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Mindful Libraries: Integrating Well-Being into Library Strategy and Culture
No full textAbstract: Academic libraries are uniquely positioned to support holistic student success by fostering environments that promote well-being, belonging, and resilience. This presentation highlights how our university library integrates wellness into its strategic planning, services, and physical spaces. Through initiatives such as a dedicated meditation room, guided mindfulness sessions, and stress-relief activities, the library creates inclusive spaces for reflection and restoration. A curated Mindfulness Collection—featuring digital and physical resources on mental health, spirituality, and contemplative practices—empowers students to explore wellness on their own terms. These efforts are complemented by Earth Month programming that connects personal well-being with environmental stewardship.
Library leadership plays a key role in embedding wellness into workplace culture, supporting staff and student workers through policies that promote work-life balance and emotional resilience. Attendees will gain practical strategies for designing or enhancing wellness initiatives in their own institutions, with a focus on equity-centered approaches that meet the diverse needs of today’s students. This session offers case studies of how libraries can evolve as vital partners in advancing student success through intentional, innovative, and inclusive wellness programming
Student Voice and Choice in Creating Learning Objects to Teach Subject-Specific Databases
No full textSubject-specific databases can be challenging to navigate due to their unique functionalities and types of information they contain. Allowing students to explore in small groups and facilitating their ability to draw their own conclusions are successful pedagogical approaches in constructing an understanding of subject-specific databases
Supporting Graduate Student Success: Designing an Orientation to Graduate Level Writing, Reading, and Citing Practices
No full textWhen new graduate students start their programs, they may be unaware of the hidden curriculum of graduate-level reading, writing, and citing practices. As a result, they may struggle or feel unprepared with faculty\u27s expectations. This lightning talk highlights how an education librarian created an online asynchronous orientation focused on graduate-level reading, writing, and citing practices in collaboration with teaching faculty. Attendees will learn how a collaborative learning program can empower graduate students to develop necessary skills to succeed in graduate school, and why they may consider offering such a program for their learners
Student Success and library-provided e-textbooks: initial results from a student survey
No full textThe University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries have been running a program for the past two years to offer unlimited-user e-texts of required course materials to students in classes where those texts are available for us to purchase with an institutional license. This program is called eCATs, an acronym for e-Course Assigned Texts. A survey was sent to students in courses where eCATs were available to assess the impact of the availability of the texts on student success as well as understand student practices in relation to textbook acquisition and usage. Some surprising results emerged regarding student definitions of success and the prevalence of piracy of e-textbooks. This poster presents a description of the program, a summary of the findings of the student survey, initial conclusions, and next steps
Open Access After Graduation
No full textAcademic libraries have, for too long, built relationships with students around a single dimension: temporary access to paywalled scholarly materials. We believe this dimension is too narrow and short-term to honor the complexity of our students’ future goals and their lives beyond graduation.
Open Access (OA) scholarship helps us reimagine relationships with our students far longer than their institutional login credentials, and to empower them as lifelong information-literate individuals. Freely available to readers, OA research extends the benefits of scholarly knowledge beyond the academy and removes economic barriers to accessing information. OA invites us to engage the multiple, evolving, and intersecting dimensions that lead people to continue to seek scholarly research throughout their lives, such as advocacy, education, workplace, health, self-actualization, spirituality, and pleasure.
We consider the ways OA can inspire library employees to center students’ immediate and long-term information needs in new ways. Purposefully integrating OA into the design of access, teaching, collections, and services provides a holistic approach that ensures that our connection with students persists with them long after graduation and honors them as whole people
Shaping AI with Purpose: Priming, Pre-prompting and Iterative Questioning to Improve AI Responses
No full textPresentation/Workshop for the MLGSCA & NCNMLG Joint Meeting, January 17-18, 2026.
Abstract: Librarians and library staff are increasingly called on to support faculty, clinicians, and students in navigating large-language-model generative AI tools (e.g. Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT). Yet many of these systems default to generic, bland, and even hallucinated responses that overlook the nuance of clinical inquiry, the expertise of the user, or the tone appropriate for academic and healthcare settings.
This session introduces three strategies—priming, pre-prompting, and iterative questioning—to allow users to guide AI tools toward more useful, context-aware output. Through hands-on work and guided exercises, attendees will shape AI responses by clarifying intent, foregrounding professional expertise, and pre-prompting for tone and cultural alignment. This session includes individual and collaborative practice, as well as time to debrief and compare AI tools.
All are welcome, but this session is designed for beginning to intermediate users who want to move beyond passive prompting and start engaging AI as a responsive partner. By the end, participants will be able to design system instructions to prime an AI tool to respond in a way that suits them, formulate pre-prompts that define a given task, and create purposeful prompts that reflect their values and expectations, potentially making AI a more effective tool in their day-to-day work
Developing a Student Success and Engagement Framework for WVU Libraries
No full textDefining student success in higher education is both complex and daunting, as the term overlaps with persistence, belonging, achievement, and wellbeing. The phrase itself is often unwieldy, making it difficult for academic libraries to determine how their work fits into broader institutional efforts. To address this challenge, the Student Success and Instruction Unit at West Virginia University Libraries sought a clear framework to define Student Success to guide planning, clarify scope, strengthen collaborations, and make library contributions visible and high impact.
The unit developed The Student Success and Engagement Framework (drawing on Bond & Bedenlier, 2019; Zhu et al., 2025) and mapped it to WVU’s emerging institutional model of student success. The framework identifies three interrelated dimensions of engagement—cognitive, affective, and behavioral—which at WVU align with the university’s pillars of academics, belonging, wellbeing, purpose, and experiential learning.
This poster demonstrates how WVU Libraries organized and assessed initiatives within this model, including:
· Cognitive: Course-integrated instruction, scaffolded information literacy, academic workshops, and open house events.
· Affective: Wellness programming to foster belonging and wellbeing, bibliotherapy, reflection rooms, and sensory kits.
· Behavioral: Student advisory groups, peer-led volunteer initiatives, and co-created programming that elevate student voice.
By situating library work within both a recognized academic library framework and WVU’s student success priorities, the libraries clarified scope, strengthened partnerships, and developed strategies for assessing library impact on student success
“Am I Good Enough to Be Here?”: A Photovoice Project on Disability and Belonging in Higher Education (Plain Language Summary)
No full textMany college students with disabilities face invisible barriers that go beyond access to ramps or extra time on tests. This study asked: How do students with disabilities actually feel in higher education? Do they feel safe? Do they feel like they belong? Do they feel liked?
Six students at a small private university shared their stories and took photographs over several weeks, using a method called Photovoice. These images, combined with interviews, reveal how deeply ableism and exclusion impact their sense of safety, belonging, and worth.
The study used polyvagal theory, which explains how our nervous systems respond to environments. For students to engage, connect, and succeed, they must feel: safe (no physical or emotional threat), that they belong (they are valued and respected), and that they are liked (they matter to others).https://digital.sandiego.edu/ceen-inclusion-postseced/1002/thumbnail.jp
Beyond the CISG: Utilizing UNIDROIT Principles to Synchronize International Contract Law Beyond Sales of Goods
No full textModern advancements have made it easier than ever for individuals and businesses to enter into cross-border transactions. Contract law in the United States employs legal instruments such as the UCC to aid contracting parties, and international law consists of tools such as the CISG supporting cross-border contracts for the sale of goods. Such tools are important because international transactions for goods occur frequently. This Comment will examine the complexities that arise in the face of international contracts, discuss tools for uniform law that are currently utilized by various governing bodies, and propose further implementation of uniform international contract law. In discussing these complexities, this Comment will focus on three objectives of uniform law: (1) improving certainty and predictability, (2) increasing accessibility to legal counsel, and (3) promoting freedom of contract. Given international contract law’s current disposition, the effectiveness of the CISG has seemingly opened a door for international contract law to be synchronized beyond sales of goods. With this possibility in mind, this Comment seeks to answer the questions of whether uniform international contract law should be expanded beyond the CISG, and what mechanisms there are to accomplish this expansion