Professional Development 2015: Spring/Summer

Spring 2015 started with a bang, and the reference and instruction folks have been swamped with very full teaching schedules. I hear rave reviews from discipline faculty about how those sessions go, which is heartening. Maybe even better, I hear rave reviews from our students who stop by the reference desk! Our recent program review by outside parties, a regular requirement of all programs here at CSUCI, also went very well and it was good to hear what our faculty and students thought about our strengths and weaknesses.

In all the hubbub, I also wanted to point out some upcoming professional development excitement:

• I've been selected to be a Spring 2015 Project ISLAS (Institutionalizing Student Learning, Access and Success) Faculty Fellow. This means I'll be attending various faculty-taught workshops on best practices in areas such as: teaching and engaging first generation and underrepresented students; research-based innovations in learning to learn; cross-campus collaborations to promote student access and success; service learning across the curriculum; multicultural and international perspectives across the curriculum; writing across the curriculum; outcomes-based assessment. And then I will join the graduates of the program as a member of the faculty offering such workshops for others. Last semester we librarians offered a workshop titled "Sustainable Information Literacy: Facilitating the Information Literate Classroom," and it was a hit. We'll be offering the same workshop, slightly revised, in early April 2015 for interested faculty.

• The Ventura County Library is offering a grant-writing program in partnership with the California State Library, The Grantmanship Center and the Center for Nonprofit Leadership. With thanks to my colleagues for covering my reference desk shifts, I will be spending the last week of March at a 5-day workshop here in town to develop my grantswomanship and start flexing our library's muscles for some funding. Participants are supposed to learn how to use the program's model for developing a grant proposal, developing a budget that anticipates funding agency questions, learning which grants will fund specific projects, and the such. Plus, there's 12 months of support from the Grantsmanship Center after the workshop. I plan to make the most of this with my CSUCI Broome Library colleagues!

• With much thanks and most of the credit to my Library Chair and Head of Public Services Debi Hoffmann and Provost Gayle Hutchinson for stellar letters of recommendation, I've been accepted into the ACRL Immersion Program in the Program Track. For those unfamiliar with the program, it's a competitive program with a thorough application process. As an accepted applicant, I will be spending one week in Seattle, Washington in an intensive series of workshops on developing campus partnerships, evaluating the information literacy program, and helping us evolve as we consider how we want to serve our students and faculty moving into the future. Some of the best instruction librarians I know are alumni of this program (and have referred to it as nothing less than "life-changing"), and I'm very excited that Amy Wallace, our AVP of the Library, is generously funding my attendance for the August 2015 session.