Collaboration

October 2024

Over the summer in 2024, I began working on a series of collaborations both across our campus building (with Student Life, Counseling & Psychological Services, the Mike A. Myers Stroke Center) and with other librarians, both at TWU and elsewhere. A fellow TWU health services librarian at our Denton campus, Esther Garcia, invited me to monthly meetings with Alexia Riggs, the director of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, AR. We’d discuss how our various projects were going and develop applications to discuss our collaborations at conferences. We were able to present our work for the first time at the Annual Conference for the South Central Chapter of the Medical Library Association, held here in Dallas, TX.

Our presentation team, L to R: Joanna Russell Bliss, Alexia Riggs and Esther Garcia

See our slides.

Support Staff for Scoping Reviews

Health sciences librarians often partner with researchers over months or years to support the creation of scoping and systematic reviews. I have finally been able to see a review go from search strategy in 2022 to publication in 2024.

Hintz, L.A., Maas, C., Bliss, J.R., & Pizarro, E. (2024). School-based occupational therapy and multitiered systems of support in the United States: A scoping review. Journal of Occupational Therapy, Schools, & Early Intervention, 17(3), 605-623. https://doi.org/10.1080/19411243.2024.2315577

Develop Your Own Digital Humanities Research Institute

April 2022

Our team that has been organizing the Digital Humanities Research Institute at SMU (see more information below) presented about our conference at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference held in Fort Worth. We took attendees through the evolution of the conference, from its seeds at CUNY in 2018, through the pandemic and towards a hybrid (online and in-person) conference for 2018. We also discussed how we approached and scaffolded the content, as well as how we facilitated online discussions before, during and after our synchronous sessions.

Our presentation team, L to R: Jonathan McMichael, Joanna Russell Bliss, Rafia Mirza, and Eric Godat.

More information about our presentation.

DHRI@SMU

Conference held in August 2020 & August 2021

I have been part of a team presenting the Digital Humanities Research Institute at SMU for two years. The 2020 iteration was originally scheduled to be in person, but it was held virtually. In preparation for the conference, I studied the previous year’s conference materials, organized by the digital humanities librarian at SMU. I was involved in the discussions on how to update the modules and pedagogy for this year’s conference, particularly its digital format, and I edited the modules for grammar, broken links and clarity in the weeks leading up to the conference. During the week-long event, I supported the conference leaders by taking notes every day and helping to facilitate conversations among participants as needed.

The screen grab below links to the website for our conference. Each “repo” link takes users to the modules covered during the week. I edited all of the modules with the exception of the Python repository, which was built by our Office of Information Technology.

As the pandemic continued into 2021, we continued to work together as a team to revise how the conference would be presented, shifting from four full days on Zoom to four synchronous sessions over two weeks with flipped learning ahead of each session. I continued to take notes during the sessions and also moderated all online discussions on Slack, helping instructors stay on track to cover the necessary content, and to share helpful resources related to the discussions we were having on Zoom.

Juvenile Collection Project

August 2020

I began working on a project at SMU in January to fill out the juvenile collection for education majors. It came about because it was found that more books are needed that explain world religions in a way that children will find informative and meaningful. It expanded to evaluate the diversity within the collection as a whole, and to grow the collection for better representation. 

  • I worked on the project for most of the spring semester, learning about how to make juvenile collections more diverse and collecting possible titles. The goal is to purchase all suggested titles throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. 
  • I presented this work, alongside my boss, Jonathan McMichael, at the Cross Timbers Library Collaborative Conference in August 2020. This conference is usually held in Denton, TX, but was held virtually this year due to the novel coronavirus. Our presentation is embedded below.