Evidence and Empathy: Library Support for Service - Learning in the Arts

In this unique curricular service-learning project, two librarians collaborated with an art professor in a foundational art course by providing an information literacy session, hosting a panel discussion in library space, and archiving student projects in the institutional repository. University art students partnered with a local youth writing project to create short films based on participants’ writings. Through shared journal exercises, youth writers and university students developed topics and shared written work. The art students created short, stop-motion films based on the writers\u27 works. A faculty-coordinated hip-hop literacy group made up of area youth created a film soundtrack, providing another level of campus-community collaboration. This project highlighted the importance of community engagement, diversity, and citizenship, demonstrating academic library potential within service-learning projects. Early in the process the instructor and two librarians collaborated to guide student’s preparatory research, exploring the value of the arts, the arts as citizenship, and the local community/agency. Researching helped students contextualize the project by encouraging them to confront stereotypes with evidence and empathy; the presenters hoped students would have a clearer sense of the community partners and the value of collaborating to create works of art. The research grounded students in data about the community, public arts, citizenship, and the community partner. As part of layered library involvement, the Digital Media Hub (located in the library) provided technology support, youth participants visited the library, a culminating panel discussion was held in the library’s ScholarSpace, and librarians provided guidance for archiving films, event photos, and original artifacts in the University’s institutional repository. In this presentation, presenters will discuss information literacy in service-learning, leveraging library space for campus-community engagement, and benefits to all stakeholders. We will also make recommendations for how attendees might adapt this project in their communities to highlight library value beyond traditional research assignments

User Education

You notice the flashing notification in the corner of your screen. Click: Claim Chat. Chat00568: Hi! I’m writing a paper about Black representation in opera and trying to find a copy of Fire Shut Up in My Bones. I tried googling but wasn’t able to find it. Do you know where I can find a copy? Music Librarian: What a great topic! One moment while I search for that. Furiously searches all of the standard places for a new opera score. Fire Shut Up in My Bones is too new to be commercially available but it does look like there are a few options to view or listen to a recording of a production. Music Librarian: It looks like the score is not available for purchase or rental, yet. Let me see if we have an audio or video recording. Music Librarian: Alas, we don’t have it on CD, DVD, or access through any of our streaming services. Based on my WorldCat search, a few other music libraries in the region have a copy of the DVD. Would you like help placing an ILL request? Chat00568: That would be great! Thanks! Could you help me find scholarly articles about the opera, too? Music Librarian: Sure! Why don’t we set up a research consultation for later this week? You can schedule a meeting with me using my online scheduler. Would you prefer to meet virtually or in-person . . . You start drafting an email to the opera history professor to discuss scheduling a library instruction session. As Leslie Troutman noted in the “User Education” essay for the Current State of Music Librarianship in 2000 (upon which the above interaction is modeled), “Whether we call it user education, library-use instruction, or bibliographic instruction, the goal is the same: to teach our users to be effective, efficient, and independent researchers.” The nomenclature continues to change, and today, librarians are more likely to use the terms information literacy instruction or library instruction, but the main goals of user education remain. It is the information landscape and expectations for the methods and modes of delivery themselves that are radically different. This essay will provide a brief overview of the changes and developments in library instruction, with an emphasis on music libraries in higher education, that have occurred since the 2000 essay in an effort to capture what user education looks like in music librarianship today

Moving Words: Building Community through Service-Learning in the Arts

In this unique project, college students in a first-year Three-Dimensional Concepts art course are partnered with a local youth writing project to create short films based on participants’ writings. This experience was born out of a campus Service-Learning Institute (SLI) to train faculty on best practices. The mutual goals included giving voice to area youth and connecting college students to the community. All participants explored and reflected on the importance of community engagement and citizenship by acknowledging their similarities and differences through creative lenses. Participants from both groups generated ideas through shared journal exercises that the youth writers then used as inspiration for their written works. Art students at the University of Northern Iowa created short, stop-motion films based on the writers’ works using Rod Library’s Digital Media Hub. A faculty-coordinated hip-hop literacy group made up of area youth created the soundtrack for one film, providing another level of campus-community collaboration. The goal of the information literacy portion of the service-learning project was to ground the university students in facts and data about the community, public arts, citizenship, and the community partner. By confronting stereotypes or lack of information with evidence and empathy, the authors hoped students would have a clearer sense of who their community partners were and the value of collaborating to create works of art. This chapter will describe the project, its inception, and its exploration of social engagement as fine arts practice, learning objectives, lessons learned, and supplemental sources, including final projects. Student, youth participant, instructor, and librarian reflections will be highlighted, with emphasis on the areas of motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes, both formal and informal

Democratizing Knowledge: Using Wikipedia for Inclusive Teaching and Research in Four Undergraduate Classes

In preparation for the spring 2018 semester, the three of us came together to develop a Wikipedia-based project using feminist pedagogies in their teaching practice. With different assignments, students in the four courses collaborated in this effort to improve the diversity, breadth, and quality of information in the free encyclopedia in English. Moreover, the assignments challenged students\u27 research and information literacy skills via an authentic learning experience, specifically editing Wikipedia on art- and diversity-related topics while engaging with the Wikipedia community and teaching other students how to edit Wikipedia on underrepresented topics--the “social responsibility of a collective struggle” for inclusion in knowledge production. The course Creating Wikipedia for the Arts prepared students to host an Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon during which they taught participants about Wikipedia and how to edit it. Leading up to the event, students enrolled in Nineteenth-Century Art, Arts of Africa, and Foundations in Art Education researched notable9 individuals relevant to the topic of their course who did not have an article in Wikipedia or only had a short stub article in need of expansion and improvement. Using this research, they came to the edit-a-thon to create and improve articles, thus making their research freely available to anyone with Internet access

Creating Information-Literate Musicians in the Academic Library

For musicians, the act of creation is multifaceted: musicians perform, analyze, write, speak, and teach in highly collaborative and diverse environments. Information-literate musicians require training to understand and engage with the myriad kinds of content and materials inherent to the contemplation, study, creation, and enjoyment of music. The various information needs of musicians requires creators to make many choices--from selecting a particular score edition or recording from many similar options, to employing a specific scholarly or pedagogical methodology to their work, musicians require the skills to critically evaluate information and determine its usefulness. Music’s ubiquity adds a further layer of intricacy, as music-related research happens in both the concert hall and the classroom, and is not limited to music programs. Disciplines from anthropology to psychology to literature to media studies employ music as a lens through which to examine art, culture, and social structures. As in other creative fields, the history of music scholarship has been heavily influenced by its focus on Western art music and has resulted in the prioritization of Euro-centric musical traditions in study and performance, making research on non-Western and popular music trickier for creators and researchers to conduct. Each of these elements contributes to a complex landscape for librarians planning information literacy instruction activities in support of music-related research and creation. Because of this complexity, students pursuing academic projects that involve music may need support for a range of creative endeavors, and information literacy instruction might seem like a complicated feat for the librarians who work with these creators. By defining what information literacy is for music students and exploring the ways that academic research and creation in music intersects with other disciplines, the authors provide a framework to help librarians contribute to the development of information-literate musicians

Instruction Inspiration: A Charrette for Music Librarians

Interactive session. Coming from architecture praxis and used in multiple design disciplines, a charrette is a structured period of intense feedback where participants work together to solve a design problem. The activity can easily be used by instructors to improve lesson plans or teaching artifacts in collaboration. Beginning with a warm-up practice activity where participants can learn how charrettes work, this session will primarily be comprised of focused small-group sharing, feedback, and brainstorming. Each participant should bring a lesson plan, teaching artifact, or other instructional challenge about which they would like to receive feedback. Small groups will be facilitated by an experienced instruction librarian. This dynamic session will offer participants immediate and actionable feedback to refresh their instruction, demonstrate a model for peer feedback they can bring back to their institutions, and encourage the formation of a teaching community of practice through the sharing of ideas and materials

Instruction Inspiration: A Charrette for Music Librarians

Interactive session. Coming from architecture praxis and used in multiple design disciplines, a charrette is a structured period of intense feedback where participants work together to solve a design problem. The activity can easily be used by instructors to improve lesson plans or teaching artifacts in collaboration. Beginning with a warm-up practice activity where participants can learn how charrettes work, this session will primarily be comprised of focused small-group sharing, feedback, and brainstorming. Each participant should bring a lesson plan, teaching artifact, or other instructional challenge about which they would like to receive feedback. Small groups will be facilitated by an experienced instruction librarian. This dynamic session will offer participants immediate and actionable feedback to refresh their instruction, demonstrate a model for peer feedback they can bring back to their institutions, and encourage the formation of a teaching community of practice through the sharing of ideas and materials

Lessons in Diversity and Bias

There is an urgent need for social justice. This need expands far beyond the walls of an information literacy classroom, but there is important work that can be done in these spaces. Lessons designed to stimulate student’s critical thinking about their personal assumptions and latent biases by using different kinds of information sources is one way music and instruction librarians can advance equity and inclusion through teaching. In this active-learning session, attendees will participate in several condensed lessons designed to challenge their worldview in order to facilitate the uncovering of unknown biases. At the same time, they will learn pedagogical techniques for the information literacy classroom by experiencing them first hand. The activities will include conceptualizing disability in the arts, investigating bias in the music industry, and examining reference works to uncover hegemony in the historiography of the canon. All activities will push participants (and hopefully their future students) to think critically about information, especially music and the arts, through the lens of diversity, inclusion, and social justice

Rod Library Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Rod Library’s Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is a concerted effort to improve the representation of women and minoritized individuals in the arts on the free encyclopedia and in the Wikipedia community. Wikipedia is the fifth most used website in the world, but there is systemic bias embedded in its content due to a lack of diversity. This project is an effort to change that. Students in LIB 3159: Creating Wikipedia for the Arts hosted the Edit-a-thon on March 24. The event was free and open to the public. In addition to community participants, students in ARTHIST 4608: Arts of Africa (who worked with the Waterloo Center for the Arts), ARTHIST 4320 , 19th Century Western Art, and ARTED 2500: Foundations of Art Education created more than 30 new articles, edited more than 50, and added more than 34,000 words to Wikipedia. Only two days after the event, those edits had been viewed almost 4,000 times around the world. This information about underrepresented individuals is now free and freely available for all. This poster will introduce the project and provide assessment data and statistics demonstrating the outcomes and world-wide reach of the event

Potent in vitro antiproliferative properties for a triplatinum cluster toward triple negative breast cancer cells

The trinuclear platinum cluster [Pt3(μ-PBut2)3(CO)3]CF3SO3 (I) was designed featuring the presence of a nearly equilateral platinum triangle bridged by three di-tert-butylphosphide ligands; in addition, each platinum center bears a terminal carbonyl ligand. This triplatinum cluster was initially developed in view of applications in the field of cluster-containing innovative materials. Yet, due to the large success of platinum complexes in cancer treatment, we also decided to explore its cytotoxic and anticancer properties. Accordingly, the solubility profile of this compound in several solvents was preliminarily investigated, revealing a conspicuous solubility in DMSO and DMSO/buffer mixtures; this makes the biological testing of I amenable. UV–Vis measurements showed that the triplatinum cluster is stable for several hours under a variety of conditions, within aqueous environments. No measurable reactivity was observed for I toward two typical model proteins, i.e. lysozyme and cytochrome c. On the contrary, a significant reactivity was evidenced when reacting I with small sulfur-containing ligands. In particular, a pronounced reactivity with reduced glutathione and cysteine emerged from ESI-MS experiments, proving complete formation of I-GSH and I-Cys derivatives, with the loss of a single carbonyl ligand. Starting from these encouraging results, the cytotoxic potential of I was assayed in vitro against a panel of representative cancer cell lines, and potent cytotoxic properties were disclosed. Of particular interest is the finding that the triplatinum species manifests potent antiproliferative properties toward Triple Negative Breast Cancer Cells, often refractory to most anticancer drugs. Owing to the reported encouraging results, a more extensive biological and pharmacological evaluation of this Pt cluster is now warranted to better elucidate its mode of action