Fall 2019 CUS/ACRL-NJ Newsletter
From the President
By Cara Berg
All of a sudden, we are more than halfway through the fall semester! I feel like it was just yesterday we were all preparing over the summer for the year ahead. Your ACRL-NJ/NJLA CUS chapter is, as always, hard at work. We are so excited for the challenges and initiatives we have planned - it has been a busy few months!
We held our annual Open Membership Meeting/MembersPalooza at Raritan Valley Community College in September. The event’s theme was wellness and self-care: participants learned time management skills, did a goal setting activity, engaged in a guided meditation, and participated in yoga, all led by ACRL-NJ/NJLA CUS members. With busy and hectic schedules, it was a good reminder that self-care is important and it’s okay to take time to breathe!
We’ve started the practice of emailing our approved minutes to the general membership – we hope you are reading along with us! It’s a great way to learn what the organization, including the highly active committees, are up to. New to the organization is our Strategic Planning Task Force, which already scheduled its first meeting and coming soon is our Diversity Committee. More on both of those to follow!
As you now know, the VALE/ACRL-NJ/NJLA CUS User’s Conference is now held concurrently with EDGECon. We still have our VALE Conference, however, it is held during EDGECon’s preconference day and is no longer at Rutgers, but is instead at the Ocean Place Resort in Long Branch. The conference venue is spacious and beautiful, and we’re excited to have our same, high-quality conference, in a new space. We hope to see you there!
As the VALE Conference is in the cold winter months, the NJLA Conference is in the sunny spring months. The NJLA Conference returns to Harrah’s Atlantic City. The NJLA Conference theme, “Know Your Why,” is so essential to librarianship – we hope to see many of our academic librarians there! Proposals are due November 30th.
As we wrap up this calendar year, I am grateful for the support and hard work of my colleagues in this organization and the greater NJ library community. I can't wait to see what we’re able to accomplish together this year.
Cara Berg is a reference librarian at William Paterson University. She can be reached at bergc1@wpunj.edu.
James B. Carey Library Awarded NFPF Preservation Grant
The James B. Carey Library at the School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) at Rutgers University, in coordination with Special Collections and U
niversity Archives, has been awarded a 2019 National Film Preservation Foundation Grant. The federally funded program will provide $10,000 towards the preservation of five reels of home movie footage shot by International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) President James B. Carey that were discovered in the SMLR archives by part-time archivist, Timothy Valente. These standard 8mm silent color films document Carey’s travel in Europe and the Soviet Union from 1945-1948. Carey was the secretary-treasurer of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) at the time, and was attending meetings related to the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). The films show Carey’s trips to the Soviet Union, London, Rome, and other European cities. They are unparalleled visual artifacts of the WFTU found nowhere else in the archival record. There are scenes in beautiful 
Kodachrome color of meeting participants, a political rally in Rome, a trip along the Volga River, everyday life in the Soviet Union, and possibly a shot of Charles De Gaulle among other prominent figures.
The films will be highlighted as part of an exhibit at SMLR which will utilize still images and reproductions of other archival materials held at Rutgers to showcase international unionism. The grant will fund both a digital access copy and 16mm film print of the original 8mm movies. Project leaders include Timothy Valente, SMLR Archivist; Tara D. Kelley, Audiovisual Archivist for the Al Giddings Collection at Rutgers University; and Julie Peters, Director of the James B. Carey Library.
Submitted by Julie Peters, Director of the James B. Carey Library at Rutgers University.
Art & Creativity Festival at Berkeley College
Every November Berkeley College Online celebrates National Distance Learning Week with a variety of activities and events. The Online Library contributes to these festivities with the annual Fall Art and Creativity Festival. We reach out to all students, associates and faculty and encourage them to submit photographs or links to their artwork which we display in a virtual exhibit (a.k.a. Libguide).
We accept artwork across many categories such as digital photography, poetry, and multimedia, as well as curriculum specific such as fashion and graphic design projects. We encourage creative expression in any format and each year we create new categories based on the interest of our community. Some of the example
s are quilts, musical compositions, wedding art, or stained glass. The submissions come via an electronic form which contains information about the Terms of Use and Rules Governing Submission. The eform also provides room for each author’s biography and description of the artwork.
We are very pleased to acknowledge that with the Fall Art & Creativity Festival Libguide, the Online Library can showcase art in a variety of media. These artworks were created solely with the imagination and the talents of our students, staff, and faculty, and put online for public presentation. They reflect the best efforts of the Online Library and the College Community to provide a valuable contribution to National Distance Learning Week.
Submitted by Maria Deptula, Associate Director, Online Library, at Berkeley College's Paramus campus. She can be reached at mde@berkeleycollege.edu.
NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Committee Merger
The merger of the Reference Services and User Education committees was approved at the July meeting of NJLA-CUS/ACRL-NJ Executive Board. The combined group, the Reference and User Education Committee, is chaired by Amanda Piekart (Berkeley College, pictured below, left) and Joe Louderback (DeVry University, pictured below, right). As decided at the new committee’s first meeting on October 11, 2019, the committee’s function is “to promote lifelong learning as an educational goal, and to support the pursuit of excellence in library user education programs and reference interactions.” Please contact Amanda or Joe for more information or if you wish to join the Reference and User Education Committee.
Open Membership Meeting Adds Mindfulness to the Mix
By Hilary Westgate
The NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Open Membership Meeting is an annual tradition which takes place in August or early September each year. Current members plan and organize the meeting in hopes of welcoming prospective and new members, as well using the meeting as an opportunity to check in with each other about the past year’s progress and plans for the following year.
This year, NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ President Cara Berg (William Paterson University), Past President Bonnie Lafazan (Berkeley College), and the two co-chairs of the Marketing and Outreach Committee, Linda Salvesen (William Paterson University) and Hilary Westgate (Ramapo College of New Jersey) decided to try something new for the meeting by incorporating wellness activities for librarians — mindfulness, goal-setting, and yoga! We hoped that with a new academic year beginning, all could benefit from these wellness activities.
The meeting began with introductions and committee/organization updates. Bonnie Lafazan (pictured below) led a goal-setting workshop with a presentation, worksheets, and group discussion. We focused on our future goals either in our professional lives or our personal lives and the steps it would take to achieve them. We had the opportunity to discuss and share our goals which ranged from home cooking to publishing a professional article. At the end of the session, Linda Salvesen (pictured above with Romel Espinel) led a calming guided meditation with background music to allow us to be more relaxed and focused. Hilary Westgate, a registered yoga teacher, then provided a 15-minute guided gentle yoga and mindfulness practice to finish out the day. 
As librarians, we often work hard to guide and teach others, and it is so important to also be sure that we are taking care of ourselves. These activities — goal-setting, meditation, and yoga/mindful movement — can help us to feel our best and more effectively handle the many hats we wear in our professional and personal lives. We all greatly appreciated the opportunity to practice these while getting to meet with our new and returning colleagues from across the state.
For information about joining our NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ committees, please fill out a Committee Interest Form. Thank you!
Hilary Westgate is the Reference, Instruction, and Outreach Librarian at Ramapo College. She can be reached at hwestgat@ramapo.edu.
Newsletter Committee Welcomes Co-Editor Intern
Welcome to Hailey Hensley, who joined our editing team this fall and helped to produce this issue. Hailey is a second-year Public Relations student attending Rider University. She works as a Librarian's Aide in Rider's Moore Library and is also the News Editor for Rider's student newspaper, The Rider News. Hailey plans to work towards her Ph.D. after she completes her undergraduate degree. She currently serves as a chapter president of the Public Relations Student Society of America and has traveled to several professional conferences. She will be helping the Newsletter Committee copy-edit new editions of their newsletter and is really looking forward to helping out!
Announcements
Berkeley College
Ryan Norman joins the Woodbridge Campus Library as a Research and Instruction Librarian. Ryan was previously at Heilbrunn Pape, LLC where she worked as a Paralegal for the past four years and Montclair Public Library where she was a Reference Librarian in the Adult Service Department. Ryan received her Masters of Information at Rutgers University in May 2019 where she also completed a concentration in Preservation and Archives in the School of Communication & Information and in 2013 graduated as an English Major/Political Science Minor with honors, also from Rutgers University.
Caldwell University
Heather Cook has been appointed Library Director of the Jennings Library at Caldwell University. She was previously the Head Librarian in Public Services.
Vict
oria Swanson, MLS, joined the Jennings Library at Caldwell University in July 2019 as the new Instruction and Assessment Librarian. She is also the new liaison for the School of Nursing and Public Health, the Department of English, the School of Education, and the Department of Modern Languages. Victoria received her MLS from Pratt Institute and BA in Sociology from Seton Hall University. She has worked in both corporate and academic libraries in New York & New Jersey and enjoys teaching students information, media & digital literacy.
Georgian Court University
Barbara Herbert will be retiring on December 17th after 40 years of service. Congratulations!
Rutgers University
Julie Still and Zara Wilkinson published Buffy to Batgirl: Essays on Female Power, Evolving Femininity, and Gender Roles in Science Fiction and Fantasy, an edited volume from McFarland.
Stevens Institute of Technology
Romel Espinel, Web Services Librarian, presented at the Association of College and Research Libraries National Conference in Cleveland, Ohio in March. He presented on a panel entitled “From Value to Values: Information Literacy, Capitalism, & Resistance” which explored how academic information literacy is intertwined with capitalism, and in particular, how information literacy instruction promotes information commodification and the production of capitalist subjects. Presentation slides can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/y2dujxb6
Leah Loscutoff, Head of Archives & Special Collections, participated in a panel titled "Community Connections: Unleashing the Potential of Programs and Services Aimed at Underserved Stakeholder Communities" at the annual Society of American Archivists (SAA) conference in August. Ms. Loscutoff discussed a project documenting the North Jersey embroidery industry, which involves collecting materials and oral histories from the predominantly immigrant communities that made up this industry for over 100 years.
Vicky Ludas Orlofsky, Instruction & Scholarly Communication Librarian, blogs occasionally for the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom blog. For her September 11, 2019 post, “Windows, Not Walls: Defending Incarcerated People’s Right to Read,” she explored the role of librarians who work with incarcerated people and how they work to maintain access to reading material within the restrictions of state policies. You can read the article here: https://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=18499
Union County College
William Paterson University
Imani Hardaway joined the David and Lorraine Cheng library staff on August 19, 2019 as the Cataloging and Metadata Librarian. Imani is responsible for catalogin
g materials, learning and applying new cataloging and metadata practices, as well as serving on committees relevant to her field. In the near future, she will also serve as a Library Liaison. Imani holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Creative Writing from Ramapo College. She went on to graduate from Rutgers University with a Masters in Information Science having focused her studies in Technology, Information, and Management. Imani began working in public libraries while in college. During that time she was able to work with children, teens, and adults. Prior to working at William Paterson University, she was a cataloging intern at Columbia University's Butler Library and became a Librarian in the Bergen County Cooperative Library System afterward.
David J. Williams joined the Cheng Library faculty in September of 2019 as the Digital Initiatives and Special Collections Librarian. Dave earned his Master of 
Library Science degree at Queens College, CUNY, along with a certificate in archives, records management, and preservation. In addition, Dave has a Master of Arts in Science and Technology Liberal Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, and completed a BS in Information Systems at Drexel University. Prior to arriving at William Paterson University, Dave served as a Web Developer, as Library Website Manager for the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and as Queens College’s Web and Digital Services Librarian. Pursuing his interest in born-digital materials, he enjoyed a records management internship at the New York City Department of Small Business Services and a digital asset management internship with the Manhattan Neighborhood Network Community Channel. In his spare time, Dave participates in Free and Open Source software development projects.
Linda Salvesen joined the David and Lorraine Cheng library staff on October 21, 2019 as the Systems Librarian. Linda is responsible for administering and configuring the library’s ILS, troubleshooting hardware and software problems with library systems, and serving on committees relevant to her field. In the near future, she will also serve as a Library Liaison. Linda holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from LaSalle University. She worked in research for a few years before matriculating at the University of Pittsburgh in their Masters of Library and Information Science program, with a concentration in Health: Resources and Services. While completing this program, she also worked in Carnegie Mellon University’s Science Libraries. Prior to working at William Paterson University, Linda was the Electronic Resources/Serials Management Librarian at Caldwell University. She is also currently in the member spotlight on the CUS website. See her feature in this newsletter!
VALE Users' Conference 2020
VALE Updates
By Melissa Lena, VALE Program Manager
The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement in NJ continues to gain momentum. Last spring, VALE appointed four OER Ambassadors - Alison Cole, Felician University; Ken Karol, Passaic County Community College; Janet Marler, Ocean County College; and Marilyn Ochoa, Middlesex County College; to serve a one year term as leaders and mentors for OER adoption and open education practices across NJ institutions. In October, the Ambassadors held two OER Regional Workshops at Ocean County College and County College of Morris, which were open to all from VALE member institutions. The workshops presented an overview of VALE’s OER initiative; explained the why, what, where, and how of OER; and provided strategies for individuals to work with their campus community to bring OER to their institutions. The OER Ambassadors will present this workshop in two different locations again in the Spring. We want to continue the discussion about open educational resources and invite all interested to join us on the VALE-OER listserv: vale.oer@njedge.net. You can sign up for the OER listserv here.
Sessions on OER will also be presented at the 2020 VALE/ACRL-NJ/NJLA CUS Users’ Conference. This year we have teamed up with Edge to co-locate with EdgeCon 2020 at Ocean Place Resort & Spa in Long Branch on Wednesday, January 8. This co-location of conferences provides an opportunity for academic librarians, library stakeholders, educational technologists, and academic professionals across institutions to come together under one roof. This is especially important for the OER movement to continue to grow, as it impacts all facets of higher education. The format of the VALE/ACRL-NJ/NJLA CUS Users’ Conference remains the same - with a keynote speaker, poster sessions, plenary sessions; and free to attend for individuals from VALE member institutions. For those who would like to extend their stay and attend EdgeCon, Edge will be offering a promotional discount to VALE attendees. We encourage our members to take advantage of this offer.
Melissa Lena can be reached at melissa.lena@njedge.net.
Submit a Proposal for the 2020 NJLA Conference
Why do we do what we do? This year's conference theme, "Know Your Why," helps us remember. The deadline for proposals is Saturday, November 30th. Find out more and submit a proposal on the conference website. Let us hear about your "why." Also, watch for announcements about the annual CUS/ACRL-NJ Luncheon.
Access2Success: Removing Barriers by Eliminating Overdue Fines
By Alyssa M. Valenti
A growing number of community college students are faced with seemingly insurmountable barriers to their completion of a college degree. Food, housing, and basic-needs insecurities are increasingly common among the student body at Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC). The RVCC Strategic Plan includes four pillars, two of which are to increase student success rates and to increase equity, sustainability, collaboration, and civic engagement. Addressing these growing inequities has become essential to the functioning of the college.
At the official All College Day and welcome back meeting in the fall semester of 2017, all RVCC employees – faculty, staff, and administrators - were charged in alignment with the strategic plan to identify solutions and strategies aimed at eliminating the achievement gap and helping students succeed in whichever way they define success. As this was truly a campus-wide charge, each department was responsible to discover specific ways they could help to close the achievement gap for our students. Some of the strategies that had been in the works previously really came to the forefront after this call to action. RVCC opened a food pantry, a resource center, began a student-to-student peer tutoring program, and hosts a growing number of professional development opportunities focusing on pedagogical approaches that level the playing field for all of our students and not just those most in need. After the first year of the charge to be deliberately mindful of closing the achievement gap, the RVCC Provost held a naming contest for this initiative with ‘Access2Success’ being the winner. Now, instead of a committee or working group, every person and department on campus holds responsibility for ‘Access2Success.’
The RVCC library had been in early talks of eliminating overdue fines for our students before the official Access2Success charge because we found that they did in fact, create a barrier to student success. After a certain fine amount accrued, a hold would be placed on a student’s account effectively barring them from registering or even graduating from the college. We want our students to be able to register for classes and we want them to graduate; we need to keep them here! Eliminating overdue fines has been a hot topic in libraries nationwide, and an NJLA 2019 conference presentation covered how three public libraries from NJ successfully eliminated their overdue fines. Drawing inspiration from these local and nationwide initiatives, the RVCC library decided that one of our commitments to Access2Success would be to eliminate overdue fines for our students.
In order to obtain approval to embark on this project, we began by collecting data. In examining the fines collected, we discovered that it was really only around $800 - $1,000 annually which, in the grand scheme of things isn’t very financially significant. We shared with senior administration these findings along with our rationale of aligning this initiative with Access2Success and the College Strategic plan and received approval to eliminate overdue fines.
We examined our loan rules and easily decided to eliminate overdue fines for general circulating items (books, DVDs, audiobooks, etc.). Students will still receive emails when items are nearing their due dates, and when items are due, but will not be fined. We then discussed what to do in the event of reserves, laptops, and recalled items which are in higher demand and more expensive to purchase and process. The librarians and the Public Services Coordinator established recall protocols in our LMS and opted to retain fine accrual for reserve items which includes our in-library use only textbook collection, in-library use only laptops, and late recalled items. In addition to the regular email notifications that an item is nearing its due date and when it is due, students will also receive an email notification if an item they have checked out has been recalled and that they will still be fined in the event they return this item back late. Finally, in regards to lost or long overdue items, library users will still be responsible for a replacement/processing charge.
To get the word out about this change, we shared it in our first monthly newsletter of the year, and have been sharing via word of mouth. We have also ensured that all of this information is explained on our borrowing privileges webpage. Not only have we successfully removed a significant barrier to student success, we’ve also hopefully inspired students to engage more frequently with our circulating collection without fear of punishment for late items.
Alyssa Valenti is Library Chair at Raritan Valley Community College and Vice President/President-Elect of NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ. She can be reached at Alyssa.Valenti@raritanval.edu.
A Warm Welcome to New Intern for Marketing and Outreach
The NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Marketing and Outreach Committee is participating in the NJLA Internship Program this year, and we are happy to share that Julie McGeough is our new committee intern. Julie is in her final semester in the Rutgers Master of Information (MI) program and comes to us with over 15 years of experience in academic publishing and marketing, making her an incredible asset for our committee, for NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ, and for librarianship as a whole. She also has experience attending library conferences as a publishing professional and now joins us all on the librarian side of things! Julie will be helping us with projects and outreach throughout the rest of the year, and we hope to learn a lot from her and to share with her about NJ academic libraries and our organization. Welcome, Julie!
Linda Salvesen (WPU) is this month's Member Spotlight
Be sure to read the Member Spotlight on the NJLA CUS / ACRL-NJ homepage to learn more about Linda Salvesen, new systems librarian at William Paterson University!
From the Newsletter Archives
In 
Makeover at New Brunswick Theological Seminary
By Laura Giacobbe
Gardner A. Sage Library is a historic special collections library that serves New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Over the past month, we have been redec
orating and revamping largely unused areas of the library to make them more inviting and usable to the community. This space is located on the lower level in the “apse” of the building, giving it plenty of light and a quiet, cozy atmosphere for studying. We’ve added new pillows, flowers, decorative rugs, and some festive decorations to the area to make it a more comfortable and lively space all-around. This is a popular area for students to gather and relax or work, and our Keurig coffee station is one of the most popular features.
With a focus on well-being and self-care, we decided upon hosting meditation classes in this newly refreshed space. We’ve included a meditation book 
display, jar with words of inspiration for students and attendees to take, and a chalkboard used to promote the event. Both the chalkboard and book display are mobile and double as partitions to close off the space from the stacks and other study areas during meditation classes or any time more privacy is needed.
Many library use
rs have inquired about learning basic meditation for stress relief, so this area naturally lends itself to hosting such a program. This program is free as our public services librarian is a certified meditation teacher and reiki master teacher. Offering this type of program allows for deeper connection with our community and relationship building. We have an ongoing mission of catering to the needs and wants of our students to create the best possible study, collaborative, and reading environment. A lot of input was gathered from our library assistants as well, who worked to come up with creative solutions and designs on a very limited budget.
Laura Giacobbe is Public Services Librarian at New Brunswick Theological Seminary. She can be reached at lgiacobbe@nbts.edu.
ARL Digital Scholarship Institute
By Janelle Bitter
This summer, Raritan Valley Community College librarian Janelle Bitter attended the ARL Digital Scholarship Institute (DSI) at the University of Rochester to learn about tools and techniques that she could bring back to her institution. The week-long institute introduced six techniques, with participants spending half a day learning about and using platforms for each. The techniques were digital archives and exhibits, with a focus on Omeka; multimodal publishing using Scalar; text mining with the HathiTrust Digital Library and Research Center; text encoding and scholarly publishing with TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), using Oxygen XML Editor and TAPAS; data visualization using OpenRefine and Tableau Public; and geospatial and temporal mapping with ArcGIS.
The workshops offered attendees a chance to explore digital scholarship tools with the guidance of an experienced librarian. Sessions began by examining examples of each tool before attendees began experimenting with the platforms. Each day, attendees were re-arranged into different groups, allowing them to meet and interact with new colleagues. One goal of the Institute was establishing a cohort for ongoing networking and skill-building, and this was accomplished with group discussions and projects as well as hands-on learning time where librarians could assist each other.
A significant majority of the tools used at DSI were open-source, meaning that regardless of one’s institutional support, most of what was learned could be built on or repeated after leaving the Institute with no financial burden to attendees. Many platforms also offered multiple levels of service, so institutions with the financial capability could subscribe or purchase them to make them available to the wider campus community.
Omeka.net, the version used by attendees, is a hosted service that allows for only one website with limited themes and plugins. Omeka.org is a self-hosted option that is also free but requires on-campus expertise. This option, as well as Omeka-S (Semantic), offers unlimited themes and plugins. Omeka-S supports multi-site capabilities, which makes it an excellent option for classroom use.
Scalar is an open source authoring platform that allows for long-form “books” that include a variety of media. It is easy to connect pages and collaborate, and the platform offers annotation capabilities that can be used for peer-review.
The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is openly available to all. To collect textual data for use in analysis, one must create an account, but this can be done with Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn or other social media accounts if you do not work for a partner institution. To use the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), one must create an account with their institutional email. HTRC offers different text mining algorithms, including word count and topic modeling.
TEI XML is an open source mark-up language that can be used in any text editor. Although Oxygen XML Editor is not open source, its developers work to support the TEI, so it is regarded as the best option. An open source alternative that offers similar TEI XML validation tools is Atom. TAPAS is a free platform for organizing and publishing encoded texts, which allows you to immediately see the effects of the mark-up. The free individual account has limited capabilities, but institutions or individuals who belong to the TEI-C (Consortium), have access to a more robust account that offers greater collaboration options.
OpenRefine is an open source software that was used to “clean” data before creating visualizations. Tableau Public is also completely free; however, a caveat to using it is that to save work, one must upload it to the website, where it becomes publicly viewable.
ArcGIS is not free or open source but is the industry standard for geospatial mapping. Although an individual can create a free online account, it does not offer the same data analysis tools that the paid institutional platform affords. There are open source software options for geospatial mapping, as well as simpler online tools that can be used to map data if visualization is your main goal, not analysis.
The first and last day of the institute included lectures and discussions about digital scholarship in higher education and the role the library can play in facilitating and leading these projects. Also discussed were examples of digital scholarship happening on each librarian’s campus. It was discovered that many institutions experienced the same difficulty communicating, with faculty research often being siloed and individuals feeling they lacked necessary support. Attendees also voiced concerns about lack of understanding from professors and administration, who may either have no idea about the support the library offered or had unrealistic expectations about what their librarians could do with limited time and collaborative effort.
Another important element of conversation was identifying digital scholarship—what are the elements and principles of scholarly work that identify it as such? In discussing possible answers to this question, digital methods, authoring, curation, preservation, and digital use and reuse of scholarship were all brought up. Attendees were then able to uncover values associated with digital scholarship, such as openness, collegiality and connectedness, diversity, and experimentation. These values and affordances could be used not only in working with colleagues, but also in instruction. Students, when given guidance and support, can incorporate these styles of learning and research into their college education. In fact, much of what digital scholarship offers aligns with the Association of American Colleges & Universities High Impact Educational Practices. These projects can be used for undergraduate research, collaborative assignments and projects, capstone projects, and as elements of e-portfolios. In addition, the focus on process over product and the emphasis on experimentation can allow students to develop skills and competencies without the fear of failure. Finally, digital scholarship can be incorporated into Universal Design for Learning (UDL) classrooms. These sorts of activities can allow for multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression.
Janelle presented these tools and techniques to teaching faculty at RVCC, and was met with enthusiastic feedback, including several requests for more in-depth workshops. She plans to offer these in the Spring 2020 semester and would like to welcome all NJ librarians to attend. Please keep an eye out for details next year.
Janelle Bitter is a reference librarian at Raritan Valley Community College. She can be reached at janelle.bitter@raritanval.edu.
Summer Transition Meeting
Every summer, the Executive Board and committee chairs gather to review accomplishments from the previous year, to plan for the year ahead, and to pass the leadership torch. Following their Summer Transition Meeting, members gathered for lunch at J.J. Bitting Brewing Co. in Woodbridge, NJ. Our past, current, and future presidents are featured in the photo below. (From left to right: Vice President/President Elect Alyssa Valenti, Past-President Bonnie Lafazan and President Cara Berg)
Editors
The CUS/ACRL-NJ Newsletter is edited by Joan Dalrymple, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Bergen Community College and Katie Maricic Cohen, Interlibrary Loan, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Editors Joan Dalrymple and Katie Cohen pose for a picture during the Summer 2015 Marketing and Communications Committee Meeting at Monmouth University Library.