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March 25, 2022 Council Meeting @ Farmingdale State College / SILC Report

« on: March 31, 2022, 01:32:23 PM »

This semester, the focus of our community conversations has been the General Education Requirements for Information Literacy, as these standards have been recently revised. There has been a lot of questions about how to proceed as some campuses have more built in systems than others. In our March meeting, we discussed the idea of having a list of SILC-endorsed information literacy competencies that any campus can use to help them meet the GE requirements. This is in a very early stage, but it is an exciting project!

We have two more community conversations coming up - April 15, 2022 and the other in May (Date TBD). Both will be held from 1-2pm via Zoom. Look for an email with the Zoom links on the SUNYLA InfoLit Listserv.

Brandon West is still looking for an interested individual taking over as SILC chair in July 2022.

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January 21, 2022 Council Meeting @ SUNY Delhi / SILC Report

« on: January 20, 2022, 09:31:22 AM »

In Fall 2021, SILC hosted three Community Conversations, all of which were well attended.

On January 12, 2022, SILC hosted the SILC Instruction Showcase, a virtual event consisting of 9, 25-minute presentations. SUNYLA members submitted applications focusing on pedagogy, technology, or diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI) as it relates to information literacy instruction. Overall, the virtual event garnered 332 views, with an average of 36 attendees per session. Each of the presentations was recorded and we are working to have them posted to our blog (https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy/) by next week.

Currently for Spring 2022, we have three Community Conversations planned. The first one is February 18, 2022 at 1:00pm. The other two are March 18 and April 15, 2022 at 1:00pm. A notification will be sent to the SUNYLA INFO LIT discussion list prior to the event with the link to participate.

Brandon West has been chair of SILC for three years and is ready to pass the torch along to another person interested in running the committee. He will be putting out a call this spring to see if anyone is interested in this leadership opportunity.

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November 12, 2021 Council Meeting @ Turning Stone Casino / SILC Report

« on: November 12, 2021, 10:36:58 AM »

This semester, SILC has currently hosted two community conversations, one in September and one in October. In September, we held a general discussion reading the on-goings and concerns on our campuses as we readjust to working and teaching in person. In October, we invited a guest speaker, Sarah Brandt, from the University of Texas Libraries to talk to us about her Information Literacy Toolkit, an open education resource. https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/toolkit. This event was well attended with nearly 30 participants during our conversation.

Our next community conversation will be held on Friday, November 19, 2021 at 1:00pm EST. Look for an announcement about the topic on the SUNYLA INFOLIT listserv or the SILC Blog (https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy/).

We are planning a short virtual event for mid-January that will feature sessions about teaching methods (currently in development). A call for proposals will be sent out to the SUNYLA discussion list soon!

I would like to thank Don Simmons Jr., Becky Leathersich, Holly Kuhl, Megan Benson, and Fatoma Rad for all their hard work!

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March 26, 2021 Council Meeting @ VIRTUAL / SILC Report

« on: March 26, 2021, 09:35:50 AM »

SILC held it's first antiracist pedagogy workshop on March 18, 2021 about misinformation and implicit bias. We had 34 attendees and received a very positive response. The recording of the workshop will be placed on the SILC Blog in the near future.

SILC has two more antiracist pedagogy workshop this semester: Thursday, April 15 and Thursday, May 13 from 2:00pm–3:30pm. The workshop on April 15 will be an introduction to critical information literacy.

We will be facilitating a SUNYLA Preconference Workshop at the 2021 annual conference. It is titled "Critical Information Literacy: Steps Toward Becoming Antiracist in our Libraries." We hope you attend!

We held community conversations in February & March 2021. The February conversation was BYQ: Bring Your Questions (to ask the group) and we talked about the controversies surrounding the Media Bias Chart created by Vanessa Otero in March. Our next one is scheduled for Wednesday, April 21, 2021 from 1-2pm.

The committee is still developing the open access ebook about library outreach. More on that in the months ahead!

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January 15, 2021 Council Meeting @ VIRTUAL / SILC Report

« on: January 11, 2021, 05:06:49 PM »

SILC has been planning some exciting programming for the upcoming semester!

Save the Date(s)

Our community conversation series will be held on the following days and times – the URL to the Zoom meeting is sent out prior to the event.

February 24, 2021, 1:00pm–2:00pm
March 24, 2021, 1:00pm–2:00pm
April 21, 2021, 1:00pm–2:00pm
May 19, 2021, 1:00pm–2:00pm

We are planning three antiracist pedagogy workshops to help us think about and practices these inclusive teaching practices:

March 18, 2021, 2:00pm–3:00pm
April 15, 2021, 2:00pm–3:00pm
May 13, 2021, 2:00pm–3:00pm

For January, we curated a master list of online webinars/conferences/workshops related to topics discussed in our programs in the fall. We are encouraging interested folks to watch one they are interested in and write a reflection to that will be posted to the blog. We are hoping it will encourage some librarians to flex their writing muscles! The resource list and link to the Google form for submitting reflections can be found here: https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy/?p=318.

One of our next projects is to create a resource about outreach. After some discussion, we have decided to create an edited open access ebook using Geneseo's Pressbooks publishing platform. In order to gather data about how we may want to structure the book, we conducted three focus groups with SUNY librarians about their experience, perceptions, and strategies for outreach on January 11, 13, and 15. Our plan is to solicit chapter proposals from SUNY folks first–it's our hope that it could be authored by all SUNY librarians. If we get a low response rate, we may expand our call to CUNY and/or the state. We anticipate that this ebook will take until next spring to complete, based on Brandon's experience editing books for ACRL.

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November 13, 2020 Council Meeting @ VIRTUAL / SILC Report

« on: November 03, 2020, 02:19:14 PM »

SILC Antiracism Book Club – "So You Want to Talk About Race" by Ijeoma Oluo

We had 23 active participants sign up for the book club. We had our first discussion on September 30 and our second on October 21. We have two more discussions left this semester. We have utilized Facebook Groups to provide a forum for sharing articles and related content. For the spring semester we are talking about building off of the book club by offering some programs around integrating antiracist pedagogy into library instruction.

SILC Community Conversations

We have continued to hold our monthly community conversations. We have learned that we get a higher attendance when we talk about more practical topics than abstract ones, but we are still receiving a decent turnout at these events, in spite of folks getting "Zoomed Out."

New SILC Listserv

The new SUNYLA-InfoLit discussion list (sunyla-infolit@ls.suny.edu) is up and running as of mid-October. In the process of setting up this new discussion list, Bill Jones was able to update the procedures for joining all of the discussion lists. SILC has been adding members to the list and will use it as a primary venue for sharing information beginning January 2021.

New Core SILC Members

We have two new core committee members! Fatoma Rad (Farmingdale) is taking on the role of the committee's Digital Communication Officer, a role in which she will manage our blog (https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy/) and discussion list. Becky Leathersich (Geneseo) also joined and will be lending her talents to help us with our program development. Holly, Megan, Don, and I are very excited to welcome them to the committee!

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September 18, 2020 Council Meeting @ VIRTUAL / SILC Report

« on: September 10, 2020, 11:26:41 AM »

SILC has been busy since the SUNYLA Annual Conference offering a variety of programming to engage the membership.

We have continued holding Community Conversations via Zoom. In July, we discussed active learning strategies for online synchronous instruction. In August, we discussed motivation and self-preservation strategies. Our next community conversation is on Wednesday, September 23 at 1pm. Megan Benson will be teaching some "chair yoga" techniques; a conversation about revamping services will follow. Information about our community conversation series is posted to https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy.

SILC's First Annual Ed Tech Showcase on August 10 & 11, 2020 was a successful event, with an attendance of 70 people over the six presentations. The feedback about the event was very positive and attendees appreciated the practical nature of the presentations. The presentations were recorded and are located on SILC's blog: https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy/?p=236.

Don Simmons Jr. is coordinating an anti-racism book club that will meet throughout the Fall 2020 semester. We will be reading "So You Want to Talk About Race" by Ijeoma Oluo. The first discussion will be held on September 30th from 2:00pm-3:30pm. There is still time to register: https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy/?p=258. There is also a Facebook group that will serve as an asynchronous space for people to continue the conversation and share resources (only folks who RSVP for the book club will be added to the Facebook Group).

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June 17, 2020 Council Meeting @ VIRTUAL (Annual) / SILC (WGIL) Report

« on: June 12, 2020, 11:39:12 AM »

This year, SILC completed the following projects: rebranded the committee; updated our charge; hosted a series of 5 community conversations; and is sponsoring a SUNYLA 2020 workshop titled "Are They Learning? Information Literacy Assessment in the Library Classroom" that is being facilitated by Logan Rath (Brockport) and Nancy Sarah Murillo (Orange CC).

Our SILC Community Conversation Series emerged as a way for SILC to help instruction librarians connect during our period of remote learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Each conversation was held via Zoom as a one-hour discussion about various topics impacting instruction, including asynchronous teaching methods, best practices, and planning for the fall. At the first four sessions, we had an attendance of 27 to 29 librarians, which we were thrilled about. Our 5th conversation in May had about 20 participants.

One of our attempts this year was to revitalize the WGIL blog that was created a couple of years ago. We solicited for topics to populate the blog, but we did not receive any interest from the SUNYLA community. We will continue to investigate ways to communicate.

Plans for 2020-2021

Membership:
Co-chair Alice Wilson (MCC) has decided to step down as Co-Chair of SILC. Brandon West (Geneseo) will continue to serve as the Chair.
Don Simmons Jr. (Westchester CC) has enthusiastically volunteered to serve as a member of the committee, which also includes Megan Benson (Binghamton) and Holly Kuhl (Cayuga CC).

Projects:
SILC is planning the following projects because we believe they will help us achieve our goal of building community around IL/teaching within SUNYLA. These activities provide the SUNYLA membership different ways to interact, whether that is more active or passive.

-Given the positive response to the Community Conversation Series, we are going to continue to hold a once per month session (open to everyone) to discuss a designated IL topic.

-We are going to hold a "Back to School" Educational Technology webinar series in August to showcase tools librarians may want to consider using in their instruction.

-We are planning a book club to discuss anti-racist teaching practices (title TBD). We anticipate to meet once a month to discuss the book and discuss how it applies to teaching in libraries.

-We are also going to focus on developing a resource toolkit for liaison outreach. Specifically, librarians have articulated struggles with effectively providing outreach and communicating with faculty throughout our community conversation series.

-We will also sponsor another information literacy workshop for SUNYLA 2021.