 All right, next up on Big Talk from Small Libraries, we just wrapped up our lightning rounds. I am Krista Porter, your host here today. Our one o'clock session is 1 p.m. central time it is here. Okay, it's 106 p.m. we're running a little long. Cultivating an active learning community at the library. As you can see here, Daniel, Deanna, Ashley Creek, and Lindsay Shetler, sorry. From the University of St. Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas, south of us, are you having a lot of snow down there or is the storm just up here? We are having some light rain. Ah, okay, you got it easy. We have wind, snow blowing sideways outside my window. Oh my God. It's okay. But they're gonna tell us about what they've set up at their learning center here at the Law University. So I'm just gonna hand it right away to you so you can just take it away. Sure, thank you. Again, my name is Danielle Tyce Dion, and I'm the library director at the University of St. Mary. I'm here with two of my colleagues, and I'll let them introduce themselves right now. I'm Ashley Creek, and I'm the Emerging Technologies Librarian at the University of St. Mary. And I'm Lindsay Shetler. I'm the Special Collections Librarian here at the University of St. Mary. And what we're going to do is take you on a journey. And the journey started around two and a half years ago. And we're really excited to have you kind of see what we've done with our library in the last two and a half years and excited to share about the possibilities for where we're going. Okay, so I became the library director here at the University of St. Mary in 2014. And when I walked in, I actually did walk into 10 card catalogs as the first thing that you saw when you walked into this library. Now we are at an academic university with around 800 on-campus students. And we do have a very active and engaged community here. And there really was no kind of visibility of the library on campus. We were attempting to do instruction but not in any holistic manner across disciplines. We had a wide variety of bound periodicals that were here in the library. We had reference materials that had not been weeded. We have around 100,000 circulating materials that had not been weeded for many decades. And very small collaborative spaces, no group study spaces, no individual study spaces except in the corner. So our patrons are really pushed into the corners of the library to have any kind of individual study spaces. So when I walked in, I was very excited about the possibility of the building of where we could go with a different strategic plan and vision and had a lot of fun the first year engaging the staff and figuring out what we wanted to do. So we started brainstorming to figure out what could be a new model. And so we knew that we wanted to create a collaborative open kind of community space where everyone across the campus would feel that the library was something that they could come in and teach classes in, participate with the librarians in instruction, hold different types of activities in the library. And so for the past two and a half years, we've been working to do that. Now, we did this all on our own. We had the support of the administration to make these changes, but absolutely no funding. And so we actually, physically librarians took down these shelves. We were the ones who were taking the shelving down. We kind of went with the model of, let's show everyone that we're willing to work really hard at changing the physical space and making big dramatic changes at the library just by working hard throughout the day. And then hopefully that would garner support of others on campus who would be willing to pitch in either physically and also financially as it turned out down the road, which was a wonderful addition that we'll speak about. So what we ended up doing is taking down the first year, 24 rows of shelving. We had bound periodicals that were sitting in 12 rows on one side of our library that actually were not even catalogued. So no one knew that we had these bound periodicals and we're in Kansas, so we really didn't need Oklahoma railroads as the past 25 years of that title. So we did a lot of weeding. We worked with various departments to make sure we were keeping items that were relevant for them. We made some very big changes in terms of what physical periodicals we kept or not kept and made some additional purchases and databases for e-content that would be relevant for our users. We do have an online community of students, approximately 500 to 600 online students. And we wanted to make sure that we were being equitable for them in anything that we were purchasing. If it was for a discipline that was relevant for them, for an online student, we really wanted to go e-only for that. So over the course of 2014 and 2015, we set out on our own journey of transforming the library spaces on our own, taking down the 24 rows, moving things around, repurposing all kinds of different tools and furniture that we had. And as you can see here, we made a lot of messes. So we kind of had this philosophy of we were going to make these changes and we did have the support of everyone here on campus, luckily. I know when you do reading projects, there is some trepidation of what the response will be around campus. We, these are all bound periodical volumes that you see here. And we were strategic in that the items that we disposed of, we first wanted to make sure we had an online version of that title if it was relevant for our disciplines or if it wasn't relevant, we could justify it by saying this title has really nothing to do with our curriculum. So we were making sure we were covering our bases and making sure that we could have logical arguments. However, when we were doing this ourselves, we did make lots of messes and we did actually have to recruit some helpers. And you can see in the bottom right side of the screen, this is our football team. They came and helped us two weekends, move out the bound volumes into a paper recycling dumpster for us and we are eternally grateful for them. And there are some of our heaviest users here in the library now. We are very grateful for that collaboration. So through that, we now have this space. So this is actually the same area where we had that first picture that was very dark and had all of the shelving that you saw that we took down. This is now our space and we have beautiful LED lighting. We still have our old carpet and our goal is to replace that this coming summer, actually. However, the students have moved in and we still have our same furniture in these images but the students have been dragging the furniture around, creating their own little pods and we have beautiful lighting that comes in from the far side of the building that we would never have seen before with the shelving. So this is where we are in around 2015 and we were very happy to be at this point. And Ashley is going to talk about what we've done since then. So after we cleared these spaces, one of the things that we asked students about was how they wanted us to use and envision our new space. So we simply put up some of the big poster sheets like giant post-it notes and asked them what they wanted to see. Our students are very creative people. They love the idea of study rooms but then there's also the people who wanted us to add Starbucks, showers, a condo. They love the idea of couches and they love the idea of open space. So we were able to take some of these feedback and enjoy our students' sense of humor but also see what they wanted us to add really. So our students have really moved into and claimed ownership of the new space that we've created. We host poster sessions. We host large sessions with our entire first year experience. So the entire freshman class can come into the library or one of the only places on campus where that is even physically possible and hold events and gather together. And then we still got a long way to go. A few, the following summer, our next big project was this large center room in the library and it was over 2,000 square feet of space that had previously been used by one employee. So a large space that was not necessarily getting its optimum usage. That summer, we spent the time to clean out the space and then actually for the next year, we partnered with maintenance to use folding chairs and tables to use it as a teaching space and event space on campus. We were able to host, I think, 32 events over the course of that year and we considered ourselves pretty hot stuff for doing that. But then we took it and went a little bigger. Okay, it's Danielle again. Over the course of that year, as we used the space for instructions, sessions and different activities with other faculty members and different departments, we learned about the Steelcase Education Active Learning Grant. And this grant is at this time in 2016 was valued at $62,000 and it provided an Active Learning Technology Lab that could be in any kind of space at a university, a middle school or a high school. And so we were a little bit wary about applying for this because a library has never received it before. And so we didn't know if we really were gonna meet the qualifications for what was needed. But after a couple days of thinking we wouldn't do it, we just decided to jump in and tried to pull it off and we pulled it off within one week. So we were a really great team trying to figure out all different aspects of what was needed for the grant application. So we went ahead and have shared our grant application with you. You are very welcome to go to this link and actually see all of our grant application materials. We did talk about our transformation of the space of not only the 2000 square foot room that we were wanting to create the Active Learning Center in but also just our transformation of the library in general. We also created a pedagogy and Active Learning Pedagogy and I'll share that in the next slide. And then we also had an assessment cycle where we were going to actually evaluate the usage of the room and the impact of the room on our campus. And so we have all of those materials available for you and you are very welcome to go and utilize that in any capacity as you would like to. As part of this process of applying, we decided that we needed to learn more about Active Learning itself. And so my colleague Ashley developed an Active Learning Resource Center for our campus and the link is available here as well. And what was great about that is that not only did we acquire some print materials that our faculty and staff could use in their own teaching and learning, but we also found some excellent online materials that faculty and staff could use as well. And so all of that is listed and available in the Resource Center Guide as well. Our grant narrative is available as well and kind of our logic arguments for why we felt we were a good candidate for this grant. We were highlighted by Steelcase Education and as an excellent example of this grant application they have been sharing our application with others for the 2017 grant cycle. And we also were one of the recipients of Steelcase sending a video team to come and highlight our usage of the room. And we'll talk about our usage coming up shortly, but the video for us that was created by Steelcase is also available on our grant application page. We have that there. So please feel free to take a look at that. This is our campus active learning philosophy that we came up with. USM instructors facilitate the creation of a student learner centered environment through creative active learning curriculum strategies that increase student and social learning, collaboration, critical thinking skills, knowledge creation, creativity and experimentation. Our pedagogy is centered on continuous instructor to student engagement, peer to peer learning opportunities, meta literacy and multiple teaching modes designed to meet visual, auditory and kinesthetic student learning styles. Instructors utilize innovative, flexible and interactive spaces and instructional technology tools to facilitate active learning and wisdom formation and espouse a culture of assessment. What was wonderful about this process is that it has generated kind of a fire in our faculty and staff in using active learning techniques and actually sharing them with each other. We have since recede of this grant created a center for teaching and learning on campus and it actually is held here in the library and our faculty and staff come together and we're trying to increase the amount of active learning pedagogies here on campus and it's a wonderful collaboration and a wonderful outcome that has happened as a result of this grant. And we'll discuss a little bit more about that as we move forward. Here's a screenshot of the Active Learning Resource Center page that I mentioned earlier and you are very welcome to come and take a look at that as well. Okay, we are going to transition to Lindsey. I have a quick question, Danielle. Yes. That just popped up, that might be a good point right now because it just got asked. Someone wants to know, what is the definition of a meta-literacy? Sure. Well, it can have multiple definitions and my colleagues can jump in after I share something but for me meta-literacy is more than information literacy. It's a combination of digital literacy, information literacy, so meta would just be kind of more. Anyone else want to? You need to be aware and understand all of it. It's more than just knowing information, it's knowing how to use it and how to present it in different ways. So kind of the holistic view of knowledge rather than necessarily just focusing on one aspect of it. I like that, the holistic. Thanks. All right, so after we won the Stale Case Grant, the renovation took place in that middle room, which is now the Active Learning Center. It was, the renovation took over the summer for six weeks and USM did provide additional funds to have new lighting, new paint, new cabinetry, things of that nature. And then this is what the renovation looks like. So this is what the room looks like now. As you can see, the grant included a smart whiteboard there that's on the right. And then there's also some tables and chairs and everything is mobile. So everything can be moved easily and is accessible for transitions for groups, group projects, classroom collaboration, things of that nature, as well as being lightweight. So it's really functional compared to the traditional classroom furniture which is stationary or too large that really puts barriers up for any type of active learning. And then here's another picture. This one shows some of our amazing whiteboards that you can take anywhere in the library and use. And they also have little slots on the tables that you can provide the whiteboards to create dividers and things of that nature. They're also sustainable, so you won't have to use posters for any type of group projects and presenting in class. You can just go straight to the whiteboards and use those. They're easy to erase and clean as well. And then here's a picture of just the tall chairs and tables that we also received. And so as a result, this active learning center brought over 240 formal activities in the space thus far. And here is a list of all the courses taught. What we've noticed is that the health scientists use the whiteboards a lot for concept mapping, problem-based learning. We also have introduced other active learning tools, such as a 3D printer and board games and a makerspace, which Ashley will talk about in a little bit. But that has provided us with additional tools to bring into the center and to really have the library provide instruction in new ways that incorporate into active learning. And then here's a shot of some of our students who are studying in the center. As a result of this grassroots program, the library is providing technology and introducing classes in technology and workshops in technology. And we're fostering a collaborative space for students, faculty, and the community. This has really brought the faculty and the library together to form new partnerships and start new conversations with each other and how we can incorporate information literacy and active learning into the campus as a whole. And here's another community usage for this space as well. There's, in addition to the list here, there's been professional poster sessions that have been held here. We have one going on right now as well. We have faculty senate that is held here. We just finished senior success day as well that took over the whole library actually, which is new for us. And then also student-led events for clubs and unions has become really popular in using this space to kind of come together and create these clubs and unions and have this other students on campus participate in events here as well. We've become kind of the hub. And then also I wanted to touch that because of this experience, we've also become the driving force to expanding library outreach to the Leavenworth community as well, which was not something that was as a priority with this program, but it has opened the doors to events that have taken place here where we have partnered with outside community businesses and just the people in general as well. We just had a donation for special collections acquired and so we were able to have a dedication ceremony here in the library and kind of familiarize the community with this space and what we're doing. And as we've gone through all these changes, one of the things that has been at the top of our minds is making sure that we really are focusing on our students and the space that they need, what our campus needs the library to be. So one of the things that is a happy side effect of this is that we've moved as part of the campus plan from a renovation five to six years down the line to a renovation that we are actively fundraising for right now. So as part of the idea to get more student feedback on what kind of space we want to build, we're fortunate to be in the Kansas City Metro area and have institutions that are at least comparable size that have done recent renovations within driving distance. And while it's not necessarily practical to take 40 students on a bus ride to look at other libraries, it was possible to take two students in another librarian on a visit to view other libraries and take enough photos and give a virtual tour that we could bring back to campus and ask students what they think of how these other libraries envision their spaces. So we can use those back feedback to talk through our future renovation and make sure that we're really creating a kind of space that our students want and how they can envision using it. And as Lindsay mentioned before, as part of our push towards active learning, we've created more makerspace tools. That's actually how my title is now the Emerging Technologies Librarian. I was the librarian formerly known as Access Services. And part of this is that I love technology and researching it for other people. We've added a 3D printer, a large format poster printer, and we've actually started repurposing the cabinets that you see on this slide are former microfilm cabinets. Since the microfilm has not been used in the six years that I've been here, we decided to empty the microfilm out into boxes and are currently using them to store all sorts of tools. Like yarn fits amazingly in microfilm cabinets, along with scissors, cutting mats, all types of tools that our students can use. And our philosophy with all of these technologies, students book time on the 3D printer by emailing me and we print things on demand. There's currently no cost for that for them. On the large format printer, we're just trying to keep ourselves solvent and ink so they can print anything for $2 a foot, which is significantly a significant savings over our local kinkgos. And anything that they want to use in the makerspace cabinets, they're free to take and use inside the library, outside the library. Materials are consumed and we'll replace them over time and tools they can take and then just bring back. We're also adding more circulating technology to our active learning. We have started a board game collection that is very popular for recreational play, but is also gaining traction in the classroom as more professors experiment with using games as learning technology. We also have several video projects so we're adding more video technology, including tripods, tablet mounts, we're looking at adding a GoPro and some robots for students to explore, how to combine coding and those types of active learning. Our education students are seeing this as they go forth into education classrooms, so this is their opportunity to play with them before they go on to write grants for these types of technologies in their schools. As part of this active learning movement that we've had, we were able to partner this semester with the honors section of the first year experience and have a built-in audience for a tech-based lunch lecture series. Lunchtime is a big time for speeches on our campus because it's the one time when there are no classes and if we provide a little bit of dessert, people will show up for talks. So we were able to host a four-week series talking through game design, social media, cybersecurity, and maker spaces and bring in speakers both from across campus and from our local community to introduce our students to these larger tech topics that are going to be things that they have to deal with in their lives. We also are continuing to scaffold this learning throughout the rest of the FYE honors section this semester. They will all be doing 15 hours of service learning with us. So they are actually proposing individual tech projects that they will be doing in service for the library. So some of the students have decided that they're going to create items for us to 3D print and use as promotional materials for the library as well as creating tutorials on how to use a 3D printer. There are others who are creating videos about our spaces and how students can use them. Others creating videos about our equipment and how it can be used. And a small group of students who are doing usability studies to ask our other parts of campus to see if we can create a library tab on our campus learning management system. So they have taken the initiative and are really seeing how they want the library to interact with their student lives. Yeah, and so with special collections we're also doing active learning projects with special collections and part of the FYE honors project that Ashley was just talking about we are also incorporating a digital exhibit project for the students to complete using our digital collection and learning how to select content, research the content, research supplemental material, how to upload that to WordPress which will be where they would create their actual digital exhibit and just really kind of become familiar with the primary sources that are in special collections and on our digital collection as well. Other things we're doing in special collections is primarily focusing on hands-on activities to learn about primary sources as well as digital humanities initiatives. And so a few examples I have last spring I instructed a class for about three weeks and they came into special collections and they had a student curated project and so they got to look through all the material and choose an item that they wanted to focus on and research and then they all kind of had to come together and create a theme to where they would then create facsimiles of the items and mount them to film board and do the whole installation for the exhibit as well and these are all the pictures from that project and that was a lot of fun and they really got to see kind of what I do and how you can utilize the primary sources and how you can research them and how you can interpret them and analyze them in new ways rather than just me kind of showing them a book and them not being able to touch it. And another, other projects that we've been working on is we've had education students come up who their projects had to do with creating lesson plans for K through 12 kids going to museums and things of that nature so I've let them use the special collections area to help them build those lesson plans and how to utilize framed artwork and artifacts and how to help students K through 12 interpret those and analyze them themselves and so it's just been a lot of fun to be able to create some hands-on activities that you don't traditionally see in special collections instruction classes as well. And so as you might be able to tell going from 32 activities to 240 has been a sharp change. We were managing the space by creating a library specific outlet calendar and adding everything to that location. The problem with that is if any one of us is out of town and somebody reaches out to us to reserve a space, it's very hard to do from off campus. It's very hard to let people see what spaces might be reserved in the library so that they can do planning. We have a couple, we have about five power users for our spaces and one of the things that we're doing this semester is we've actually, I know several of you probably use LibGuides or at least have seen LibGuides. They also have a scheduling app called LibCal and we're currently using that to manage our spaces in a trial and run and given access to our power users so that they can start planning out their events in advance. It allows us to do mediation and make sure that people are not necessarily booking out large chunks of the library for days and days on end, but it also lets us create more useful statistics on what types of events are being held in the library and who is hosting them. We're also investing in the equipment manager from the same platform so that we can do checkouts for technology. We have been running the checkouts through our normal ILS system, but the LibCal version allows us to embed like the product manual so I don't have to check them out with the technology and it also forces students to acknowledge that they are responsible. There's a little form that you can embed that before students can check out the technology they have to acknowledge that they are financially responsible for the technology and read through the parameters before they can complete their booking. So that's a really nice functional touch for those of us who need to make sure that we can charge people if they don't return things. Okay, this is Danielle again. So at this point we have shared all of the major content that we would like to share with you and we would love to hear from you. We'd be very interested in hearing any active learning story that you would like to share with the group as well as any questions that you would propose to ask any of us regarding the topics that we've shared. Great, thank you Danielle and Ashley and Lindsay. That was very cool. Love seeing the amazing changes that happened in the library. One of my first impressions, I don't know if many other people may have had the same thing. When I saw the library catalogs still in the library, my first reaction was, oh wow, cool. And then what did they do with them? Like those are so, you know, people love to have them now in their houses or especially librarians to get them for their own use. Right. When a no longer been used in library when they're like weeded out. Of course, we currently have them still in the building. We will give one or two to the development office for kind of an auction at some point. We just have not done that yet. We're still holding on to them. And I've heard some great stories of repurposing them for wine cabinets. There's some really great. Oh yeah, yeah, they're very much in demand in certain areas, yeah. All right, we do have some actual questions though about your presentation. If anybody does have any questions, do type them into the questions section of your GoToWeb in our interface. I can see them here and pass them on to our presenters. All right, well, question's about the 3D printing. Do you limit your 3D printing to school projects? If so, how do you monitor that, especially when you're not charging a fee for it? No, we don't. We bought a printer that I would highly recommend for anybody who is just getting into 3D printing. It's called the printer bot play and it retailed for $400. A reel of material costs $12. And so the individual items that were capable of printing are really costing us like 12 cents or less. And just while we're currently building demand for it, I keep it running 99% of the time. We put it at the front desk and just have it running printing. I cannot tell you how many Pikachus I have printed over the course of this past year. I got a test with something. Got a test with something and students love a giveaway. Now that we've been giving stuff away and showing examples up at the front desk, we also give them to the president of our college. We have the Lincoln collection and special collections so we've printed a bunch of Lincoln busts and so as people come to campus to relate to that collection, we'll give them a 3D printed bust of Lincoln. It's a way to build goodwill towards the library. And now we're actually seeing because faculty and students are more aware of the printer's existence, we're actually 3D printing stuff for the physics class for an egg drop project and an education student has me printing farm animals today for a project for her elementary school theoretical class. The usage is growing just because we weren't afraid to spend the money on filament. Right, yeah, you have the money to put out for that, yeah. Not a question since you're talking about the 3D printers and I jumped down to this one. How reliable has this one been for you? Does it break down often? Because I know previously you lot about different maker spaces and people having good and not so good luck with the different brands and types of 3D printers that are out there. I will say, I picked this one because I saw a review video where a guy climbed on top of it while it was printing. That was an influencing factor. I've taken ours apart three times. I will say that if you are uncomfortable with the idea of taking a 3D printer apart, I would strongly recommend finding somebody on your staff who is less afraid. Dismantling seems to be something that is intrinsically built into 3D printers. But I will tell you that particularly with this model, the cost of replacement technology and the accessibility of instructions has really made it easy to troubleshoot when we have had problems and we've broken down a surprisingly few number of times. Yeah, it does seem like that you have to be either comfortable with it or a mechanically inclined person which some of the librarians are on some art to be able to have to deal with them when there's some, can be very picky, temperamental in what they work or not, yeah. Can you give what the name of the one is that the model that you have again? Repeat what that was again. It's the printer hot play and printer bot does not have an E in printer. Oh. Okay, one of those, got it. So printer bot play, got it. Oh, I was most noted to, what was the name of the scheduling app that you used again to repeat that? What was that that you were using? It's from SpringShare, it's called LibCal. Let me go back and see if I can, there it is. It just kind of shows you a screenshot of what it looks like on the roll. So LibCal is a similar kind of acronym and shortening of the other things that SpringShare does. Yes. And here's another one that's common to many libraries. Have you introduced food or drink or any sort of a cafe into the library yet? Or is that? That is in the plans. Yeah, I, we know that we'll probably have some type of kiosk for coffee, but it won't be where we'll have, you know, a barista or anything. It'll be serve yourself type of coffee station. And then we do also have the, why am I blinking on what it's called? For students, the hunger. Oh, we have actually become a location on campus. We have a student run food pantry. That's locations for students, by students, and it's located here in the library because it was seen as a place that students gather without stigma. Yeah, and our active learning center currently has a little food station where you, there's a little fridge, a sink, a curig, and a microwave. So students are welcome to use any of those. So it seems like you're in your university having some sort of actual like full blown cafe of some sort in the library is already being handled by other places around campus. Correct. And we do make exceptions every week, every year for finals week, every semester that we have finals. The library provides coffee for the full amount of time that we are open and we just bought a 40 cup coffee pot and we brew coffee from set up till closed. Yeah, and since we have events during lunchtime in the active learning center, the departments who host those usually pay for catering of some nature, you know, whether that be just pizza or something like a taco bar or something like that. And so that's actually in the ALC and when that's, I mean, a lot of people come for the food as well as the lecture, but it's usually if there's always some type of food line in the library without us having to create it. Sure, and you did say you offer, what was it, sweets or something to entice them for one of them that you mentioned. Food is always a good draw, yes. Yes, yes. So that's one thing, always definitely don't, always allow food in your library in some way so that you can offer that yourself. All right, any other questions for these guys? I see you brought up that you've got this grant writing lib guide here. This is good for anyone also. I think in one of our previous sessions today, someone had asked about how do you find out about these grants, the best mall library in America one this morning. Here's a good resource for you, you guys have obviously put together some sort of a place with the resources for that. Yes, based on, actually I went to a grant writing workshop with Scott Rice which is our local Steelcase dealer and that's where I learned about the Steelcase grant. And they also taught us how to find other grants. Great, okay, so here's a resource for anybody looking to get more money for doing things at their libraries. And one thing to recommend with grant writing is we all look at IMLS and NEH and things of that nature that are directed towards libraries but the Steelcase grant wasn't necessarily directed there. So looking outside of the box and a little bit more regional also can help provide funding in unique ways. Oh sure, look to your state library or library commission we here, we offer grants through our Nebraska library commission to libraries in the state. So look local and look national and just get creative, yeah. Yeah. Okay, I think we'll wrap it up then for this session. You guys got us right back on schedule. Thank you very much. Yeah, of course. I have another poll.