After two years of online conferences, Atla 2022 was held as a hybrid conference June 15-18.  (Almost) all sessions were live-streamed to remote attendees in addition to those who were in-person in Baltimore, with multiple sessions lead by presenters or co-presenters who were also remote.  Overall, this seemed to work well, with a concerted effort to alternate comments and questions from those who were online and those who were in the room.

As was to be expected, a number of sessions focused on how various institutions dealt with aspects of COVID-19 and the resulting changes to funding, instruction, programming, work spaces, etc…, such as: “Just Please Don’t Call it ‘The New Normal'”: Managing Challenges, Changes, and COVID-19 as University-Based Divinity School Library Directors; Outreach and Promotion to Distance and Online Learners: Lessons from a Pandemic; and Continuing the Conversation: Reflecting on our Pandemic Experiences.  Other sessions looked at the impact on the mental health and critical thinking skills of both students and librarians: Factors Impacting Students’ Beliefs about Plagiarism: The Effect of Engagement and Mental Health on the Instances of Academic Fraud during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Epistemology of Research: (Theological) Librarians and the Fierce Fight with COVID-19 Misinformation.

The pandemic didn’t dominate everything, thankfully, and there were multiple sessions that covered new instruction methods, using analytics, and utilizing open access tools and resources.  These included: Teaching Information Literacy through Biblical Studies; Information Literacy in Community of Practice: Proposing User Training for Theological Students from Unregistered Churches in China; Linking the Art in the Christian Tradition Image Database to Wikidata; Learning Analytics and the Library-Using the Data you Collect to Address Student Learning Outcomes and Tell the Library’s Story; and Befriending the Internet Archive.

Because almost all sessions were live-streamed, many were also recorded, so I will have the option to re-watch some of the sessions I was able to attend, as well as check out the many sessions that were of interest but occurred at the same time as another session, when the videos are posted in a few weeks.  If anything listed here sounds interesting to you, let me know and I would be glad to share my notes, or the videos when they are available.  The full schedule for the conference can be viewed here.