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Sunday started out with an early morning breakfast with Kate Nevins on SOLINET business. She is thinking of taking me up on my offer to host the spring SOLINET meeting at Graylyn. That would be terrific!

Next I attended a program of the ACRL Science and Technology Section (to which I belonged many years ago) because it was called “The Embedded Librarian: New Role or New Title?”

Marianne Stowell Bracke, Purdue University
Nancy Deegan, Central Arizona College
Martin Kesselman, Rutgers
Sarah Watstein, UCLA

I wanted to know how closely the experiences of these science librarians were to our ZSR Embedded Librarian program. As one of the speakers said, while the situations varied greatly, the positive outcomes were remarkably similar. One speaker was embedded in a three year soil science research grant, and another was embedded as a Teaching Assistant in several Blackboard courses. The positive outcomes cited by all were closer ties to both faculty and students, a change in the view of faculty toward librarians from instructional support staff to peers, and a re-thinking of traditional roles because of an ability to “think like them.” Kesselman and Watstein have just finished a research paper on embedded librarianship that will appear in Journal of Library Administration. I will definitely look for that!

In the afternoon, I got an upfront seat to the presentation of Susan’s award from the ACRL Instruction Section. It came as the first part of their annual program entitled, “Creating Change: Teacher Librarians and New Learners.”

Susan was presented with a huge certificate and a check for $3,000 by a representative of Lexis Nexis, which sponsors the award. Great job, Susan! You honor ZSR with your energy, enthusiasm and teaching/learning/technology skills!

In the program portion, Dr. Jeffrey Liles from St. John Fisher College endeared himself to the audience by introducing himself as “non-librarian” faculty. His title was “You Can Lead a Dog to the Fridge but Can You Make Him Think?” What he meant was the need to align teaching and learning methods to achieve an effective outcome. Instead of merely reversing the focus from teacher to student, he advocated putting the subject in the middle along with both teachers and students. Good advice.

My last event of the day was the ACRL Excellence in Libraries Award celebration. Jeff Trzeciak, my friend and former colleague from Wayne State who is now the University Librarian at McMaster University in Canada, won the award for the university library category. Jeff also served as our Digital Forsyth Consultant during the planning grant phase. Way to go, Jeff!