This article is more than 5 years old.

On Thursday, May 19th, ZSR held our first annual Wanda K. Brown Staff Development Day. The all day event was open to the entire staff, and was well received, despite the frigid conditions in the Auditorium.

The day began with a wonderful two-hour session by Shayla Herndon-Edmunds, Director of Diversity Education at Wake Forest. Her program, “Unconscious Bias: Is It Saving or Sabotaging You?,” discussed the problem of unconscious or automatic bias and how it can over-ride our more rational, thoughtful mind.

Shayla’s session was followed by a series of eight short, 15-minute presentations by the staff and faculty of ZSR. Every team was represented by at least one presentation. Before lunch, we heard from Mary Reeves about the Criterion Film Collection, from Thomas Dowling about beacons, a new technology that pushes information out to mobile devices, and from Mel Rutledge about his work creating digital biographical files in Special Collections. After an all-library pizza lunch in the Staff Lounge, we continued with sessions from Barry Davis, who spoke about the multimedia equipment that is available in the library for check-out and use, Chelcie Rowell, who spoke about the task management application Trello, Hu Womack, who talked about his work helping to develop a First Year Experience course at WFU, and Carol Cramer, who gave tips about how you can manage your email with an inbox zero philosophy. The short sessions concluded with a one-act play by the Resource Services players called “Code REaD,” a comedy-drama that illustrated how a rush e-book purchase is processed.

The day concluded with a very fun Wake Forest trivia contest called “Wake, Wake Don’t Tell Me,” which was ably and entertainingly MC’d by John Champlin, the Assistant Director of the PDC. The contest included a scavenger hunt round that sent the attendees scurrying around campus.

The Staff Development Committee welcomes your feedback on this event so that we can improve it in the future.