Objectives & Takeaways:

• The objective is to provide participants with an immersive experience of how a Memory Café operates, its purpose, and the role it plays in supporting individuals living with dementia and their care partners. 

• By experiencing the resources and activities, participants will gain the confidence needed to initiate and facilitate their own inclusive, supportive and engaging Memory Café.

Objectives & Takeaways:

Our university is changing from an emerging Hispanic-Serving Institution to a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. Twenty-five percent of our enrolled full-time students are Latinos. Instead of the typical library support for minoritized students of once-a-year display for Hispanic Heritage Month, some collection policy updates, and a few translated webpages, our library is trying to create an inclusive culture for Latinos. Our state’s higher education landscape is evolving, and the Latino population is the fastest growing group. 

Hispanic-Serving Institutions typically enroll first generation college students, low-wealth students, Pell grant recipients, English as second language speakers, bilingual or multilingual speakers, BIPOC, immigrant, undocumented or non-traditional students. Our library currently provides some support for low-wealth students with a laptop lending program, a first-year orientation session on information literacy, and charge no fines. Buley library has even purchased this year’s required undergraduate textbooks and placed them on reserve.  

These efforts are just a start, however, as these students still require more support to increase retention and decrease their ongoing degree completion gap. This Quick Talk/Mini Session would be a great way to discuss additional ways to support and provide outreach for these students.  It would also be a wonderful networking opportunity to learn about other academic librarians’ recommendations for effective support.

Objectives & Takeaways:

• Print media materials are rich sources of information with strong evidentiary value.

• Researchers of all disciplines turn to historic newspapers and periodicals to piece together both personal and collective pasts, from topics of interest ranging from politicsand social justice to popular trends in fashion, music, and film.

•  In recent years, prominent agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Libraryof Congress, along with a widespread network of local libraries, archives, and historical societies have come together to preserve and provide equitable access to the unique histories contained within both national and local newspapers. 

• In alignment with recent trends in public and academic librarianship, Otis Library recently undertook a transformative digitization project to preserve and provide open access to 150 years of microfilmed issues of the Norwich Bulletin. For many years, this project seemed beyond our library's reach, but as we took our first tentative steps, we discovered it was more achievable than we had imagined. In this session, we will provide a detailed overview of our two-year journey - from researching potential hosting platforms and how to estimate images per reel to shipping the microfilm and marketing the completed digital collection. 

• By sharing our experiences, lessons learned, and practical tips, we aim to demystify the digitization process and empower other public libraries with newspaper holdings to embark on their own preservation projects.