 Good afternoon. Welcome to all of the alumni who are joining us for this third Thursday conversation. We're very glad that you've come today. I'm Jeanine Bertie Johnson, and one of my roles here at AMBS is as director of alumni. We've been doing these third Thursday conversations since the beginning of the school year last year. This year we just did them this spring and today is the last one of this series and we plan to continue them in the fall and I'll say a bit about that at the end. Just a couple of housekeeping details before we get started. If you would like to introduce yourself, please send a chat to all to everyone, not just to the panelists and say your name and what years you were at AMBS and maybe where you are now if you'd like to do that. If you have any technical concerns during the webinar, please send a chat message to the AMBS webinar host. And then if you have a comment or question for our speaker, I asked you to use the Q&A feature which you'll find if you hover at the bottom of your screen. And you can type your question there and I'll be watching for those questions and comments and I'll select the ones that we give to Carl. Please note that the webinar including the questions is being recorded. After our conversation, Carl Stitzman is director of library services at AMBS. He began working at AMBS in 2008 as assistant director for digital library services and received a master of library science degree from Indiana University in 2009. He's been active in ATLA, the American Theological Library Association, and he chaired its emerging technology interest group. In 2013, he was selected to attend the Wabash Center teacher and learning colloquy for theological school librarians. Boy, that's a mouthful. Carl earned a certificate in theological studies from AMBS in 2016 and became our library director in July 2016. Carl will start by answering several questions that I have for him and then after that we'll have time for whatever questions and comments you want to share. And please do share those throughout the webinar using the Q&A. Thank you for joining us. Carl, what would you like to tell us about yourself as an introduction. Yeah, so as you mentioned Janine, I've been here at AMBS for almost 14 years and time has really flown by. I'm really grateful to Eileen Sainer, who was our library director here for 30 years before retiring for bringing me on to the library. It's been a remarkable opportunity to grow and change personally, professionally, spiritually. So yeah, I'm immensely grateful for AMBS and the place that it's been for me over these years. Personally, I'm married to an AMBS alum, Twyla Epstotzman, who graduated early in the 2000s. And we have three kids. Our oldest was a baby when I started in AMBS and he's finishing middle school now. Yeah, we live by the Elkhart River and enjoy outdoor activities together. So yeah, that's a little bit more about me. And Janine, what's our next question? Well, one of the questions that I've been asking everyone is if you can tell us a story about a time when you experienced God in a powerful way. Yeah, so I often fail to recognize God's work except in hindsight. But in recent years, I was really carried by God through a dark time of depression, in which I felt like I was a fraud and a failure as a Christian, among other things. And so it really helped to have community around me, to have AMBS, to have my family, and also help from doctors and therapists and people like that. So I really feel like I was carried by God through that time. And yeah, there's amazing resources out there for that journey. So yeah, I also learned in a deeper and fresher way how much grace there is for me, despite all of my shortcomings. And that is really an incredible learning and growth for me in the past few years. Thank you. I'm wondering if you can remember what drew you to the AMBS community? What attracted you here? Yeah, so I really, really liked that AMBS was building a green library. That was a big draw for me at first. I was at Goshen College back in the day. And I worked in the Goshen College library for a number of years after graduation. I also took classes at AMBS right after finishing up at Goshen College. And really appreciated the AMBS community and the kinds of deeper engagement with Anabaptist history and theology and biblical studies that went on here. So the invitation from Eileen to come and work in a brand new LEED certified library was a total no-brainer to me at AMBS. So I, yeah, I'm really, really grateful for the chance to work here. I go to other theological libraries, other college and university libraries, and I'm always grateful that I work in the library where I work. I am very rarely envious. Yes, we have a wonderful, wonderful facility and resources in it. What kinds of projects are you working on this year? Or if you could just even give us kind of a description of what your work life includes and involves. What's a typical week like for you or a not typical week? Just what are you doing as director of library services? Yeah, so I'm not sure there is a typical week, but I do have the latest project that came my way is figuring out what we do next after my colleague Brandon Board leaves AMBS at the end of the month. So I've really appreciated support from our Dean Bev Lap and in processing what happens next. So that's, yeah, that's a current project. I've missed Brandon a whole lot, but I'm, I'm excited about the ways AMBS will provide new opportunities for our library. So, I also do a lot of supporting students with their research and writing. It may be as simple as someone coming by and saying, Hey, what's a good commentary on Matthew or whatever, or as complicated as someone wanting to process what their thesis should be for their paper. I really, really enjoy those kinds of engagements. And especially seeing students grow over their time here at AMBS. Early on in the program, we assess them for their information literacy skills, meaning the apparatus of their papers. And then work with students who need additional assistance over their time here. And that's been really, really rewarding. I also engage with faculty in different ways. I was just asked to do another workshop for a class by a teaching faculty member. I enjoy those kinds of things to the collaboration around collection development, which is somewhat unique here in that we have faculty driven collection development. These relationships in the ABS community are so precious to me. And I think that's what keeps me coming back over time is those connections that are being made here. Another really exciting thing is all of the students that we have around the world, including a strong contingent in Ethiopia. So being able to have zoom meetings with them and I explain things about the library do troubleshooting do research assistance. Writing assistance is a really great opportunity for me to learn and grow. We also have a strong contingent of international students here on campus which you maybe know about. It includes student workers here in the library. So developing relationships internationally cross culturally is really, really a lot of fun. So those are some of the things that I'm working at. I really hope that we can do some more digital collections work in the next year. We'll be familiar with a few projects that we have done in the past that we want to build on, including our digital men and I periodicals project that continues to grow by slight amounts. There are new periodicals coming online every so often. And then we also have the, we've worked collaboratively on all of these digitization projects with other and Baptist many institutions. Bringing on more Institute of Mennonite studies publications. Bringing on online, the biblioteca digital about these stuff, which is a Spanish language theological library, which also continues to grow little by little. And I have some other projects in mind that we may be working with others on going forward. We are grateful for partnerships with Goshen College and the Mennonite Historical Library there, as well as the Mennonite Church USA archives for working on some of these projects with us and various other partners as well. And so we're never alone when we do this stuff and I would also say that library collaboration is something that really engages me. We collaborate with library partners, as Janine mentioned through ATLA and through Poundly the private academic library network of Indiana. And without those networks of librarians, we would be able to do very little around here. We rely heavily on library collaboration. I'm going to ask you just to push that out a little bit more Carl tell us. What is Poundly. How does it work. How does it serve our students how do we resource other libraries around the state. Just a description of Poundly and then also say a bit about your roles with them. So Poundly started out in the early 90s as a library automation group that facilitated AMBS getting an online library catalog, and even getting internet on campus. Eileen was a huge leader in Poundly getting started and bringing Poundly to AMBS so she gets credit for that role. And Poundly over time has emerged in new ways as a place of deeper and deeper collaboration among the library staff at each institution to create teams that work on each other's behalf through work on digital collections or work in electronic resources management, the links to the various electronic resources in our collections, or work on cataloging, or work on scholarly communication, the cycle of faculty publishing things. So Poundly's work really extends our ability to have expertise in the variety wide variety of things that librarians need to know about these days. And so we can have deep expertise at other schools and build on that draw on that here at AMBS. And at the same time, as Janine mentioned, we can lend our expertise to others through this collaboration. One of the ways that I'm involved in Poundly is as a member of the Poundly board, each of the library directors at each of the 23 institutions across the state of Indiana that are part of Poundly, we have seminars, colleges, universities, ranging in size from, you know, less than 1000 to 10s of 1000s of students. We don't have the really big schools, but we have kind of the medium sized ones. Anyway, I serve on the board of directors with all of those folks. I am also on a task force for Poundly that's doing future visions work for the organization, looking at changing demographics in our supported schools, and how we're going to deal with that strategically, how we're going to communicate the value of libraries in an era of likely diminishing resources and shifting models for higher education. So libraries continue to be really important as we shift our understandings of how education happens, but librarians are not very good at telling our own story. We like to be behind the scenes. We like to go about our business and help people one on one. We don't like to market ourselves. We don't like to say we're great. And yet, librarians are some of the glue that holds the academic endeavor together. Because without our work, people couldn't get access to the resources that they need to write and read for classes. So we see the hollowing out of libraries as institutions change, and that can be really alarming. So, yeah, advocacy around those kinds of matters is something that I contribute to Poundly. We also contribute expertise in library systems. I've been involved in that in the past. And one thing that's been said by leaders of the larger libraries of Poundly even is that they feel like AMBS makes an outsized contribution to the organization by providing leadership and expertise, even though we're really, really small. We're the smallest institution in Poundly. But we're a highly valued partner. Thank you. And can you go ahead and explain ATLA as well and how it's different and what we get from there? Yeah, so one thing I failed to mention from Poundly is that we have a really important program called Pal Share, which means sending the books around that we find in our shared catalog. And that's the direct connection that most of our students and faculty know about. There's a lot happening behind the scenes to make the library work, but that's a really visible program that everybody relies on. So that's, we can't talk about Poundly without Pal Share. So if I had a book that I wanted that was not in the AMBS Library Connect collection, but it was at Notre Dame, you would notify Notre Dame and then a courier would bring the book? Right. Okay. Yeah. We have a daily library courier that brings books actually from any library across the state. So it's a really cool service that gives us a lot of access. Yeah, so talking about ATLA. It's also a different kind of organization in terms of geographic scope. It's actually moving in the direction of becoming a more worldwide global organization. The primary way that you may know ATLA is as the provider of a library database, which you incidentally all have access to as alumni. We have a program where you can get a username and password to access the ATLA database and search for articles based on scripture texts in particular journals and get the full text of those articles right at your fingertips. So ATLA, in addition to having a really awesome database that is always growing and including more journals from around the world is also a membership organization of theological librarians, theological and religious studies librarians. Primarily in North America, but increasingly in other places too, and networked with people in other places. So it provides a lot of really rich connections ecumenically. It's a great way to rub shoulders with, you know, from everyone from the fundamentalists to the people who aren't necessarily Christian to Catholics to Orthodox to. On and on, there's a lot of richness in those relationships we could disagree on everything theologically and be passionate about that. But we embrace each other as brothers and sisters and theological librarianship. It's, it's that's a really cool organization. ATLA gives us the opportunity to have free interlibrary loans between these libraries which have really remarkable collections that are deep in their own areas. So we get quite a bit through that that's a direct benefit. There's a reciprocal borrowing program that enables our distant students to go to a library near them and gain access. It's, it also resources us as librarians in terms of professional development, being aware of trends, being aware of technology. And so we're up on the latest happenings and the databases the latest happenings in library administration for me or what have you so. Yeah, thoughts about strategic planning or other kinds of things going on in the world of libraries. That's our source for how to be better theological librarians. Um, just to follow up a bit. Eileen Sainer has has asked a couple or, you know, suggested a couple of things that you might say a little bit more about and maybe you have now explained these well enough but how does the library catalog allow people to request materials from other libraries and how does that affect how ambia spends its library budget. And then she's also mentioned the library guide for alumni which you have touched on a bit. Do you want to say a little bit more about those things. Yeah. So, um, the pounding, pounding provides us still with a library catalog that automates our library circulation system that facilitates discovery, and a really cool thing about that I talked about pal share which is the way that we gain access to these books from other collections is the practical side of it. The technological side of it that makes it possible is the catalog system itself which allows us to see results from that are kind of tiered the first tier is the results that come from our library. The next tier is results that come from other pounding libraries and the third tier is actually libraries around the world. So, at any of those tiers there are options to request things. And, or immediately grab them if you happen to be here in Elkhart or connecting remotely to to our collections for students and faculty. And we have been able to really focus on our specialties because we have such ready access to other library collections. So, we have leaned into purchasing some obscure materials and biblical studies that our faculty really dig, and we can provide those to other libraries, as well as our library so we know that they have a trajectory of getting at the same time, we can rely on another library to get something specialized in a different interdisciplinary area. And as our faculty do more and more interdisciplinary work, particularly the peace studies program is really interdisciplinary with sociology and political science and things like that. So we can be sure of being able to get things in those areas and not have just a shallow collection in that area, just because we need something. We know that we have access to deeper collections in those areas from other libraries. So it enables us to target our spending to the things that we're really good at. And contribute more to the library community and to our people here. So, and another related question is that I want to talk at some point here about the resources for alumni I've touched on that a little bit. But yeah, I, I would like to share my screen and show you some things that we have done actually for many years. Eileen started these things for us and they're so well appreciated that we must continue them. So, yeah, I'm going to share my screen here and show you what we have in place. So, let me start here with the library website. So recently, and BS is marketing. Oh, you're probably seeing my, are you seeing my screen. We are we're seeing the library homepage. Perfect. It doesn't have a little circle around it like it usually does. So I was worried. The ABS marketing department recently worked really hard to bring our total and BS website up to speed. So, I am really appreciative to them for making our libraries website look really good. They found beautiful pictures of our library to put on our website. They integrated our various resources and actually our website person is a current student so he knows how valuable our resources are. And a neat thing that they did in the process of putting our website up was give a tour video of our library. So you can virtually tour our library through our website and see some of the neat things about our facility and collections. If you keep scrolling down, you can find a link to our alumni resources. So if you ever forget how to get to our alumni page, this is the link to go to it. If you happen to be in the local Elkhart area, you are more than welcome to come in and use our resources in person. You can give out library cards for free and want people to make use of our space and collections. But we know that our alumni go everywhere. So we need to provide digital library resources for you all as well. And that's what's covered on our library guide. So, here is our library guide for alumni. We have library guides on a large number of topics. And you're welcome to explore those but this one is specifically addresses the resources that we make available to alums. And as I mentioned before, the Atla database is a really key resource that we we actually pay a little bit of money every year for access for everyone to have this database and it requires a username and password. We, if you send us an email, we will send you a link to the form to fill out to get a password and I'll just show you real quick what that form looks like. It's a real simple form that asks for your name and email address, and then we send we have to update the password every year. So we'll send you updates on what the password is when it has to change. So it's important that you get signed up on our list if you haven't gotten a new password for a while, your password won't work. So, yeah, sign up with us and we'll update you on the password. One of the neat things that's happened with the requirement to change passwords every year is that we actually get to hear from our alumni about their use of the database and how much they rely on it. So, that's been the side bonus of EBSCO telling us that we have to change the password. Yeah, it's a little, it was a little bit annoying at first, but then we found out that we got to actually connect with people, which was, which was fun. Back on our alumni guide. It's organized to have various preaching and worship resources free resources. In the Anabaptist Mennonite topics, including some of the digitization projects that we that I mentioned earlier. That bring you access to say the Mennonite and Gospel Herald, and Spanish resources, several journals. There's, there's a ton of stuff out there and available for free. So, this, there's a combination of resources that are free to everyone and resources that are only available to our alums. But we want you to, yeah, have access to as much as possible. The other thing that is available to you is contacting us as librarians for our reference services. And that our information is on this guide as well. We're willing to go look up things and commentaries and make scans of them for you. And answer whatever questions might come up. And that's, we enjoy hearing from our alums and especially people that we've known over the years. But not only that people who have longer stories with AMBS than I do. Yeah, just, just being able to fulfill a quick request that is easy for us but makes a big difference for someone else. I, a couple of days ago an alum contacted me. If this is too complicated. Let me know. But I would really like a photo of like one page of something that you have. Like, yeah, that's super easy. And I went and did it right away and it was so much fun to be a part of something that was really important to this alum. And actually was really easy for me to do. Please don't hesitate to ask questions that even feel obscure, because we enjoy having that interaction and that ability to help. So, yeah, that's, that's a little bit about what we provide to alumni. And we really value the various ways that you're engaged in different kinds of ministries and want to come behind you to resource you in that work. Thank you that's awesome. Another question I have for you is, if you have any current research interests, are there things that you are pushing out your own knowledge of. Yeah, so my most recent kind of research passion is around the area of critical librarianship and bringing that into conversation with theological librarianship. Critical librarianship is the is a kind of emerging field that seeks to listen more carefully to marginalized perspectives and librarianship. Name historic inequalities and undo various forms of oppression within the library space. And I think that theological librarianship has a lot to learn from critical approaches to librarianship. And this connects with my passion for undoing oppression is in the space of our seminary. And learning from the various intercultural opportunities that we have. So, one of the things I've been doing, as well as this integration of critical librarianship and theological librarianship is working as an IDI qualifying administrator intercultural development inventory, which we do here on a regular basis that is an AMBS so I get to have lots of intercultural conversations with people. So, this is really fired me up to to work more at addressing historic inequalities and and working at issues of oppression that get in the way of having rich cultural and social exchanges. So, one of the things about theological librarianship is that it is wider than regular librarianship, which is already pretty white. So it skews in kind of the opposite direction of what we might want. And by wider, I mean, not just skin color, but also kind of the overarching concept of whiteness of normative ways of being that reinforce Western Northern European kinds of ways of being and privilege. The patriarchal heteronormative. All of those kinds of understandings of what is normal in our society. So undoing that within the space of theological librarianship is is pretty important to me. And I do have a upcoming poster presentation at the Atlet conference that I'm not quite ready for on this intersection of theological librarianship and critical librarianship so I'm working at that. I'm also in the process of publishing an article in the journal theological librarianship on understandings of theological librarianship as a vocation. There is a really interesting article in the critical librarianship space on how our understandings of vocation can actually be impediment to justice in employment conditions. And, and encourage overwork and underpay and and I think in theological librarianship, we have an even more elevated sense of vocation than in general in the general field. And does that I sort of pose a question does that actually work against us as library professionals in theological schools. I think it might and I think it might get in the way of our diversity as well. Because people from more marginalized backgrounds suffer disproportionately from these sorts of things. So, yeah, I would be, I could sit here talk for way too long about this. It really gets me fired up to think about how to bring more justice to these spaces. Yeah. So, I appreciate the leadership of ambias and identifying these sorts of issues and addressing them through our ICUR intercultural competence and undoing racism team. And I'm just always inspired by the ways ambias is providing leadership in a variety of spaces around the trajectory of God Shalom. Thanks. And to the end of the questions I have so if others want to add more to the q amp a please do but what's a dream you have for ambias. And then after we after you answer that one will will see what questions you have for our alumni. Great segue Janine because my dream is that ambias will just keep on being this incubator for this Shalom work that is so important in a world that is hurting in so many ways. And I feel like as a really really small school. As a really small religious tradition, we have had an outsized impact on our faith tradition in terms of calling Christians to be more intentional about discipleship and working toward peace and understanding peace broadly. So, I want us to continue to do that to not hide our light under a bushel and to sort of boldly claim our impact out there. So in our various circles like the ATLA circles. I hear a lot of respect for what we're doing here at the seminary so in other theological and religious studies schools. What we put out there has an impact. So this tiny little place really does matter and I hope that we can really claim that. Thanks. And the questions do you have for the alumni who've joined us today. Yeah, I have a whole bunch. Throw them out there, and you can answer the ones that maybe engage you. So, first off, what was the most helpful thing our library did for you as a student as a, like, how do we set priorities for our current students what what was most important to you. The second question is what kinds of resources do you need for your various ministries. What else could we provide for you. And then how have theological research and writing impacted your preaching teaching evangelism and peacemaking so what is that connection between what we do and research and writing at seminary and that those roles as practitioners. And, and finally, were there practices that sustained you in your studies, and now in your various ministries that the library could facilitate and promote for our students. We like to tell students that research and writing are embodied activities. And that it's important to attend to our bodies as we do this intense work. Yeah, what, what kinds of things in that realm might we want to promote as a library. So, you don't have to answer any of the questions, definitely not all of them. But I'm curious about a lot of things. Yeah, I've put those questions in the chat. And if you'd like to answer in the chat that would be great. And then if you have any questions for Carl this is a time for you to go ahead and put those in the Q&A. And so either a response to the questions he has asked or a question or response to what the other things he has presented. I just want to ask a few more questions as we're waiting for the alums have questions but tell us about the bookstore being incorporated into the library and how that is working out. Yeah. So the bookstore has been a really interesting experiment for us. We, over time we have more reliance on digital periodicals than print periodicals. The ATLA database is a huge asset in that way that we can rely on the coverage in there and we don't need as many print periodicals so we had space opening up in the library. And so we created a small bookstore area at the same time that the bookstore was really struggling to stay afloat financially. And so we created a small bookstore area in the corner of the library. And that meant that we also began managing the bookstore. So, I never trained to do retail. I did it in a small way. And so, we've had some neat opportunities connected to doing the bookstore that I think we wouldn't have had otherwise. And one of those has been the ability to do events with authors, and to kind of cross promote new materials. So, one of our own, David Kramer recently published a book. We had a really awesome book party with him here in the library and brought people into our space sold a whole bunch of his books. Got an interesting book talk. And so that kind of opportunity has been something I've really enjoyed about the bookstore. So I will spare you the discussion of the little headaches of having a bookstore. But I think the joys of it outweigh those. So, yeah, it's been really, really fun. Another thing that you have brought to the library that you don't see in every library are things like an exercise bike with a reading desk on it. Like a hammock and some balls, sitting balls. Can you say a little bit more about your thinking behind those and what you hear from students about those. Yeah, so it's what I said earlier, which is that I think reading is, is a whole body experience and that we need to attend to that. There's some sun lamps around for those dark Indiana days, even though the natural light in our library is amazing. Sometimes we need an extra boost. And I've picked up these ideas, actually from other librarians through the networks that I mentioned. And our students talk about them being not kind of their exclusive place to study, but a helpful diversion. So it may be helpful to spend a little bit of time on the exercise ball while they read to give themselves kind of a concrete break from what they're doing. So we see these things kind of migrating around the library. And people definitely spend a lot of time in the soft seating that we have in the table seating that we have, but they also appreciate the chance to kind of flex around with some of these other options. And I think this goes back to the original design of our library as a flexible space and as a green design space. All of that design work facilitated the things that we're doing in our space now. We can move things around because we have power in various places because we have kind of reconfigurable spaces and beautiful spaces, we can provide these kinds of opportunities. So, again, Eileen gets the credit for all of that work that happened over many, many years. We're, yeah, we're very, very fortunate to have that. Thanks, Paul Likty has made a comment here. I've been using logos Bible software recently and appreciate the ways it links to other resources. Are there ways in which electronic resources of AMBS can be linked to logos. Thank you Paul for that question. Our logos theological librarians have a little bit of a love hate relationship with logos because they're, they're not very keen on linking in kind of resources from outside of their orbit into their program and they're also not very eager to allow libraries to buy into their program. So while we see the value of the products to people doing serious study. We have to kind of keep our distance from them because they don't want to let us in. So I think that their business model really is trying to get you to pay for add on packages and additional materials within the their software. So, yeah, I don't have anything helpful to say about what we could do with logos. Other than to say that we often have parallel resources here in the library. And there are ways that if you see a reference to something within the logo software that you don't have access to. You could ask us for a scan of something. And we would be happy to help with that. So, yeah, I, I wish we could integrate better. But that's, that's the limit of, of software and their license terms and so forth. Thanks Paul for answering all these questions and thank you to the alums who joined us today and those who will watch this later. I'm grateful to get this insight into your work Carl, and, and I know if you, if people still have questions they can contact you directly and you'd be glad to talk with them more. I want to thank all of you who've joined us today for your ongoing support of ambias as you have heard me say many times alumni are most important influencers. They are valuable as supporters of prayer support financial support and identifying new students for us so if you have a new student that you would like to see take advantage of classes at ambias please contact me about that. I also hope that you're staying connected to the seminary through our church leadership center offerings and other events. Note on our website that we have some things coming up this summer that you can be part of, as well as classes next fall that you can use your graduate audit special rate on. I want to thank also Janet McGeary our student IT person who has provided technical support today. Next fall when we come back to do more of the third Thursday conversations, we're going to be interspersing them with the interviews of individuals, and, and then on other months we're going to have conversations with new programs at ambias. So we'll have a webinar focus in which you will be able to see everyone on the screen and we'll have a conversation together with maybe two or three administrators at ambias, who will talk about new things that are emerging. We will include the de min program that we are waiting for final approval on in the beginning of June, and also some exciting news out of our development team about a capital campaign. So, look forward to having those conversations again next year thank you so much for joining us today and for joining us throughout this, this spring season. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you all.