Professional Development

For this essay, I begin with a list of activities I’ve participated in for my professional development. I have described each of these activities and connected them to the guidelines about Professional Development in the Librarian Personnel Code, which are on pages 26-27.

I have followed my list of activities with a list of publications, presentations, posters, and workshops I’ve given along with short descriptions.

Activities for Professional Development

Title of Documented Activity: Organizer for American Library Association Film & Media Roundtable (ALA FMRT) Webinars

• Description: I have been an active member and participant in the American Library Association’s Film and Media Round Table since 2018. In FMRT, I started out by organizing an open discussion about media making and media spaces at ALA Midwinter in Seattle, and after that, in 2019, I was on a panel for an FMRT event about media makerspaces in which I talked about the UW Libraries Research Commons as a site for making media, albeit in the totally online context of the UW Libraries Storytelling Fellows program for graduate students. Having participated in an FMRT webinar, I shifted my focus to organizing webinars for FMRT. Since 2020, I have been a leader on an organizing team, and we’ve developed and offered five successful workshops since then, which have attracted audiences of fifty to eighty people. Workshops have focused on digital storytelling, copyright and Creative Commons, youth media making, educational video games and games used in education, and making and providing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality games and exhibits. As part of this work, I have scheduled meetings for the organizing team, I have set agendas, I have found speakers, and I’ve moderated or provided support for events. This series has become some of FMRT’s main work these past three years.
• Connection to the Librarian Code: “Participation in Local, National, and International Groups and Associations”

Title of Documented Activity: Reviewer and Moderator for the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum

• Description: Since 2018, I have done conference presentation proposal reviews, conference scholarship reviews, and conference moderation for the DLF Forum. For the presentation reviews, I read between ten to fifteen proposals, comment on them, and rate them. For the scholarship reviews, I also read between ten to fifteen proposals, comment on them, and then meet with a group of other reviewers to settle on finalists. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I moderated conference panels in 2018 and 2019. I also moderated online panels in 2020 and 2021 and have chosen not to attend the DLF Forum or moderate panels this year because it’s in person, and I have COVID concerns. Aliya Reich, the DLF Program Manager for Conferences and Events, recently sent me this message:

• “Hello, Elliott. Great to hear from you as always. I hope you’re doing well and enjoying some spring weather 😊 Absolutely you can be involved in the planning committee / reviewing proposals even if you can’t make it to the event. That’s the case for many folks each year. I’ll hold out hope that you can attend in person, but even if not, it will be wonderful to have your valuable perspective reflected in our event. We so appreciate your efforts every year and I’m glad to have you back for 2022. Let me know if you have any questions – take good care until our paths cross again soon.Warmly, Aliya”

• Connection to the Librarian Code: “Participation in Local, National, and International Groups and Associations”

Title of Documented Activity: Editorial Board Member for Public Services Quarterly

• Description: Public Services Quarterly is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on practical uses of resources and the development of programs in academic libraries. In 2022, Professor Helene Williams in the UW Information School recommended to the editorial board that I serve as a reviewer for a submitted article about a podcasting initiative in an undergraduate library. Based on the quality of that review, the Editor in Chief, Kimberly Mitchell, asked if I wanted to serve on the editorial board and periodically read articles for review over the year. Since agreeing to this editorial board position, I have reviewed a second article and am slated to do at least one every quarter.
• Connection to the Librarian Code: “Participation in Local, National, and International Groups and Associations”

Title of Documented Activity: Participant in an International JAWS Community of Practice

• Description: From the beginning of 2022, I have been part of a small community of practice that has worked to learn how to use the JAWS screen reader. Mark Weiler, an accessibility expert and Web & User Experience Librarian at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario has led the group, and Zachary Grant (Reference & Instruction Librarian at Clarke College), Andy Andrews (Assistant Director at UW Disability Resources for Students), and I have participated. As part of this group, I have been learning how to use JAWS by following its manual, and I have also been doing practice exercises that Mark suggests to the group. I have also attended meetings Mark has organized in which Blind library users and scholars talk about their use of screen readers as well as their thoughts on ways sighted users (like myself) can learn how to use them and things they should be mindful and respectful of.  
• Connection to the Librarian Code: “Participation in Local, National, and International Groups and Associations”

Title of Documented Activity: Newsletter Writer for Association of College & Research Libraries, Washington (ACRL-WA)

• Description: From 2016-2018, I wrote biannual  newsletter updates for ACRL-Washington. I did short write-ups about interesting happenings at UW, Seattle, and featured things like the Libraries’ Accessible Library Resources Day, the formation of the liaison teams of subject-specialist librarians, space renovations in the Foster Business Library, and the Graduate Student Summer Research Institute.
• Connection to the Librarian Code: “Participation in Local, National, and International Groups and Associations”

Scholarly and Library-Related Publications Relating to Librarianship or Other Academic Disciplines

• Mundt, M., Stevens, E., & Yee, P. (Forthcoming in 2023). Bridging physical, online, and community spaces with digital storytelling. In Exploring Inclusive & equitable pedagogies: creating space for all learners. American Library Association.

• For this chapter, I identified the call for proposals and assembled the team of writers. I scheduled initial planning and brainstorming sessions, wrote at least a third of the article, and was the primary contact between us writers and the editors.

• Batts, Q., Flynn, K., Stevens, E., & Vedantham, A. (2020). Starting early: High school students in paid internships at academic libraries. College & Research Libraries News, Vol. 81 (9). https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/24645/32465

• For this article, I contributed by bringing all the writers together, suggesting a way that we could write and edit together in Google Docs, and managing our project and reminding people of deadlines. With Kian, I also wrote half of the section that features the UW Libraries. This article was viewed over 500 times in October 2020, and its impact is that it represents a rare occurrence in academic libraries: paid internships for high-school students.

• Stevens, E., & Yee, P. (2019). Digital storytelling. In V. Kern & R. Chin Roemer (Eds.), The culture of digital scholarship in academic libraries. American Library Association. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/44484

• For this chapter, I contributed by proposing a way for me and Perry to work together. I brought up the idea that, before composing our chapter, we should each do five one-hour free writes together and then come up with an outline together. Perry liked this idea, and the result was that we each freewrote over fifty pages of raw, unedited material, and we also came together by strategizing about an outline together. The composition and editing of this chapter wasn’t easy--we drastically changed its structure halfway through--but we still finished it and met our deadlines. This is a review of the book that appears in College & Research Libraries News: https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/24341/32172

• Flynn, K., & Stevens, E. (2018). From students to interns. Alki, Vol. 34 (1). https://wala.memberclicks.net/assets/Alki/Alki_March2018.Final.pdf

• Kian and I had no trouble working on this article together, and we found it easy to split up the work, contribute to our drafts, and edit together, finding cohesion in our content and styles. These past few years, I have worked on a number of writing projects with people, and I think it’s a strength of mine that I can work on complex writing projects with others.

• Mundt, M., & Stevens, E. (2018). “I remember…”: A written-reflection program for student library workers. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/i-remember-a-written-reflection-program-for-student-library-workers/

• For this project, similar to what I had done with Perry, I had suggested to Madeline that, before we start working on a draft, we do at least five hours of individual freewriting about this topic. We did that--and managed to generate dozens of pages of raw material each--before we got together and put together an outline we could work with. This project provided another interesting hurdle in that Madeline and I went through the IRB in order to include some assessment interviews with student workers. The impact of this writing is that--like the internship for high school students in academic libraries--we’re sharing work that we’ve done that’s unique. It is highly unusual that we’ve incorporated written reflection into student work.

• Stevens, E., & Tieman, A. (2017). We used Problem-Based Learning in library instruction and came to question its treatment of students. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/we-used-problem-based-learning-in-library-instruction-and-came-to-question-its-treatment-of-students/

• This was an article that I finished up right as I was transitioning from my former Research Commons Librarian role to the UW Libraries to English Studies & Research Commons Librarian position. I include this because it’s from a peer-reviewed journal, and it was also a project that called for me to go through the IRB. Further, in the article, I provide an unusual critique of Problem-Based Learning, which, in both library and education scholarship, is something that’s hardly criticized and questioned.

Contributions to the Profession--Posters, Presentations, and Workshops

• Bailey, E. & Stevens, E. (2022, October). Having Fun with wicked problems: The use of digital escape rooms to explore complex challenges. [Presentation]. ACRL-NW Conference, Menucha Oregon.

• This presentation focuses on the creative idea of Digital Scholarship escape rooms that Erika and I have been experimenting with as part of our roles as co-chairs for the UW Libraries Digital Scholarship Collective.

• Raftus, D., Stevens, E., & Stewart, M. (2021, April). A DH model kit: An experiment in team building with Arts & Humanities Liaisons Librarians [Presentation]. New Shape of Sharing Conference, Online.

• This was a lightning talk for a poster about a team building exercise the Arts & Humanities Librarians did at UW, Seattle, with Digital Humanities tools and processes. I was responsible for presenting part of it.

• Batts, Q., Flynn, K., Garrett, N., Stevens, E., Vedantham, A., & Watanabe, J. (2021, April). Diversity in Academic Libraries through Paid High School Internships and the Partnerships that Make them Happen [Presentation]. ACRL Conference, Online.

• I identified the call for applicants for this conference and pitched the idea to the group that we present. I organized planning meetings for writing our proposal, and I was the point of contact with the conference organizers. In order to present, we had to record and caption a 45-minute video, and I was responsible for doing the recording, editing the recording, and burning the captions into the media file.

• Chern, J., Henry, M., McGrew, C., Stevens, E., & Yee, P. (2021, March). Aspirational equity: An approach to online workshops by the UW Libraries [Presentation]. Online Northwest Conference, Online.

• For this presentation, Perry and I worked with three graduate-student workers from the Research Commons and LibID. This is important because this was the first library conference these students had presented at, and Perry and I worked to ensure that they would have a good and productive experience.

• Stevens, E. (2021, January). Accessibility testing of digital publishing platforms in the University of Washington Libraries [Presentation]. Modern Language Association Conference, Online.

• This conference was supposed to be in Toronto, but because of the pandemic, they shifted it to online. The panel is about the preservation of humanities texts, and I think I’m bringing an unusual take to the discussion in that I’m going to argue that accessibility is a crucial component of preservation.

• Stevens, E., & Wadland, J. (2019, October). Workshopping the workshop: Stealing from creative writing pedagogy to investigate the craft of digital scholarship [Presentation]. DLF Forum, Tampa, FL.

• I believe that Justin’s and my presentation about this topic had a big impact. When many library workers hear the word “workshop,” I think they conceive of that word as something that you’d attend at a conference--that is a short, hands-on session in which you do something active in order to learn. But our idea here was to talk about the workshop in the way that it’s constructed and used as a teaching tool at MFA creative-writing programs like the one at the University of Iowa. Our argument was that such a workshop is a good way to test, discuss, and improve digital scholarship--and all while bringing people together in community. At our session, we received many questions from the audience and encouragement.

• Garber-Pearson, R., Kern, V., Mundt, M., Stevens, E., & Sullivan, M. (2019, April). When research gets trolled: Digital safety for Open researchers [Presentation]. ACRL Conference, Cleveland, OH.

• This presentation grew out of the digital-safety workshops that Reed and Madison taught, the drop-in sessions that we all held in the Odegaard Library and the Hub, and the Mozilla Open Leaders program that Verletta, Madeline, Madison and I participated in. The impact here was that--when people think of concepts like “Open Source” or “Open Access” or “Open Educational Resources--they don’t really consider the harm and harassment that some people, especially researchers, can face online and in person.

• Bailey, E., Dahlin, G., Patino, D., Stevens, E., & Yee, P. (2019, March). Totally online digital storytelling: A workshop developed by and for grad students [Presentation]. Online NW Conference, Portland, OR.

• For this conference, I am especially proud of the fact that Perry and I helped the three graduate student workers--Gabby, Dovi, and Erika--secure ODT funding for their conference registration and travel. That was not only helpful to the graduate students--it was also essential to the spirit of this presentation because, in it, we talked about the value of graduate-student labor to academic libraries, and we covered the myriad ways that these students are both compensated and taken advantage of.

• Stevens, E., & Yee, P. (2018, April). From paper to pixels: An online digital-storytelling workshop [Poster]. University of Washington Teaching & Learning Symposium, Seattle, WA.

• At this point, Perry and I were teaching workshops for graduate students in both digital storytelling and podcasting, so this was an excellent way for us to chat with educators on the UW Seattle campus about that work.

• Bayo-Urban, I., & Stevens, E. (2018, April). The critical pedagogy summit: A UW libraries and FemTechNet collaboration [Poster]. University of Washington Teaching & Learning Symposium, Seattle, WA.

• As I was moving from my Research Commons Librarian role to English Studies & Research Commons Librarian position, I worked with this graduate student in the Information School to organize an all-day conference in the Research Commons. This conference provided many of the processes I would come to rely on later when working with graduate students in the English Department to organize half-day events like Frankenreads, March Madness, and the Praxis Conference.

• Kian, F., & Stevens, E. (2018, March). Two new librarians develop their university libraries’ first high-school internship [Presentation]. Online NW Conference, Portland, OR.

• Over the years, I have found the Online NW Conference at Portland State University to be a great place to get feedback on ideas as well as to learn from other passionate local library workers. This was Kian’s and my first time presenting about the UW Libraries’ High-School Internship, and we spoke to a giant audience. In the Q&A session, we were surprised that someone aggressively questioned why such an internship should exist in an academic library in the first place, and I did my best to respond to this person calmly and by focusing not just on the program we put together but with the research that informed it.  

• Buccicone, W., Vrbancic, E., & Stevens, E. (2018, October). “That’s inappropriate!”: Beginning a conversation about harassment in libraries [Poster]. ACRL-NW Conference, Menucha, OR.

• This conference had a big impact on me because it signalled the beginning of what would become the LibCares Team, which I co-chair today. Here, Whitney and Emilie spoke about their work in organizing an all-Libraries-staff prevention of sexual harassment training, and I spoke about the proposed formation of LibCares.

• Stevens, E. (2018, October). A critical reflection of a totally online digital storytelling workshop for graduate students [Presentation]. DLF Forum, Las Vegas, NV.

• This presentation was unusual for me because it wasn’t just a talk about the Storytelling Fellows digital storytelling workshops. Instead, I tried to organize my speech around the things in Storytelling Fellows that weren’t working--things like technology failures, attrition problems, and a lack of accessibility.

• Mundt, M., Stevens, E., & Yee, P. (2018, February.) Digital storytelling in the UW Libraries [Workshop]. The University of Washington Praxis Conference, Seattle, WA.

• Long before we hosted the Praxis Conference at the Research Commons, it was always one of my favorite on-campus events. This was early on in the development of Storytelling Fellows, and in this session, Perry, Madeline, and I experimented with bringing laptops with us and having people experiment with script writing, Creative Commons resources online, and video editing.

• Stevens, E., & Yee, P. (2017, October). Storytelling Fellows: A digital-storytelling workshop in the University of Washington libraries [Presentation]. ACRL-NW Conference, Pack Forest, WA.

• This was one of my first collaborations with Perry, and right from the beginning of working on this presentation, I knew that he’d be someone I’d want to work with more in the future. In the coming years, I certainly hope to do more presentations with him, write articles with him, and perhaps even put together a book about digital media-making workshops.

• Ray, L., & Stevens, E. (2017, September). Showcasing information literacy: Library events and programs [Presentation]. The European Conference on Information Literacy, St. Malo, France.

• This was the first time I had worked on a project with Lauren Ray before, and here we spoke about the Research Commons--its mission, its flexible spaces, and its programming and consultations for graduate students. I enjoyed working with Lauren very much on this, and now that she’s in her Open Access Librarian role, I expect to work with her even more in the coming years.  

• Stevens, E. (2017, September). Written reflections for student workers: High-Impact Practices at work [Presentation]. The European Conference on Information Literacy, St. Malo, France.

• Though, over the years, I have moved away from the concept of High-Impact Practices, I still found this to be a good forum for sharing the work that Madeline and I have done with incorporating written reflection into the work of student workers. While, in this audience, I had no one as outwardly critical and aggressive as the person I mentioned in the Online NW audience, I did here have a group of people who had many pointed questions for me about why in the world we’d want to pay students to reflect about their work in writing.