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LWLC Liaisons & Subject Specialists

Professional Development Events

Equipping Librarians with AI:

New Tools to Enhance Workflows

 

Thursday, May 22 at 2:00pm
Learn how to implement GenAI tools for everyday library tasks and aiding patrons in research processes.
Click here to register.

Library Instruction Together (LIT) 2025 Conference

Save the date for LIT 2025! This year’s in-person retreat will be held at the Nashville Public Library on June 13. The virtual conference will take place over Zoom on June 18. The submission form for proposals will be available soon. Click here for details.

The People of Color in Library & Information Science (POCinLIS) Summit will take place on Friday, July 25, 2025 online via Zoom. Registration is free, but space is limited.

A colorful graphic advertising the virtual 2025 POC in LIS Summit

Proposal Due on Friday, April 15, 2025 at 11:59pm PST

Event Website: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/pocinlis/

Submit Your Proposal: https://forms.gle/ggUhMgfzzB6CuN8t5 

The mission of POCinLIS Summit is to create a productive and brave space for people of color, especially women and marginalized identities, working in the information sector. Information workers will have the opportunity to explore their work in LIS as POC and their intersecting identities as POC+ and information workers. This summit invites participants to challenge and interrogate their roles and actions as information workers. This summit aims to collectively establish rules of engagement and discourse, acknowledging that dominant narratives may be disrupted. This space is created to support the research of POC librarians and create a network of POC information workers for future collaboration and self-care. 

"May You Live in Interesting Times"

The theme May You Live in Interesting Times invites submissions that recognize and address the troubling, fraught, and often discordant times that we find ourselves in. As people of color moving through uncertain times, both in our field and the larger information landscape, we are not only being challenged as workers and individuals, but those called upon to actively resist intersecting oppressions. This year, the online summit aims to be a supportive and vital counterspace for reflection, exploration, commiseration, and experimentation among trusted colleagues. We ask you to be brave and share how you are grappling with the present, past, and future of these "interesting times".

The POCinLIS Summit is a space for collaborative conversations that explore our passions and interests. We welcome submissions that are unique, challenging, and unorthodox in other LIS spaces. Information students and information workers of all kinds are invited to submit proposals. 
 

Presentation Title:

Create an informative title for your presentation. 

Abstract/Description:

Your presentation abstract/description should be less than 300 words. Check out our information page for presentation support.

Presentation Outcomes (1-3 outcomes):

Your presentation should include outcomes that tell us what attendees will learn or be able to demonstrate after your session. Outcomes should be measurable and realistic based on your content. See Valamis Learning Outcomes page for help.

Suggested Topics [but not limited to]:

  • Yes, you have Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges and… ?
    • Overcoming AI fears through understanding
    • Challenging AI as solutions to all
    • Using AI to support your work (Case Study, Workshop, etc.)
    • Teaching AI ethics for different audiences from students to staff
  • Information working in an age of change
    • Managing budget with challenges
    • Low effort, big impact
    • Rethinking management and supervisory structures
    • Creating a workplace we want to work in/workplace challenges
    • Finding joy and interest in new work or new positions
  • Confronting professional and workplace challenges on a personal level
    • Balancing remote, in-person, or hybrid (or all of the above) work
    • Coping with anxiety and burnout 
    • Reclaiming time
    • Managing stress
    • Fighting oppressive structures and people
  • Censorship and Facing Levels of Pushback
  • We are all a work in progress
    • Doing our bestest when the world is the worstest 
    • Resistance to being in an endless marathon
    • Creating joy in dark, unsure spaces
    • New projects and programs to share

Session Formats and Lengths:

  • 60-minute session including Q&A
  • 30-minute session including Q&A
  • 10-minute lightning talks

Session Submission Types: 

  • Lessons Learned: Share success and/or failures on recent projects (example)
  • Works in Progress: Share your up-and-coming work. Ask questions about research and projects in development (example)
  • Skill Workshops: Teach a concept, new method, or anything LIS-related to your peers (example)
    • Writing and publishing for new authors.
    • Presenting and facilitating in the classroom.
  • Learning Labs: Use the space as a laboratory to test ideas, concepts, and pedagogy with your inspired peers (example)
    • Create course materials or testing materials.
    • Practice lesson plans or active learning activities.
    • Experiment with a new teaching tool or app.
  • Lightning Talks: 10-minute poster or presentations on the topic of your choice. Great way to share new ideas (example
  • Alternative types of presentations (example)

Need Help with Your Proposal? 

Attend a POCinLIS Summit Drop-in Session! We can help with abstracts, outcomes, or just brainstorming a topic to present. Sessions are run by Aisha Conner-Gaten and Jennifer Masunaga via Zoom:

Want the latest updates on the POC in LIS Summit? Join our Google Group: ​​pocinlisupdates@googlegroups.com! Messages sent will only involve the Summit and you can unsubscribe at any time. Directions on joining a Google Group here.

Have Questions? Email pocinlis@lmu.edu 

AI Tools

Bard

Bard provides more detailed answers to questions asked than the typical Google search through this large language model. Bard's main goal is to retrieve information in a simple answer versus a search engine results page.

Consensus

Consensus is one of the best AI tools if you are looking for genuine scientific findings. Using this AI tool, you can’t go wrong with any research information, as they source the information for you only from published sources. That makes the process very reliable and uncomplicated to understand the subject and document it effectively. 

Also, this AI tool scans each topic thoroughly (through peer-reviewed research) so that it can provide you with a genuine and well-researched article that will reduce your stress.

Elicit

You can consider Elicit as one of the easiest go-to AI tools in the market to process your knowledge. With the help of this tool, you can design and conduct qualitative research. From analyzing the textual data to specifying the key themes, sentiments, and patterns, a researcher can use this tool to automate. 

Also, Elicit can be used to deduce summaries and visualizations for effective data interpretation. For any researcher, Elicit is a gold mine as it helps them gain deeper insights and make informed decisions.

Scite

Scite is one of the most popular AI-powered academic research tools that improve any academic research in one go. Its own natural language processing and machine learning helps users do better research on scholarly articles and analyze citations. 

Moreover, Scite allows researchers like you to assess the dependability in any particular context of references. It helps in evaluating the quality and impact of the research. It also provides better visualizations and metrics to understand the citation landscape of a particular paper or a topic.

Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar is an AI academic search engine that focuses only on relevant research papers. It is used in computer science, neuroscience, and the biomedical sciences. Also, its natural language processing and machine learning techniques help to analyze the content. 

This tool can help researchers find and navigate relevant literature, visualize citations, and track scholarly articles. It’s advanced search capabilities and citation analysis are some of the most recommended features to use. With its AI-driven approach, you can efficiently create and deliver high-quality scientific literature.

Tableau

Tableau is a powerful tool that helps users to analyze data. With its drag-and-drop interface, Tableau helps users easily explore, understand, and identify data, trends, patterns, and outliers. It supports everything from basic charts and graphs to advanced maps, treemaps, and heat maps. 

It is a popular choice for data analysts, businesses, and researchers across industries for its user-friendly interface and robust data visualization capabilities.

Trinka

It is one of the most commonly used AI tools for scholars and students, as it helps with grammar and language correction for academic and technical writing. It has 3000+ grammar checks, tone, and style enhancements, which help scholars write better theses and projects without any errors. 

Trinka helps you document scientific findings and allows you to have a more technical tone and style without any difficulty. Therefore, for academic research purposes, Trinka is the most promising tool, as it helps document research papers and white papers in a better way. 

Zotero

Zotero is an AI-powered management tool and your personal research assistant. It is specially designed to help researchers and scholars collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research documents. This tool can help you customize all your collections and automatically extract metadata from sources. 

Zotero has 10,000 citation styles for you to format your work and match your style to a publication. Moreover, it takes help from references and bibliographies to edit text and give you genuine information in your Google Doc or Word document.

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