Post by 2025 WHSLA Professional Development Grant Winner, Eileen Severson!

Guest post by WHSLA member, Eileen Severson

First, thank you for the boost of cash to attend MLA!  Here’s a bit about what I learned, and thought might be important for you all to know.

I took the CE entitled “Hospital Librarianship: Keeping Traditions and Bridging to Innovations: (Re)Vitalizing your Career and Your Library.”  The title of this course attracted me because there are times lately I’ve needed a bit of re-vitalizing around my career and library.  What I came away with the most was that I wasn’t alone.  I sat in a room of both exhausted but enthusiastic hospital librarians who shared their frustrations and problems as well as their successes.  We discussed creating a mission, vision and strategic plan for your library, and making sure they connected with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic plan.   We brainstormed services and ways we could “get out of the library” and make our value known.  Some ideas were being on committees like continuing education, research, patient education, IRB, GME and grants.  Other ideas included attending grand rounds, morbidity and mortality conferences, and department meetings.  One of the librarians shared her email tag line that we all thought was spot on: “We use our expertise so you can focus on using yours”.  Through this course I met some creative and kind librarians with lots of ideas and feel more energized to try new things in my library.

I attended a variety of symposiums and poster presentations.  Some takeaways from these presentations:

• Take time to reflect on how you are hiring—is it inclusive? Where can you offer flexibility in the position description and job ad?  Do years of experience need to be in a library—what other experience does the candidate have?  Be more flexible in the interview—for example, give the candidate the questions before the interview, turn off the camera to give candidate time to think before answering a question.  Allow notes—this isn’t a test! 

•  Succession planning! This presentation hit home for me.  Basically, if you have someone retiring or moving to a different position—make sure to document, document, document all that they do.  The presenters suggested that the documents don’t have to be prescriptive but should describe the thought process when performing tasks.  They created flow-charts showing the thought process of several responsibilities of one of their retiring staff. 

•   How to highlight your library as a value driven partner: 
• Use data that means something to your leaders; align your data with organizational goals.   
• How much money does the library save?  How do we help meet strategic objectives of the organization?  What is the ROI of the library?
• Don’t just share the data, include narrative, stories.  Make sure to eliminate library jargon. 
• How do we provide a community benefit?
• Talk to people, attend events
• Connect work with incentives/reimbursement 

• AI is the new hottest topic—it was everywhere at MLA.  I have determined I need to learn more about it and our library needs to be a resource for understanding and teaching others about AI. 

I also networked with my fellow WHSLA Professional Development winner, Kathy Koch!!!

Before (left) and after (right) photos below:

 

WHSLA's newest award: The Robert Koehler Exemplary Service Award

This past Monday, June 6 the WHSLA Board had the honor of presenting Robert Koehler with the new WHSLA Robert Koehler Exemplary Service Award. Robert received this newly designated award for his service to WHSLA and health science librarianship in Wisconsin for over 37 years. 

Here are a few highlights of his time in WHSLA:

• Issue 177 from November 1985: Robert Koehler listed as a new WHSLA member.  Location is Methodist Hospital Library.
• Issue 194 from July 1987: Robert Koehler listed in the WHSLA Election Committee report as one of six newly elected representatives. 
• Issue 217 from November 1989: Robert is the Program chair for the 1990 WHSLA Annual meeting to be held in April.  Fun fact: on the conference registration form for the meeting (included in issue 221) they asked for your social security number if you wanted to collect CEU credits!
• Issue 222 from May-June 1990: Congratulations to Robert as he is elected President-elect in spring 1990.
• Issue 230 from May-June 1991: Robert’s first president’s column talks about how he’s recharged after the conference in Green Bay and that the class he attended on computers was helpful as he prepares to bring CD-Rom technology into the library.  Blast from the past!
• Issue 240 from May-June 1992: Robert’s first past-president’s column talks about how when he was first approached about running for WHSLA president, his initial reaction was, “I’m not really qualified to handle the position.”  His second thought was, “I don’t have the time.” He went on to say that his fears on both counts were quickly dispelled.  He said he had so many WHSLA members to turn to for help and there are so many unsung heroes in the organization.  He found it easy to find people to agree to help and had people calling him to offer to help with committees.
• Issue 248 from April-May 1993.  Robert’s elected Rep-at-large again.
• Issue 251 from October 1993: Robert gave the Treasurer report at the April 1993 Board meeting
• Issue 314 from November/December 2003: In the President’s letter, Robert’s mentioned as the 2003 WHSLA Librarian of the Year.  The award garnered attention for Robert at Meriter Hospital; he was featured in the hospital newsletter and honored by the CEO. 

Robert was also featured as a 2016 WHSLA Spotlight. 

We wish you all the best in your retirement, Robert!

WHSLA 2023 Librarian of the Year

We are happy to announce that the WHSLA Librarian of the Year is Michele Matucheski! 

Michele was nominated by Brenda Fay, who highlighted Michele's service to WHSLA over the last 19 years, but also her kind, collaborative, and supportive nature, which has helped many WHSLA members over the years.

Michele received a plaque, flowers, and lunch with one of her favorite people. 

Congratulations, Michele!

Professional Development Award Report: FYE (First Year Experience) Conference

Carrie Papa-Schold was a recipient of one of the two WHSLA 2020 Professional Development Awards. Below, she tells us about her experience at a pre-COVID conference. 

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Thank you WHSLA for the grant towards attending the FYE (First Year Experience) Conference in Washington, D.C. on February 21 – 24, 2020.  (Yes, just before Covid hit the US.)

In my current job at George Williams College (GWC) in Williams Bay, WI, I am the Assistant Director of Academic Support and Disability Services.  I also help out with the library as the “campus librarian”.  GWC is part of Aurora University in Aurora, Illinois where the Phillips Library Director manages of all of the contracts through CARLi.  We have a small library (located at one end of a building on two floors with two fireplaces, 8 computers, three study tables and seating for an additional 8 more students) that is staffed mostly by student workers. https://gwc.aurora.edu/academics/library/index.html

In my role, in academic support, I am an academic coach working with students who are underprepared for college.  Most are from low income and first generation families. The work with the freshmen class is what brought me and my supervisor to the FYE Conference.  The purpose of the conference is to bring together educators and administrators to teach and learn about enhancing the first year student experience.  I was thrilled to find that about a dozen of the presentations and poster sessions were on Information Literacy.  I was fortunate to attend 3 of them.

Poster sessions (The following was the one I was most interested in seeing and talking with the presenter)

Information Literacy Misconception of Students in First-Year Experience Courses. Michelle Keba. Palm Beach Atlantic University.

This poster was of a study (not yet published) done by Michell Keba at her institution using the methods from the research article Predictable Information Literacy Misconception of First-year College Students (Hinchcliffe, Rand, & Collier, 2018).  The original study was designed to determine if students either lacked knowledge versus misperceived their information literacy skills using the “misconception inventory”.  By identifying common misconceptions, potential learning outcomes were developed to guide information literacy instruction.  The misconceptions identified in the Hinchcliffe et al. (2018) article are:

·         Library

o   First year students believe they are supposed to do their research without assistance

o   First year students perceive the library as only a place to get books or to study

o   First year students believe that all library sources and discovery tools are credible

·         Information Access

o   First year students believe that freely available Internet resources are sufficient for academic work

o   First year students think Google is a sufficient search tool

o   First year students believe that accessibility is an indicator of quality

·         Research Process

o   First year students believe that research is a linear, uni-directional process

o   First year students think that every question has a single answer

·         Information Literacy

o   First year students believe that they are information literate

Hinchliffe, L., Rand, A., & Collier, J. (2018). Predictable Information Literacy Misconceptions of First-Year College Students. Communications in Information Literacy, 12(1), 4–18. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1183245

The New Library Session: Forget the Library - Focus on Information.  Elizabeth Johns, Kristen Shonborn, Kristen Welzenbach.  Goucher College.  Tinyurl.com/fye20-goucher

Faculty request librarians to teach students about the library and how to use it.  What students need is how to identify appropriate information sources from the internet to library databases.  This is a shift to teaching students about information literacy to address the information era abundant with credible and non-credible information.

Developing Interdepartmental Information Literacy Solutions: The First Year Experience in the Misinformation Era. Kate Otto, David Lemmons, & Sherry Larson-Rhodes. Marquette University.

Information is easily accessible through the library, internet, and social media to name a few.  Students need to learn the value of good information versus bad.  Information literacy efforts help to educate students on how to locate, evaluate, and effectively/ethically use the information they are accessing regardless where they find the information.  Librarians play key role in leading information literacy efforts.

There are three types of “information”.

1.       Misinformation – unintentional

2.       Disinformation – intentional, false, shared to cause harm

3.       Mal-information – intentional, true, and harmful

This is a life-skill to be used throughout college and career.

Education on information literacy can be achieved through collaborative efforts on campus.  The first step is to define “information literacy” to ensure understanding between faculty and staff.  The Association of College & Research Libraries Association (ACRL is a section of the American Library Association) offers guidelines and a framework for information literacy in higher education that can be used to guide initiatives in the college setting.

Outcomes from conference attendance:

·         Gathering information on where information literacy is being taught on campus to identify gaps in student learning regarding information literacy

·         Created a module on information literacy that has been incorporated into academic coaching

·         Developing a module for the senior seminar class on how to effectively locate information post college when they no longer have access to the subscription databases.

Respectfully submitted by:

Carrie Papa-Schold, MLIS
papaschold at gmail dot com