Jennings Librarians at the NJLA Conference

Last week, our Archivist, Rebecca Driscoll, and our Electronic Resources Librarian, Sara Margaret Rizzo presented posters at the New Jersey Library Association Conference in Atlantic City, NJ. Rebecca’s poster discussed the work she has been doing using Shared Shelf to preserve and share campus history and activities. Sara’s poster discussed her experiences of working in a new library and university in Kazakhstan. For more detailed descriptions of each poster, please see the abstracts below.

Sharing Campus History and Activities through Artstor’s Shared Shelf
Within the last two years, Caldwell has implemented Shared Shelf, Artstor’s media management solution, to catalog and share archival photograph collections and students’ scholarly projects. Recently, Caldwell was selected to join the Council of Independent College’s Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Research. For that project, we are digitizing and sharing materials created by students during mission-related service activities. The poster covers these projects and our experience with Shared Shelf in general.

Jersen’ it up in Central Asia: Bringing ideas from NJ libraries and implementing them in a Kazakh library.
Across the Garden State, NJ librarians are doing exciting and innovative things everyday. After finishing my MLIS in 2013, I accepted the position of Expert-Manager of Patron Services at Nazarbayev University Library (NUL) in Astana, Kazakhstan. The University opened in Fall 2010 as part of an education reform project to switch to a more western-style of education. My task in the library was to keep this mission in mind and help transform the library into one of the top libraries in the region. One way of achieving this goal was sharing some of the things libraries do in the Garden State, such as social media outreach and programming, and implementing them in NU’s Library. I will share some of the initiatives I spearheaded and challenges I met along the way. Additionally, I will discuss some things NJ libraries can learn from this experience, such as strategies for working with a multi-lingual population (Kazakhstan is a bilingual country, for many of our students English is their 3rd language, most faculty only knew English, while some staff spoke very little or no English).