In-Person Program | November 7-9, 2023

Schedule At A Glance

Tuesday, November 7, 2023
  • 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM: Registration and Poster Set-Up
  • 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM: State of ACTAL and Welcome Unconference (Topics: TBD)
  • 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM: Reception
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
  • 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM: Breakfast, Registration, Poster Set-Up
  • 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM: Welcome and Keynote Speaker
  • 10:15AM – 10:30 AM: Break
  • 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM: Concurrent Sessions
  • 11:10 AM – 12:00 PM: Show Us Your Space Poster Session
  • 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM: Lunch
  • 1:10 PM – 2:00 PM: Concurrent Sessions
  • 2:10 PM – 3:00 PM: Concurrent Sessions
  • 3:00PM – 4:00 PM: Adobe – Sponsored Presentation
  • 4:10 PM – 5:00 PM: Concurrent Sessions
  • 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM: Reception
Thursday, November 9, 2023
  • 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM: Breakfast
  • 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM: Tours of the VCU Libraries 
  • 10:15 AM – 10:30 AM: Break
  • 10:30 AM – 12:00PM: Concurrent Workshops
  • 12:00 PM – 12:15 PM: Walk to Institute of Contemporary Art (Lunch location)
  • 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM: Closing Plenary and Lunch
  • 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM: Tours – Community Media Center (Institute of Contemporary Art)

Presentation Schedule

Wednesday, November 8

Concurrent Sessions

10:00 AM – 10:30 AM

Reduce, reuse, upcycle: Creative approaches to plastic waste at the Genesis Lab

Presenter: Lauren Haberstock, Pepperdine University

Room 250

What do you do with the plastic waste generated from 3D printing? My deep dive into numerous online forums and subreddits, conversations with colleagues, and wishful Googling over the years have brought me no closer to a reliable (or low-cost) solution than when I first asked this question in 2021 when I began my job as the director of a makerspace with 3D printers. As the Spring 2023 semester came to a close, I committed myself and the summer to finding creative, joy-inspiring, and useful ways to finally use the plastic waste rather than letting it accumulate further in my office. I wanted to pursue projects that contributed to the makerspace and would be easy to replicate or iterate on in the future.  In this presentation, I will outline tips and advice I have gotten from the community of makers, share the results of the projects I started in the summer, and provide the opportunity to make (or brainstorm) how to create something great from a literal pile of trash. Participants will learn how to reduce the amount of waste output when 3D printing and experience upcycling firsthand through demonstrations of completed projects and hands-on exploration.

The Reality of VR: Librarian Involvement in Virtual Reality Projects

Presenter: Camille Andrews, William & Mary

Room 205

As an instruction librarian in a makerspace and later as science liaison librarian at both large and small universities, the author has participated in various virtual reality projects for education, including doing workshops and class-related instruction on virtual reality and creating 360 video tours, creating an asynchronous virtual reality paper prototyping assignment, and participating in a faculty AR/VR working group and helping create a virtual chemistry lab. There are ways for librarians to be involved in virtual reality for education at all levels, whether your only experience is with Google Cardboard or you are an expert at creating 360 videos or virtual reality scenes. The library can also be an excellent place to introduce students to virtual reality in a way that reaches across disciplines, invites participation from underrepresented groups, and levels the playing field for all. In this session, participants will learn some basic uses of virtual reality in instruction, identify various ways that librarians can participate in instruction using virtual reality, and identify some basic tools and software for using and creating virtual reality. In the interactive portions, they will have an opportunity to share their own experiences, ideas and questions with each other and try some basic tools.

1:10 PM – 2:00 PM

Everything You Need to Know to Build a Comprehensive XR Service in Your Library

Presenter: Jonathan Bradley, Virginia Tech

Room 205

In this session, attendees will learn what it takes in terms of logistics, budgets, staffing, expertise, and space to build anything from a beginners-only to an advanced XR research space. We’ll go over the different technologies associated with immersive environments, such as VR, AR, motion capture, volumetric capture, 3D scanning, photogrammetry, mixed-reality recording, spatial audio, and virtual production, along with their respective costs, benefits, and challenges for a simple to advanced setup. We’ll also go over building programming and support for such a program, including workshops, consultations, grants, graduate assistantships, events, technology lending, and how to establish a student-driven research group like our ARIES program. Finally, I’ll go over some of the ways we’ve successfully advocated for our space and program with faculty and administration on campus.

Maker Camp as a Model for K-12 Outreach

Presenters: Sara Sweeney Bear, Eleanor Boggs, and Max Ofsa, Virginia Tech

Room 250

Maker Camp is a day camp offered by the University Libraries Studios Network at Virginia Tech. Each summer, 25 campers visit the library for four days to learn collaboration, prototyping, and process documentation skills then design and build arcade games using studio resources and upcycled materials. During this session, we will provide an overview of the camp, discuss its use as an outreach tool, and lead a mini brainstorming session about camps and other K-12 outreach programs you can offer in your library maker spaces.

2:10 PM – 3:00 PM

Empowering Through Partnership: The Women’s Maker Program’s Holistic Approach to Building Confidence, Skills, and Belonging in Library Makerspaces

Presenters: Maggie Nunley, Fang Yi, and Jenny Coffman, University of Virginia

Room 205

The Women’s Maker Program is a library makerspace program which increases residents’ confidence and interest in makerspace technologies, improves sense of belonging in the STEM field, and builds professional development opportunities. Participants receive training on growth mindset,-human-centered design, and rapid prototyping methods and technology such as 3D modeling/printing, AR, VR, and more. There are several key elements of this program that we believe are vital to its success. We work closely with paid student interns who are past graduates of the program and current program participants who together craft experiences that are student centered and reflect the unique interests of our cohort. We foster an experimental mindset and intentionally build flexibility into the program to rapidly test out new components. Finally, we prioritize and support overall student well-being by accounting for their full lives, their stresses, challenges, competing priorities, and systemic barriers to STEM. Our approach is to co-build support systems for personal and professional adversity, success, and growth. In this presentation we will demonstrate concrete examples of student-partnered program implementation, showcase student participants work in the program, and discuss the importance of a holistic community-led approach to building welcoming programming, spaces, and technical skill building for marginalized groups.

More Than Just Literacy: Describing Creative Technology to Your Colleagues

Presenters: Emily Thompson, Sarah Kantor, and Michael Standard, University of Tennessee – Chattanooga

Room 250

No matter how popular your space, we’ve all had that conversation that starts with some versions of “But what makes you a librarian?” While we know how we fit into the larger context of an academic library, how do we convey that to those who used to more traditional service points? This session will explore the overlaps with other library services and discuss how we can start to form shared vocabulary and definitions so non-ACTAL folks can understand what we do and how we help build students’ confidence and true fluency in multimedia rhetoric.

4:10 PM – 5:00 PM

Student Success: Positioning students to lead programs, space design and one another

Presenters: Jennifer Nichols and Mona Nakamura, University of Arizona

Room 250

From leading teams, to designing and teaching workshops, students are often the best people for the job. Conference presentations often yearn for the inclusion of authentic student voices. Where are the students? What do they think about this policy or that program? Is the work we do actually having an impact? This presentation will feature real examples of student-led engagement, testimonies by library makerspace student workers, and actual ways student experience has shaped and influenced programmatic and space decisions. It will focus on ways to create student-led opportunities in a makerspace (or other library service) that are beyond token engagement, and how to creatively implement opportunities in structures that are not designed to accommodate novel ideas. Participants at this presentation will help to create and share best practices and solutions to sticky problems that often prevent library staff from implementing more student-centered opportunities.

Fostering a Creative Learning Community Through a Graduate Student Residency Program

Presenters: Justin Schell and Erica Ervin, University of Michigan

Room 205

This presentation will share the story of an ongoing graduate student Residency program at the University of Michigan Library. Wholly distinct from the ALA Resident Librarian program, this Residency began in the Library’s Shapiro Design Lab in 2016 as a project incubator. Since then, it has gone through numerous iterations and continues today in both the Design Lab and other parts of the Library. At its core, the Residency encourages and supports students (primarily graduate students) on multi-semester projects that contribute to a highly interdisciplinary and creative learning community. Sometimes these students’ projects are conceived as part of goals and focus areas for the Library (accessibility explorations like tactile graphics and adaptive gaming, digital preservation, community science projects, and more) and other times they are the student’s own creation. In all of these projects, however, the students are supported by Library staff throughout the project and, more importantly, gain valuable, real-world project experience. Numerous former Residents have commented about how their Design Lab work, and the Residency specifically, was something that potential employers frequently asked about. Our goal with this presentation is to show how this kind of iterative, multifaceted, and sometimes unconventional student project support can be and is an important part of creative service points in academic libraries, especially in the kinds of spaces that comprise the ACTAL community.

Show Us Your Space Poster Session

11:10 AM – 12:00 PM, Room 303

The Library Studio since 2015

Presenters: Emily Thompson, Sarah Kantor, and Michael Standard, University of Tennessee – Chattanooga

When the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga opened its new library in 2015, it introduced a new service point: The Studio. It took off immediately, and continues to be one of the most popular spaces in the building. Now that the space has been open for nearly eight years, it still works. This poster will show how it has changed, stayed the same, and most of all, serves our students.

CATalyst Studios

Presenters: Jennifer Nichols and Rachel Castro, University of Arizona

We will create a multimedia poster presentation about CATalyst Studios, the makerspace and digital learning studio at the University of Arizona Libraries in Tucson, AZ.

Genesis Lab: A space to explore, discover, and create

Presenter: Lauren Haberstock, Pepperdine University

The Genesis Lab began as a grant-funded project at Pepperdine University in 2017. Located on the second floor of Payson Library, Pepperdine’s flagship library on its Malibu campus, the Genesis Lab is a makerspace that serves faculty, staff, and students through high-tech and low-tech making tools. The space continues to be reimagined, and has gone through a number of reorganizations to accommodate new technologies, facilitate special projects, and adjust to user patterns of engagement. The latest iteration of spatial organization occurred during Summer 2023. It attempts to create zones of engagement, with PC workstations on one wall and making tools organized on the opposite wall, leaving room in the middle for VR zones to be taped out. By the time of the ACTAL conference in November 2023, the reorganized space will have experienced nearly three months of usage and the poster will reflect its current state as well as future imagined iterations that respond to usage patterns and behaviors.

Making the Most of 300 Square Feet

Presenter: Leanne Nay, Indiana University

The Wells Library Makerspace is a small (but mighty!) space at Indiana University that supports audio and video production, 3D printing, sewing, and crafting. This poster will demonstrate how to make a big impact when space is limited.

Seven Years And Still Going: Looking at the Past and Future of Michigan State University Libraries’ Video Game Labs

Presenter: Michael Laney, Michigan State University

Over the last few years, my unit has been in the process of reimagining how we support our video game collections culminating in a university grant that represents a major investment in the space and allowing us to refurbish and reimagine the space.This presentation will seek to explore the challenges we faced in the first phase of our Video Game Lab’s (VGLs) life cycle, detail changes to our thinking that led us to expanding our offerings around games, and finally detail the changes to the physical setup we have made while looking towards the future of the space.  In particular, I would like to talk about moving away from the influence of already established practices around our multimedia collections towards conceiving of the video game collection and VGLs as unique spaces that can be responsive to needs. One highlight was the creation of a space for E-Sports clubs to practice in our spaces. In addition, we have sought to solve a variety of problems, like how to better standardize patron experience across our VGLs and create smooth and intuitive switching between consoles. As we move forward with a newly reimagined space, we want to continuously develop new approaches to our space and services. Included among the approaches we are considering are supporting streaming with video capture cards webcams in our VGLs as well as circulating consoles.

Gallery 4 at Clemons Library: A Multifunctional Space for Creativity, Inclusivity, and Innovation

Presenters: Joshua Thorud and Haley Gillilan, University of Virginia

In this ‘Show Us Your Space Poster,’ Gallery 4 co-founders and librarians Haley Gillilan and Joshua Thorud will guide attendees through their new library space, showcasing the innovative design and the significant impact it has had on student engagement and learning, and demonstrate a successful collaboration between the Teaching & Learning team and the Robertson Media Center – a multimedia creative technology space in the library.

Promoted as a student-centered, comfortable, flexible space near the main entrance of Clemons Library, Gallery 4 displays student art, new technology, popular reading collections, and boosts upcoming campus events. The space welcomes users and encourages them to engage with the library and library resources.

Securing internal grant money, Josh and Haley designed the space from the ground up, selecting furniture, furnishings, and technology that would build an intentional environment. Every piece of Gallery 4 is intended to be inclusive, immersive, and wholly different from the rest of our spaces, as a place for programming and exhibition. Displaying student art and work creates a sense of ownership of library space and showcases the potential of creative technologies.

Participants will gain insights into the creation, successes, and challenges of this space, as well as future plans for dynamic programming. We are excited to share this project with those who want to making small renovations and create spaces that might support and promote other parts of their Library system, or are considering ways to create welcoming environments on their Library floor.

Presenters: Justin Schell and Erica Ervin, University of Michigan

This will be an overview poster of the Shapiro Design Lab in the U-M undergraduate library. The content will cover the Design Lab’s three spaces across the first floor of the library; the Workshop, P.I.E. Space, and Media Production Rooms.

UNM’s Adobe Creative Commons

Presenter: Dayna Diamond, University of New Mexico

A poster describing UNM’s ACC. The spaces we have and how they were developed, plus (as fits) some brief notes on how those choices have panned out with some hindsight.

Thursday, November 9

Concurrent Workshops

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

This Librarian Life: The Podcast Assignment of Requirement

Presenters: Jason Evans Groth, North Carolina State University, and Elizabeth Esser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Room 203

Since 2004 podcasts have had a continuous moment. These highly accessible containers for stories immediately inspired faculty members the world over to start suggesting them as multimedia options for assignments, putting media librarians into the familiar position of demystifying the magic behind podcasts, largely considered to be audio production. Yet as podcast assignments continue to populate the pages of syllabi everywhere, the opportunity to focus on the importance of preparation for media projects arises anew. With the right mix of ubiquitous tools, reliable planning components, and practice, podcasts can be an incredible and surprisingly accessible tool to more easily make stories available to a larger audience. Whether working with faculty members, students, or starting our own podcasts, becoming comfortable with the century and a half old technology of audio recording is powerful, but even more powerful is understanding how to get to the point where you use it comfortably and sustainably  to make a successful podcast. In this session we will make and share podcasts in groups – starting with ideas, creating scripts, recording, and editing (quickly!) – and then share our feelings about the work and the work itself with one another. We’ll learn a little about audio production and a lot about (the) love (of using preparation to make otherwise daunting media projects more accessible).

Technology seminar supporting greater curriculum integration

Presenters: Jason Fleming and Alyssa Wharton, University of North Carolina Wilmington

Room 250

We just finished the 2nd year of our Digital Makerspace Faculty Fellows program. It is a competitive annual program hosted by the library that faculty apply to for the opportunity to learn how to use the different services in the Digital Makerspace. Faculty are added to a Canvas Learning module full of resources and an agenda that takes them a workshop series offered on a bi-weekly basis that encourages learning at your own pace with hands on training and in depth support. These workshops provide “hands on” working knowledge of subjects such as 3Dmodeling, 3D printing, Laser Cutting/Engraving, Podcasting, Virtual Reality, Video Creation/Editing. Additionally they receive training on how to reserve spaces and make consultation appointments. Along the way we give them examples of active learning projects that have been used in the past. They start the program with a vague idea of how they can incorporate their class assignments with makerspace activities, and we give them the confidence they need so that they can create an assignment that teaches their students a skill based on topics in their syllabus. In this presentation we will tell you how to set up your own program to get your faculty and their students into your space using your resources with a good understanding of how everything works and why it is a good fit for what they are trying to teach.

When the camera lies: Why is it tricky to teach about truth?

Presenter: Oscar Keyes, Virginia Commonwealth University

Room 205

This workshop will explore some early teaching experiments related to synthetic images, including images generated by AI and manipulated using image editing software. It will open with research about the history of image manipulation and how we can prepare for teaching in the Age of AI. Next, practical examples of class assignments and relevant student examples from a middle summer camp and an undergraduate photography course will be shown. Resources and a reading list will also be supplied.