Stony Brook Liaison Retreat, 2016

Today all the liaison librarians from Stony Brook attended a retreat at the beautiful Stony Brook Southampton campus. It was a chance to take a break from our daily grind and think deeply about our work as teachers, researchers, and liaisons to our respective departments. We brought two guests from Cornell University to help us frame the development of our liaison program, which is still relatively new.

Our first speaker was Anne Kenney, University Librarian at Cornell University Library. Her talk was called Liaison Futures: View from a University Librarian and addressed the future of academic librarianship and the way the liaison model helps cast and train librarians as subject specialists for their institutions. Next we had a talk and workshop session with Kornelia Tancheva, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning Services at Cornell University Library.

After lunch, we broke out into discussion groups to talk about issues relevant to our work:

  • Teaching in the flexible classroom (Molly Higgins): We will talk about how to make flexible spaces into exciting opportunities for creating adaptive, interactive instruction sessions.
  • Pop-up library (Jennifer DeVito): A pop-up library can be a cost-effective, fun way to promote the library to the community, strengthen partnerships and bring library services to those who may not visit the library.
  • Digital badges (Darren Chase): The Digital badge framework presents an opportunity for libraries to offer competency-based information literacy lessons.
  • Chat reference (Laura Costello): We will discuss the current state of chat reference and ways we could potentially expand and develop our own chat service.

I got some pretty excellent hand gestures in:

Next, I led a session of tech tools lightning talks focusing on instructional technologies and updates to our library technologies:

  • Formative (Laura Costello)
  • Poll Everywhere (Darren Chase)
  • ORCID (Jenny Lyon)
  • Institutional Apps (Jamie Saragossi)
  • HSC iPad Program (Molly Higgins)

In the afternoon, we had three short sessions from Darren, Jennifer, and Molly addressing our new Academic Commons, access services, and implicit bias in the workplace respectively. All in all it was a great and informative day in a great setting!