Category: higher education

State of the Kiyomi, Sabbatical, DEI, and More

Happy Fall! It seems like each year my annual update gets a little later in the year. I’ve finally unburied my email a little and have time to take a little break and provide an update. The lovely graphic on this post is for our newest SciPop Talk and was created by our fabulous graphic designer Erin Colonna.

For the first 6 months of 2019, I was on sabbatical, I highly recommend it!  I spent my time working on finishing up old manuscripts and working with Mark Puente, Director of Diversity and Leadership, Association of Research Libraries. I was named Visiting Program Officer for Diversity and Leadership and continue to work with Mark now that I am back at UNL.

Puente, M.A., Deards, K.D. (2019). Moving from talk to action: What does successful institutional change related to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) look like? IDEAL’19: Advancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility in Libraries & Archives. [Presenter]. [Refereed].
Click here for a PDF of our slides

You can read about some of the work that I do as I science librarian and outreach/event planner in the following works:

Lai, R., Deards, K. Harry Potter x Science: Pop Culture as a Strategy for Science Engagement. CAISE (Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education) Newsletter. September. [Edited.]
https://www.informalscience.org/news-views/harry-potter-x-science-pop-culture-strategy-science-engagement

Harrington, E.G. (2019). Academic Libraries and Public Engagement with Science and Technology, Cambridge, MA: Chandos Publishing [Interview].

You can also read my most recent collaboration with Leo Lo for free:

Deards, K. D., Lo, L. S. (2019). Establishing Your Professional Identity. In Hodge, M. (Ed.), The Future Academic Librarian’s Toolkit: Finding Success on the Job Hunt and in Your First Job, Chicago, IL: ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries). [Refereed].
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/377/

In 2020 you will find me at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in Philidelphia:

[Forthcomming]. Deards, K. (2020). Communicating science with little (or no) budget: Design rules and tricks for the non-artist. American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition, Division of Chemical Information, Scientific Visualizations & Creative Presentations. [Presenter]. Date: TBD

Currently, I am productive and covering Chemistry, Biochemistry, Forensic Science, Physics and Astronomy and Water. I continue to coordinate outreach for our SciPop talks and interactive events, and for the Nebraska Local Section of the American Chemical Society. In addition, I was elected the 2019-2020 Secretary of the Libraries Faculty, and serve on several other committees related to work, STEM, and mentoring. I have one formal and one informal draft in review by peers before last looks and journal submission/passing the document off to a committee. I have one incomplete manuscript that I hope to complete before the end of the year, I managed to recode several hundred responses while on sabbatical and have kept my lit review up to date so we shall see what December brings.

How to Be Generous Without Being a Doormat

Takers, Givers, Matchers, Smart Givers Align Their Giving With Self-Interest, Be Instrumental, Network Like a Giver, Listen More, Ask Questions, Refer, Include, Thanks, Follow-up, No. No is a complete sentence.At ALA Annual I teamed up with Leo S. Lo to present Giving to Get Ahead: How to Be Generous Without Being a Doormat. When someone asked me what the presentation was about, and if it would be relevant to them since they worked in a public library, I told them it was about how to say no. Libraries attract people who want to help others, but it’s important that givers do so strategically so that they don’t burn out and so that the person they are trying to help gets what they need (when possible).

You can read about our presentation, and others from the ACRL program track, in the most recent issue of C&RL News. I will add the download link for the slides here once they are loaded in our institutional repository. If you attended ALA Annaul you can listen to the audio or watch the video by logging in to the conference website.

Edit 2/10/2019: Slides Download Link

For those who weren’t able to attend ALA we recently did a free webinar with the same material through the ACRL Leadership DG which is posted to YouTube.

Edit: 2/10/2019: You may also be interested in our presentation from 2017 at ALA Annual: What They Don’t Teach You in Library School: Using Emotional Intelligence to Succeed as Academic Librarians of Color I would also like to clarify that these techniques aren’t unique to Academic Librarians of Color. We chose this title because we believe Emotional Intelligence (EI) helps people to have the best experience possible. If you are in a bad situation EI will not miraculously make it better, but it can help you navigate the situation until you can get somewhere better.

Recent publications include:

Burks, R., Page, S., Deards, K. D., Barnes, J. (2018). Chemists Atwitter. In Sorensen-Unruh, C. & Gupta, T. (Eds.), Communicating Chemistry through Social Media, ACS Symposium Series, (19-34). Washington, D.C: American Chemical Society. PDF: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/367/

Burks, R., Deards, K., Defrain, E. (2017). Where science intersects pop culture: An informal science educational outreach program. Journal of Chemical Education, 94(12), 1918-1924. Link: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00070