview of both Canvas courses, details of our survey tools, and an early analysis of the data. We will also demonstrate how specific aspects of an LMS training course can be adapted to suit the specific needs and culture of different institutions. We will save 10-15 minutes at the end of the presentation to answer questions and collect feedback from attendees to better inform our final analysis.

Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the effectiveness of using an LMS for training library student workers, a framework for assessing the new and existing training programs at their home institutions, and a better understanding of how to bridge the gap between "completing training" and "confidently performing the work" for their student employees.

As academic libraries transition from quiet study spaces into active hubs of creation and innovation, Access Services units are increasingly positioned at the forefront of experiential learning. Traditionally associated with stacks and circulation, frontlinelibrary staff now sustain the "hidden infrastructure" that enables technological innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and applied learning/. This presentation explores how the development of a fabrication program within an academic medical library has transformed Access Services.

The Evolution of "Other Duties"
What began in 2015 as a modest initiative, a $5,000 grant supporting a single printer, has grown into a multi-campus operation producing over 10,000 anatomical models annually. Central to this growth represents a massive shift in "other duties," including:
Technical Troubleshooting: Learning and maintaining complex machinery (Stratasys, processing equipment).
Logistical Management: Expanding services across Missouri, California, and Arizona campuses and faculty/students in adjunct or rotations.
Instructional Design: Creating LibGuides, workshops, and staff training modules that didn't exist a decade ago.

The Bridge Between Theory and Practice
Access Services staff now serve as critical connectors between clinical theory and hands-on application. By supporting the design and production of medical models and research prototypes, they provide the scaffolding for design thinking and skill development among future healthcare professionals—work that is rarely captured in traditional library metrics.

Civic Infrastructure and Crisis Response
The expansive scope of "other duties as assigned" became strikingly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic and in subsequent STEM outreach initiatives. In moments of crisis and opportunity alike, library staff extended their roles beyond traditional boundaries to function as essential civic infrastructure.
Pivot to emergency manufacturing, producing face shields and masks for local health partners, medical and dental students, faculty, and staff on all campuses and in rotations. This work positioned the library as a critical node in regional health response efforts
Launch STEM outreach to underprivileged K–12 students, serving not only as educators but as mentors and recruiters into health science careers pathways. These programs expanded the library’s role in workforce development and community engagement.
Develop patented medical models (like the ballistic gel spine), demonstrating that library labor contributes directly to scholarly innovation and translational research.

Positioning the Library as an Active Partner
This session provides a framework for libraries to recognize and formalize the hidden work of Access Services. We will discuss strategies for gaining institutional support for "non-traditional" labor and for positioning the library not just as a repository but as an essential engine for teaching and research.

Learning Outcomes
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Redefine Access Services: Describe how frontline staff support experiential learning and interdisciplinary research through "hidden" fabrication workflows.
Navigate Scalability: Identify practical steps for scaling a service from a single printer to a multi-campus operation, focusing on staffing models and "other duties" management.
Support Student Innovation: Explain how library-led prototype clubs can strengthen peer learning and applied skill development.
Advocate for Civic Role: Develop ideas for integrating community STEM outreach to align the library’s technological labor with the institutional mission of equity.
Quantify "Invisible" Impact: Assess methods to demonstrate value using usage data, patent outcomes, and the success of community partnerships.

No GPS, No Textbook: A Road Trip Through Course Reserves and Access Equity tells the story of how course reserves at the GSU Clarkston Campus Library became more than a service—they became a way of guiding students who are navigating college without a map. Presented by a father–daughter–style team—a Library Technical Assistant grounded in access services and a Reference Librarian with a gift for instruction and conversation—this session uses storytelling to illustrate how collaboration, mentorship, and care-centered librarianship drive access equity.
The presenters frame course reserves as a shared journey. From the behind-the-scenes work of processing physical and electronic reserves to the energy of the classroom and reference desk, attendees will hear how clear communication, instructional storytelling, and strong faculty relationships help students understand not just where materials are, but why they matter. The Reference Librarian’s engaging teaching style brings course reserves into research instruction and information literacy sessions, while access services expertise ensures those materials are reliably available when students need them most.
Like any road trip, the work includes detours—last-minute faculty requests, copyright questions, staffing challenges, and students who don’t yet know what support exists. Through anecdotes and practical examples, the session highlights how trust built through mentorship and cross-department partnership helps libraries respond with flexibility and empathy.
Rather than a checklist of procedures, this presentation offers a narrative about shared responsibility: seasoned voices guiding newer ones, instruction reinforcing access, and course reserves serving as a bridge between affordability and academic success. Attendees will leave with strategies they can adapt, stories they can recognize from their own libraries, and a renewed sense that when access services and reference travel together, students don’t need a GPS—or a textbook—to stay on course.

There is a long-standing tension within academic libraries between librarians and library staff, which typically stems from the designation of librarians as “professionals” often assigned a faculty or faculty-equivalent rank. Much of the literature on library employee morale focuses on librarians, while little attention is given to the “paraprofessional” staff largely responsible for day-to-day operations. The tendency to overlook staff in these discussions exemplifies how the inequities between these roles widen the gap between the two and further damage the job satisfaction and morale of academic library staff.
This session will explore the social and organizational factors that contribute to the inequities between faculty and staff, such as: disparities in wages, professional development opportunities, and recognition; the increasing expectation for staff to perform duties previously expected of librarians; and the value and accessibility of the MLIS degree. Discussion will also include the disproportionate impact this striation has on library staff from marginalized communities striving to advance in the profession. Finally, the presenters will propose actionable solutions to address these issues on an individual and institutional basis.
The audience will come away from this presentation with a greater understanding of this issue’s prevalence within the profession and how those in managerial roles can best support their staff to improve working conditions and the overall functioning of the library.

The oversight, management and ____ of building operation is the piece of the library work that many are ill prepared for.  The intricacies of HVAC, plumbing, building structure, electrical infrastructure and so on are a lot to understand, especially when systems fail and decisions must be made. Things that we never learned in library school is a familiar refrain for many.

This session will focus on an approach to learning about the physical building, the systems and processes needed in order to better manage library buildings. From creating partnerships, learning the building inside and out, creating an inspection checklist, understanding the Facilities organization and workflow, and so on. This session will give you the knowledge to become confident about the roles and responsibilities of a building manager.

In addition to maintenance, the session will also touch on safety and security of library facilities.

In Access Services, we need to write a great deal of documentation, most of which follows a formulaic structure. Our goal is always to convey deceptively complex information clearly and with a consistent narrative voice for an audience that does not necessarily share our specialized knowledge and experience. This type of writing consumes much of our valuable time.
Large‑language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT provide a practical way to reduce that workload while increasing clarity in the documentation we need. LLMs can transform legacy documents that have been edited, expanded, and revised so many times they have become difficult to navigate into clear, concise, and well‑organized resources.
A central point of the presentation is that LLMs do not produce a final product; they are an exceptional tool for producing a strong second draft. I’ll talk you through taking your first draft, which can be as simple as a brain dump, and putting it into an LLM and prompting it to create your second draft. The output will require you, the expert, to review/edit the documentation for factual verification and to fine‑tuning connections between concepts. Overall LLMs saves access services’ staff from the labor‑intensive first and second drafts stage which is often the most frustrating.
I will also discuss broader applications of LLMs for professional writing, and using them to adjust tone and style (think of an “intelligent thesaurus” that works at the sentence or document level) in our communication.
Our expertise and knowledge remain irreplaceable. I will show how integrating an LLM into your documentation workflow does not diminish the role of the librarian; rather, it makes the time spent on documentation more valuable and results in a more effective final product.

Academic libraries are increasingly being asked to do more than support research and instruction. They are also expected to contribute to student success, community engagement, and overall well-being. This session looks at how a University Library has leaned into that role through a Library Community Pass program.

The Pass program gives students, faculty, and staff access to local cultural and recreational experiences at no cost. Using the LibCal platform, users can reserve passes to venues across the city, helping remove financial barriers and making it easier to engage with the city. At the same time, the program creates meaningful partnerships between the library and community organizations.

This presentation connects the Pass program to larger institutional priorities, including Carnegie Community Engagement efforts and campus and library wellness initiatives. It will walk through how the program was developed, what has worked so far, and what we are still figuring out. Attendees will leave with ideas they can adapt, whether they are starting small or thinking about scaling a similar initiative.

When thinking of work with employees, we often think of beginnings: hiring, onboarding and developing employees. We think less often about endings. This is the story of how an Access Services unit has responded over the years to the death of several employees, one of whom passed away during their shift. This program will share our experiences in piecing together our response to the loss of these staff members. Issues we have addressed have included: communicating with family, disposition of personal property at work, processing timecards, and identifying / tracking / handing off work in process at the time of the staff member’s passing, and allowing staff to grieve and remember as they carry on with their work The question and answer portion of the presentation will include time for members of the audience to ask questions or to share their own experience dealing with similar experiences.

A misshelved book. LIS migration with no record cleanup. Incorrect call number labels. These are stacks crimes that Tisch Library has faced for years. No inventory of the stacks has ever been completed at Tisch, but one department is determined to close the case file and resolve these mysteries. Using modern Alma API integrations, our forensic investigators (student workers) systematically examine our crime scene. As they scan items, they are alerted to inconsistencies between Alma and what they see. These investigators pull the items and bring these “clues” to the detectives (Access Staff) who further investigate in Alma what the problems are, resolving what we can, and passing through the Chain of Custody (i.e. technical services work orders) things we cannot. Resolving a variety of "crimes" that have plagued our stacks for years, come hear about the significant progress made in ensuring our shelves and catalog match for the first time in Tisch history.

Most access services models are built around something we often take for granted: a library that stays in one place. This session looks at what happens when your library is floating in the middle of the ocean.
Serving students aboard a maritime training vessel creates challenges that most traditional academic libraries never have to think about. There’s limited physical space, no quick replacement for damaged or missing materials, inconsistent internet access, and a student population that lives, studies, and works together around the clock while traveling internationally.
This presentation will explore how access services functions such as circulation, course reserves, collection management, student staffing, and user engagement operate in a shipboard environment where flexibility is not optional—it’s required. We’ll discuss what works, what has failed, and how library services are adapted when your patrons can’t simply visit another branch, place an online order, or rely on stable technology infrastructure.
Attendees will leave with practical ideas for adapting services in nontraditional environments, managing limited resources creatively, and rethinking access services through a more flexible lens.

After a tough year that included losing one of our valued library colleagues, we had an idea---what if, to help raise morale, we added a little bit of whimsey to our workplace? And thus, the Whimsey Committee was born.

And what is more whimsical than racing wind up barnyard animals in costumes across the top of the library stacks? Throw in a school mascot tie in, some funny names, ridiculous prizes (who would have thought a 3-inch trophy would be so coveted?!) and it became the Law Library Annual Chick(en) Run to the Courts!

This lightning talk will center around planning a fun outreach event for staff and faculty around the institution that encourages creativity, togetherness, and, of course, WHIMSEY! I’ll cover how to plan and run a hugely popular event while keeping costs low, fun up, and whimsey at an all-time high!

Note: file attached includes images from past Chicken Runs.

Returning to leadership after a life‑altering health crisis forced a fundamental shift in how I understood supervision, capacity, and resilience. In this lightning talk, I reflect on how personal disruption reshaped my approach to managing Access Services staff and why traditional “push through it” leadership models often fail frontline teams.

Using brief examples from circulation and public service work, this talk highlights how recognizing invisible labor, fluctuating capacity, and dignity in small interactions can transform staff supervision.

This talk is intended to spark reflection and conversation among Access Services supervisors navigating change, burnout, and evolving expectations.

Butler University Libraries had a social media problem. Our posts weren’t engaging our students, our staff was stretched too thin to put the time into it, and frankly we didn’t even enjoy doing it. Then we got an idea: why don’t we let our talented, capable student employees create our posts? In fall 2024, our Information Commons student associates began to create fun and informative Instagram reels that captured our library’s playful atmosphere and really engaged with our student body. Our follower count soared, we received positive feedback from students, staff and faculty, and we even got copied by other student organizations. Learn how we created a consistent, organized posting schedule, got buy-in from library faculty, staff & administration, and provided our student employees with real-world skills that will give them a leg up in their post-college careers.

This presentation traces my journey from student to staff at the University of Texas at Arlington through the lens of Course Reserves. As a student, I was aware that Course Reserves existed, but it never meaningfully supported my academic work. My instructors rarely used it, and as a result, it remained a largely abstract service—something I understood in theory more than in practice, despite working in the library as a student employee.

That perspective shifted dramatically when I later assumed responsibility for the program as a staff member. What had once seemed straightforward revealed itself to be a complex system shaped by faculty expectations, student demand, copyright considerations, and daily logistical challenges. Tasks that appeared seamless from the outside required constant negotiation and adaptation behind the scenes.

By reflecting on these two roles, this talk explores how proximity changes perception and how institutional systems take on new meaning when viewed from within. What once felt distant and largely irrelevant as a student became immediate and complex as a staff member. This shift reveals the gap between how students experience services like Course Reserves and the realities of maintaining them, offering a more human-centered understanding of the work and the people behind it.