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2020 Poster Sessions
Get out of my cite: 
Fostering campus consensus and collaboration in adopting citation manual updates


Intended Audience

Academic Libraries, Library Leadership


Poster Summary and Objectives

In recent years, APA, MLA, ASA, and Chicago have all updated their citations manuals. These updates, while necessary and positive, have the potential to create havoc on university campuses and significant confusion for students as different departments and individual faculty take different approaches to incorporating these changes into their classes. In these situations, librarians are uniquely positioned as an outside force that can help negotiate the adoption of these changes between all involved parties, as well as intervene and mediate in the case of any potential inconsistencies in the implementation of the new citation style guidelines.

At the University of South Carolina Aiken, the library plays a substantial role in citation support on campus, and this has allowed the library faculty to step into that leadership role in coordinating the implementation of updated citation styles. Through strong relationships with faculty and departments across campus, through involvement in the campus Critical Inquiry program, and by partnering with the Writing Center, the librarians have been instrumental in helping to maintain consistency in the application of citation style rules across campus.

This poster will outline practical steps and strategies for leading a campus through citation manual changes. Building on and applying lessons learned during each new manual update, the librarians have engaged departments and individual faculty in an active dialog to foster consensus regarding issues such as how best to streamline adoption and determining timelines for adoption that would be least disruptive to student learning. Vital to these efforts is effective and ongoing communication between critical support groups (writing room, library, tutoring) and across the campus.


Presenter

Deborah Harmon- University of South Carolina Aiken

  • Poster presentation on related topic at Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy in 2018
  • Published peer-reviewed article on related topic in Collaborate Librarianship 2017
  • Provide extensive citation support on a university campus