
One of the many aspects I love about working at a college belonging to a larger university system, is the wider community of librarians I get to work with that belong to that system. SUNY has 64 colleges and universitites, each one unique in it’s own way but there are also a lot of similarities and challenges that we have to face together. The SUNY Librarians Association provides a community where we can do that. I have participated and been a member of national library organizations, attended national conferences, but I don’t think any of those experiences can compete with the marvelous connections I’ve made through SUNYLA. I was secretary for the Executive Board for a few years which was quite honestly, a lot more fun than it should of been. It’s all about the people, I had such a blast. For the last few years I’ve been co-chair for the Working Group for Information Literacy (WGIL). We have many librarians who are passionate about information literacy working at SUNY insitutions. However, we are spread out all over the state so our meetings are usually held virtually. One of the biggest challenges in recent years has been the lack of “energy” and participation in the group. Like I said, we’re all passionate about information literacy but we’re also all really busy and finding time to contribute to working groups and committees is always hard. For a while, the other co-chair and I thought maybe we could get things moving with a blog. Contributors signed up and posted articles sharing ideas for library instruction, etc. But writing articles takes time, and it was hard to get volunteers to contribute (let’s face it…blogging is rather 2006) so last summer we all came up with another idea. Fifteen minute lightening talks. These are low-effort, jump on Zoom and listen to me talk about this cool idea I tried or challenge I’ve been having regarding information literacy. Our goal is to have one monthly and so far it’s going pretty well. If you’re interested in listening to some of the recordings you can find them on our blog: https://sunyla.org/informationliteracy/