Poster Presentation Session IV

FLA 2026 POSTER PRESENTATIONS SESSION IV (Thursday 11:30am – 1:30pm)

Telling Stories, Sharing Stories: Enhancing Access Through Inclusive Metadata
Amirah Flynn, Pasco-Hernando State College

Libraries strive to be places where everyone feels like they are welcomed and represented. We curate materials that reflect our individual and collective stories, culture, viewpoints, and values. To maximize user discoverability of our collections, it is crucial that the metadata be as accurate and inclusive as the items they contain. Adapted from a webinar created for an MLIS capstone course, this poster presentation will focus on the ways in which metadata affects the user, and how information professionals can use controlled vocabularies to enhance access for all members of the community.

Attendees will learn current best practices for inclusive metadata and cataloging work and will learn techniques for implementing an inclusive metadata project at their institution. The presentation will include a hands-on activity to facilitate interaction and conversation, as well as a digital resource sheet with practical tools.

Quantifying Librarianship: Visualizing the Work of an Academic Librarian
Mary Rubin, University of Central Florida

Mary Rubin tracked all of her meetings, Ask A Librarian shifts, reference desk shifts, research consultations, events, and instruction sessions during her first two years as an academic librarian. By carefully documenting where her time was spent, she created a dataset that captures the rhythms and responsibilities of her daily work. Quantifying how work hours were distributed across different types of service and engagement, this data visualization tells just one part of her professional story. It reveals patterns of outreach, instruction, and support that might otherwise remain invisible in the daily flow of academic life.

In academic libraries, much of the work librarians perform is relational and service-oriented, making it difficult to represent in traditional reports or metrics. Tracking these interactions offers a way to make that labor visible. The resulting visualization highlights the volume of activity and the diversity of roles librarians occupy: instructor, research partner, event organizer, and point of contact for students and faculty. 

Data visualization has become increasingly popular as a creative endeavor to represent personal data. This project transforms routine professional record-keeping into a broader reflection on labor, time, and visibility in librarianship. By turning two years of tracked activities into a visual representation, the work invites viewers to consider how data can illuminate the often unseen patterns that shape professional practice.

Including Students in the Archives: Telling the University's Story One Item at a Time
Clarissa West-White, Bethune-Cookman University

This poster explores the collaborative relationship between the university's archivist and a student worker at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) in Florida. By engaging students in the processing and digitization of materials related to the university’s founder and early history, the archives move from a "silent warehouse" to a dynamic classroom. Students act as co-interpreters of the university’s narrative. Each document, photograph, or artifact handled by a student provides a direct link to the founder’s vision, allowing the student to see their own academic journey as a continuation of a century-long legacy. 

Objectives: 
1.Examine the collaborative working relationship between a university archivist and a student worker within an HBCU archival setting. 
2. Reframe the role of student workers as co-interpreters of institutional narratives rather than solely as labor support for technical tasks. 
3. Analyze the educational and identity-building impact of hands-on archival engagement on students’ understanding of their place within a historic institutional legacy. 
4. Acknowledge and contextualize the challenges of employing student workers in archival settings— including scheduling, turnover, workload, and stamina—while emphasizing their long-term value to archival missions, while highlighting best practices for leveraging student labor in ways that are mutually beneficial for institutional memory, student learning, and archival sustainability.
 

Beyond Numbers: The UWF Story Project
Kellie Sparks, University of West Florida Libraries

The UWF Library Story project reimagines how we document library value by moving beyond gate counts and into the heart of the student experience. This poster presents a dual-purpose survey experiment designed to capture the "why" behind library usage. By gathering personalized narratives, we gained deeper context into how our libraries impact students' academic journeys and identified specific problems our services solved.  This tool functioned as a two-prong strategy: it successfully collected rich qualitative data while simultaneously identifying library advocates for our #ScholarlyArgos social media campaign.

This poster presentation will explore the specific methodology used to solicit these stories, a curated sampling of the data collected, and the resulting visuals from our social media outreach. Our objectives are to demonstrate how libraries can bridge the gap between feedback and advocacy, using student voices as powerful social proof. This poster presentation will help librarians understand how to transform user testimonials into a cohesive narrative that resonates with stakeholders and builds community trust. This proposal aligns with the conference theme by proving that when we empower users to tell their stories, we create a more compelling and authentic library narrative.