rhedreen

After we’ve been tenured (or after our last promotion) at my university faculty are evaluated every 6 years. This is my year. It’s a simple thing, just lists of accomplishments and an updated CV, but it also includes a narrative. So here it is.

I started working at Southern in 2004, just about 5 years after I’d gotten my MLS. I’ve been at Southern for 21 years, which is the longest I have ever been anywhere in my life. Those 2 decades have been a roller coaster, but Southern is in a better position than it was when I started, and I like to think that I’ve had some influence in that. Six years ago was the fall of 2019. It seems like a different world in many ways. I’d just finished my previous assessment file as September started to wind down, we’d just hired Diana Hellyar as STEM Librarian and I was looking forward to helping her take on most of the science departments I had been liaising with for years. This would leave me with more time to concentrate on Biology, Nursing, and Psychology (that last was new to me.) I was taking the last class for my MSBio degree and hoping to finish my thesis in time for spring graduation, and we had no idea what was looming on the horizon.

However, I am ridiculously proud of our efforts in Spring and Fall 2020. I’d been beating the drum of “we all have to work with online students and faculty” for years, and I guess it paid off. The Library pivoted to online quickly, and, if not seamlessly, at least with comparatively few internal hiccups. I was already doing online instruction for classes and individuals, and had worked with many of my colleagues to get them doing online work as well. We had many of the tools we needed, like web chat and patron pick-up scheduling, we just hadn’t deployed them robustly before.

Our stats plummeted for Fall & Spring 2020, of course. Everyone’s did. There were just fewer people doing anything besides just trying to get through the days. Professors re-wrote assignments to use fewer resources, and students got by with the minimum. I remember working with a student who was having trouble accessing library and class resources. She came in and everything worked fine on campus. It quickly became obvious that her problem was 6 people on a single wifi connection at home (I think it was 4 adults working from home and 2 kids in school online.) Which, honestly, was a problem we’d run into before, just not to that extent. The Library has always been a haven for those with crowded or noisy environments wherever they called home.

Besides the internal Library events and projects, I was also co-chair of the NECHE accreditation subcommittee for Standard 7 (libraries and facilities) for the midterm self study. This is definitely one of those “invisible labor” projects – tons of work, lots of nagging, emails galore, and, in the end, a single report that gets a “thank you” memo in your inbox at some point. Highly necessary, but exhausting and seemingly endless.

2020 was the year we all tried to figure out how to do conferences strictly online. One gem was the Force 11 Conference, on scholarly communication. I’d been wanting to go for years, but heading to LA in August was a hurdle, as well as an expensive trip. In 2020, they put their whole program online in December and had the best attendance ever, with attendees from the entire globe. While I appreciate the opportunity to chat with colleagues in the hallways and meet new people over lunches, I also really appreciate the ability to sleep in my own bed.

Another fantastic opportunity that I was able to do online was the Evidence Synthesis Institute for Librarians, offered online in August 2020 by librarians at Cornell University. The institute was designed to provide the needed expertise to work on evidence synthesis and systematic review projects as a librarian and search expert. Among other things, this clarified my view of librarians as experts in our own right. The term being used now is methodologists – experts in a particular methodology. I set up a guide based on the one at Cornell Library and started to explore how I could do a soft release of a consultation service and possibly take on full co-authorship for a few projects.

2021 felt like a slow recovery, the type that stalls and has little reversals, and in which it becomes hard to see where you’ve been and how you got where you are. During this year, I continued to work with the Office of Online Learning to do classes and videos about teaching and learning online, continued to work on the SCSU Authors project, and was finally able to get back to my thesis. I had switched the Sit Down & Write writing groups to online and it became the tool I needed to finish writing my thesis. Since I was facilitating, I had to show up every week! I also discovered things about my writing process that I hadn’t realized before. (Which just goes to show, it’s never too late to learn.)

In 2021 my colleague and friend Winnie Shyam retired. She had been Head of Reference/Research & Instruction for the entire time I’d been at Southern, so it was a wrench and a thrill to say farewell and to be asked to take on the position of division head. One of the first things that I implemented was Springshare’s LibStaffer for our desk schedule. Such an improvement over cumbersome Excel spreadsheets and awkward Outlook calendars! It’s definitely one of those things that once you have it, it’s hard to understand how you coped without it.

I finished, presented, and defended my thesis in fall 2021. As I’d planned, I released the thesis and the dataset openly, via the Zenodo repository platform. My last two presentations on this were definitely the most fun – speaking to the Biology Department about FAIR data and how my project met those goals (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible) and speaking to a high school ecology class (taught by one of my biology classmates) about the field of historical ecology.

In the fall of 2019 I’d roped Diana Hellyar, as a librarian new to SCSU, into our SCSU Authors project and she became a crucial collaborator for the database and the publications that came from it, including our 2021 ACRL Science & Technology Section poster with Scott Jackson from Institutional Research.

Fall 2022 was the first year I added Health & Movement Sciences to my list of subjects. That department had originally been Physical Education in the College of Education, and over the years had morphed into a more health science specific program and moved to HHS. However, our Education Librarian, June Cheng, kept her role as liaison librarian even after they switch colleges. When she retired it seemed like the perfect time to switch librarians, and I took it on. I also released my Evidence Synthesis guide to a select group of faculty and have worked on some fascinating projects, none of which has (yet) seen publication, however.

In 2023, the article for a project that a group of nursing librarians, including myself, had been working on since 2019 finally came out. We had been trying to investigate the impact that difficult search assignments had on nursing students and new nurses, most particularly the “5 year rule” (only use studies published 5 years ago or less.) Do frustrating assignments lead to a disinclination to do literature searches? While we were not able to interview active nurses during the time (trying to get a nurse to do anything other than work and survive during COVID was a pretty big ask) we were able to interview nursing librarians, students, and faculty, so our project turned into more of an exploration about why the common search restrictions were used and what was the reaction to them. Librarians and students expressed frustration and when we asked faculty why they used what they did, the answer was essentially, “That’s what I had to do.” We hope that it gives nursing librarians and faculty some things to think about when giving those common evidence based practice assignments. It’s certainly informed my own nursing library instruction. I also presented our results at our SCSU Faculty Tapas event in Fall 2022, and some of my co-authors presented at the Medical Libraries Association conference in May 2022.

2023 was also the year I had 3 interns, 2 in the spring and 1 in the summer. One of the spring ones was supposed to join us the previous fall (2022) but had to postpone, so I ended up with 2 that spring. Jesse, Jenn, and Ariss were all a joy to work with and they tested out a new internship tool I created, the Intern Professional Development reading/viewing list. Each inte