HSLI Newsletter

(via Stephanie Sopka, Goucher College)

A forthcoming ACRL publication, Closing A College Library, is now accepting chapter proposals to be included in the edited volume, slated for a Fall/Winter 2022 release date.  We are seeking authors with first hand experience with some aspect of closing a small college library in the United States.

The United States is facing a crisis in higher education, particularly amongst liberal arts colleges. High tuition prices coupled with extreme amounts of student debt and a decline in the traditional college-age population has resulted in less students enrolling in higher education institutions each year. This, in turn, has led to the closure of a number of small, often liberal arts focused, colleges. The reasons for the closures can vary, from sharply declining enrollment numbers, to unsustainable endowment draw-downs, to accreditation issues, as can the amount of notice before the closure and the fate of the campus, but the end result is the same.

This is not the book we dreamed of writing and it is hard to welcome you to participate in a project about how to close a small college library. But here we are. Even though closing a library was not something any of us wanted to do, we still wanted to do it well. We are here to take our collective misfortune and turn it into something useful, something that will hopefully help librarians do the best they can with the most unenviable task of closing a college library.

Each library and college community is unique; this book aims to cover some of our similarities as well as highlight the many variables that can impact the work of shuttering a college library.

The deadline to submit a proposal is Monday, November 1. Please see our site for further details.

(via Laureen Cantwell, Colorado Mesa University)

Chapters are sought for the forthcoming ACRL book Spatial Literacy in Public Health, focusing on collaborative spatial literacy teaching and learning initiatives across the college campus.

Public health has been at the forefront of global news and conversations since early 2020, resulting in an increased awareness of and interest in how public health topics connect with many areas of our lives, big and small, globally and locally. We have seen how public health integrates with data, business, economics, our grocery store, historical precedents, psychological factors, tourism, social media, and much more. Spatial literacy skills overlap with public health topics in many thought-provoking and discussion-friendly ways that can help students realize the relevance of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial literacy skills.

The goals of this book, ultimately, are to tie spatial literacy across the higher education curriculum, under the theme of public health intersections. This book will include content designed to have academic librarians and disciplinary faculty working together, and provide multimodal materials to foster successful in-classroom (or online!) deployment.

Chapter Structure

Each chapter of this book will have a specific spatial literacy focus using GIS tools and will be a collaborative effort between librarians and disciplinary faculty members. Chapters can connect with Covid-19 but that will not be a requirement. To provide a foundation for readers-other teaching librarians and their faculty collaborator(s)-each chapter will begin with an overview of foundational material to provide grounding in the established scholarship.

Next, the chapter will include a brief, annotated list of recommended readings that could be assigned to participants ahead of a workshop when appropriate; alternatively, readings could guide or otherwise serve as resources for the collaborators. Finally, each chapter will include hands-on activities and discussion prompts that could be used in the actual instructional session. QR codes will be integrated into the book to navigate users to additional content (e.g., videos, lesson plan modifications, and more) as needed to help set readers up for success in the activity and to save space within the book. Chapters should also factor in modifications for use of open source GIS tools, open access content, and virtual (vs. f2f) learning to help the work reach audiences with limited fee-based tools.

Authors will be asked to house a student-friendly PowerPoint version of their chapter in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Sandbox. Authors will be encouraged to have relevant screenshots and/or video tutorial content for the activity integrated into the slide deck, rather than into the chapter itself, unless critical. A teaching librarian, hopefully with a disciplinary faculty partner, will be able to use this content as-is…or modify it for the direct instruction portion of a session!

Final chapters should be 2,000-3,000 words in length.

Possible Chapter Topics

These are just examples of the kinds of spatial literacy + public health intersections we believe could be brought into this book.

• supply chain management
• temporal comparisons
• social media campaigns
• data visualization
• racial disparities (and other demography themes)
• immunization
• epidemiology
• environmental health/environmental Science
• stock market/global economies
• community health
• K-12 education
• recreation/tourism
• …and other ideas you come up with!

Not sure if your idea or collaboration is a good fit? E-mail the editors! (See below for contact information.)

Our Timeline

Submission Due Dates

• Submit your chapter proposal by Thursday, September 30, 2021.
• Notifications will be sent by October 31, 2021.
• Chapter drafts will be due February 28, 2022.
• Final chapters will be due June 30, 2022.
• Anticipated publication date Fall 2023.

Submit Your Proposal

Proposal information:

Authors should submit their proposal here.

Proposals should include:
1.    Discipline or audience addressed
2.    150-word abstract of proposed chapter
3.    Description of a sample learning activity

The Editors

Laureen P. Cantwell, Head of Access Services & Outreach, and Dr. Tammy Parece, Assistant Professor of Geography, both from Colorado Mesa University

E-mail SpatialLiteracyACRLBook@gmail.com to reach the editors with any questions.

(via ACRL)

Share your knowledge of today’s hot topics! ACRL is currently accepting proposals for future editions of Keeping Up With… on a rolling basis. Each edition focuses on a single issue including an introduction to the topic and summaries of key points, including implications for academic libraries. Visit the Keeping Up With… website for more information, including submission instructions and a list of past editions and topics. Please contact David Free, at dfree@ala.org, with questions.