ALA Adventures: REFORMA

The American Library Association's annual conference at Chicago (#alaac17) for 2017 is concluding tomorrow and luckily I was able to attend for the first time. The conference dates are June 22, 2017 to June 27, 2017. I've attended many sessions that have given me a great deal of inspiring information to bring back to my library. Outside of topics covering my job in a very direct way (instruction, reference, data analysis, research, etc.) there was the opportunity to look into topics important personally that still influence all libraries, one being diversity. Today, I finally took a step to become more involved in an organization I joined in library school called REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking.

I am of Puerto Rican and Irish decent. Being biracial has presented a challenge for me at times because I struggle to feel a part of either community. Spanish was something I learned as an adult and growing up people would tell me I was not a real Puerto Rican since I could not speak the language. On the opposite side, I was excluded or experienced a hard time with my white peers because I am Puerto Rican and have the different behavior that comes with that culture. I always feel like an intruder in each group because I'm not fully either. I'm not Latina enough for one and I'm to much of a Latina for the other. This is not the case with every person or group I know.

During graduate school it was very important to me to join a Library organization that focused on Latinos and Spanish literature because this felt so absent from my experience with literature growing up. REFORMA was that organization and I joined it before even joining ALA. However, I had not felt able to really contribute time to any organization consistently until recently. The general membership meeting was this afternoon and I felt a little intimidated about attending by myself.

Sitting and waiting for things to start I was very nervous about being perceived as an intruder because of my past experiences. Right away, a man began talking to me who was attending for the first time too. We spoke about why we were there and why REFORMA was important to us. He ended up being biracial and had similar difficulties as me. It was instantly a relief to find out that someone else there felt the same way but that it did not hinder his desire to invest time and energy in this organization. It motivated me to speak with other people there to find ways to participate actively. Everyone was gracious and friendly; they were happy to find ways I could contribute. Hopefully soon, I will be able to join the REFORMA mentor program and technology committee. Stay tuned...

Workshops

Logistics

Much of my energy at work has been invested in starting to offer (free) workshops to users at both of the locations I work at and online. The workshops are modeled after ones that were offered at a previous college library I worked at. There were logistical things to deal with like booking equipment and rooms. With the assistance of knowledgeable staff these things turned out to be the easiest to do. It is also beneficial that the libraries I work at have their own computers labs, that we schedule, which were available for the workshops. Some other things I had to work on were setting up a registration form, creating a page available through the library website for people to go to for information/ registration, and advertising the event.

Google Forms
For the registration form I was able to use Google Forms to setup a registration page and using addons like FormLimiter and Email Notifications I was able to add needed features. FormLimiter allows you to create a notification that will be provided to anyone trying to sign up after the a maximum number of responses is reached that the event is full and to contact me. The email notifications addon allows you to create a custom email message registrants will receive upon submitting the form. I used this to create a registration confirmation with the event details, my contact information, and a display of the information they submitted in case there were some errors. These addons were able to be included while creating the Google Form and this video helped me to properly create the email rule. 

 

I created a different registration form for each workshop and set registration limits that matched the number of computers in each room. Feel free to check out the online registration form but please do not sign up unless you really want to attend. This is my first experience using Google Forms and it was exactly what I needed. It was easier to setup than I anticipated and the embed code provide after clicking Send was just what I needed for the LibGuide based page on the library website. I will be using this for all my workshops in the future.

Workshop

The workshop itself was about an hour long and covered how to setup a presentation in Prezi and Google Slides. Below, I have a Prezi that covers the new tutorial students will experience when they first sign up for Prezi. Overall, the students that have taken the workshop so far, were more interested in Google Slides over Prezi because it can be downloaded for offline use. Both web apps allow users to share the project with others and work on it collaboratively. In the future I think I will more heavily advertise the Google Slides part since it has generated more interest.