BU Librarians Present on Experiential Learning, AI, and More at Annual Boston Library Consortium Forum
Boston University librarians shared insights and expertise into emerging trends, innovative tools, and best practices at the Boston Library Consortium Forum, an annual membership meeting of library professionals from 26 public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, state libraries, public libraries, and special libraries across the Northeast.
The forum, hosted at Boston University, is a venue for library professional to discuss current industry issues and trends, engage in professional development through workshops and presentations, and connect with peers and colleagues. Presentations by BU Libraries staff at this year’s forum include:
- Lucy Flamm, Social Work Librarian, and Jack Mulvaney, Discovery Services Manager, led the lighting talk, Making Meaningful Metrics: Applied Analysis of Online Content for Instructional Librarians. In this talk, they offered a case study of BU’s online instructional and resource-directed content, known as Library Guides, to demonstrate how alternative metrics inform our understanding of users, user information goals, and platform discovery, and furthermore how these metrics can influence iteration practices and translate value to stakeholders.
- In their presentation, Library Strategies to Support Experiential Learning Courses in Business Schools, Dorice Moylan, Reference Librarian, and Kathleen Berger, Assistant Head of Information Services at the Pardee Management Library, reviewed trends in experiential learning in business schools and the increase in these courses offered at the Questrom School of Business. They provided examples of the additional library support strategies they have developed to meet the needs of experiential learning classes.
- Brock Edmunds, Assistant Head for Access Service at the Pardee Management Library, demonstrated how library professionals can responsibly use AI tools to support patrons in his presentation, AI in Action: Practical Ways Library Staff Can Leverage AI. Brock offered actionable insights into how AI can streamline workflows and improve service quality, covered AI-assisted citation and bibliography generation and brainstorming, among other topics, and provided practical tips for responsible AI use.
BU librarians and archivists also welcomed forum attendees on tours of the library’s distinctive collections and lively exhibitions. BLC attendees joined curator-led tour of Textiles Tell Stories, an exhibition of the African textiles collection held at the BU Libraries, and its complementary community exhibit Textiles Tell OUR Stories; had an intimate view of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s time at the University and his leadership of the Civil Rights Movement through the Libraries’ archival collection of Dr. King’s papers; and engaged with other select items from the University’s special and archival collections held in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at the BU Libraries.