NCLA Con 2025

Family Portraits started with a familiar missional goal: identify what holes exist for our local community in availability, access, and impact, and find a way to provide meaningful service in that space. What began as a utilitarian opportunity to leverage existing Library resources in meeting a community need has blossomed into the Library's most expansive recurring annual program, serving nearly 500 families since its inception in 2021. Starting in 2021, each fall a staff member transforms the underutilized Library Conference Room, crafting multiple festive, nonsectarian backdrops comprised entirely from materials on hand from Library storage or on loan from staff. In patrons' twenty-minute appointment slots, a Library staff member stages the family/individual and shoots photos in various combinations of backgrounds, poses, and props (as determined by the patrons prior). Afterward, the staff member uses free, open-source software to edit the best shots in the same vein a professional photographer would, delivering around a dozen card-ready edits along with any usable unedited photos to the patron digitally via cloud storage. While time-intensive for the staff member responsible for the set-up, staging, shooting, and editing, the program operates on an almost non-existent budget and is easily replicable year-over-year at libraries of any size. As the program entered its fourth year in 2024, word-of-mouth exposure increased significantly, particularly after the program was recognized at a state level by the NC Public Library Directors Association. Following the most ambitious year of the program from a patron availability standpoint (2023), and adding in that the programming staff member responsible for staging, shooting, editing, and delivering the photos would be leaving in the middle of the program's normal editing season for paternity leave, significant innovation proved necessary to slash down staff time investment if the program was to remain available to serve the community. The first step in streamlining was to completely overhaul the patron registration process. Staff enacted a new-look online registration in 2024 as a prerequisite to book an appointment. Under the new system, a custom link (available as QR codes throughout the building and hyperlinked on Library web/social media pages), directed patrons to a one-stop web experience where they could: maximize photoshoot time by filling out all their information; access the full rules, guidelines, and suggestions for enjoying the program; utilize a full catalog-style collection of family portraits from previous years, as well as photos of the backdrop options, to custom order the poses and placements they wanted for their shoot; and, especially important given the staffing circumstances of the program, select whether they preferred to ensure photo delivery by November first (whether edited or not), or wait for the full set of edited photos after the holidays. Another key change instituted in 2024 proved pivotal in slashing editing time, and thus enhancing the capacity of the program: the addition of photography lights. Investing in a set of low-end studio-style photography lights (approximately $50) allowed the staff photographer to better control the shooting environment prior to taking the photos, which cut the largest parts of the photo editing (lighting and color adjustments) out, taking the average edit time down from around ten minutes to less than three. A third key innovation-the addition of a color-neutral background option-while seemingly a flippant addition, provided an unexpected increase in access.

Play, Learn and Explore: A Park Adventure Guide is a booklet created in collaboration between Librarians at the Cary Regional Library and the staff of the Downtown Cary Park. The booklet uses the framework of Every Child Ready to Read to guide caregivers and children on an early literacy adventure throughout the park. Using rhymes and songs, conversation prompts, coloring pages, word searches and themed book lists, the booklet helps caregivers interact with their child in proven ways to encourage literacy while having fun. In our presentation we will share the process of forming this collaboration with the Downtown Cary Park and the steps we took to get a printed booklet in people's hands. We will also discuss the various opportunities and problems that arose and how we ultimately ended with both a product and a partnership that helps increase library visitation and encourages early childhood literacy. As Children's Librarians, we understand the importance of early childhood literacy. Our presentation will share how librarians can create tools using Every Child Ready to Read so caregivers can partake every day in developing a child's love of reading. These tools can then be used to engage people all across our community and beyond the library's doors. By partnering with a community park, we have not only created a mutually beneficial relationship, but an opportunity for an outside entity to be an advocate for the importance of public libraries. 

Based off viral internet book clubs like Dracula Daily, ECU's Joyner library started our own digital book club. Using public domain literature and open access photos we divided each story into bite-sized sections and emailed them out to students, faculty, and staff on campus who signed up for the newsletter. This session will share successes and failures from our first two years running this program as well as detail how we navigated logistics, marketed the program, and continue to work to ensure diverse and inclusive voices while using 100+ year old texts. Having now used a novel, short stories, poems, and non-fiction essays in different semesters this session will also discuss the pros and cons of each format and how we are hoping to improve in the future.

Libraries are always looking for new and innovative opportunities to serve the needs of their patrons. Adding manga to an academic library's collection offers an invaluable opportunity to promote inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility within higher education environments. As a distinct medium that blends art and narrative, manga has garnered significant global popularity, transcending cultural boundaries and appealing to a broad range of readers. The incorporation of manga into academic library collections supports the educational and social goals of inclusivity by offering a broader, more diverse spectrum of content that reflects various lived experiences and viewpoints. This collection management project started by creating and expanding the library's popular reading collection. The idea was to provide students with an opportunity to use the library for more than just studying. They are given the chance to make recommendations for the collection by commenting on social media posts or sharing them at events like the annual connect fair (an event for freshmen to explore the different departments and clubs on campus). Through these interactions, we found a need to expand the collection to include manga. The addition of manga to an academic library collection does pose some unusual challenges, particularly in terms of classification and cataloging. Popular manga titles are increasingly being made available in public libraries, but only a relatively small number of academic libraries have begun adding them to their collections. While many manga MARC records do contain call numbers, these are invariably either Dewey Decimal system call numbers or PZ call numbers under LC classification. Gardner-Webb has tried to move away from using PZ call numbers for all but children's books, so we need to assign our own LC call numbers to almost all incoming manga series titles. Further complicating matters is the fact that manga can be assigned LC call numbers based on different criteria by different institutions - by collection name, by author, by title, etc. There seems to be a lack of consistency in cataloging practice among academic libraries, and a lack of non-PZ LC call numbers in existing MARC records inhibits the addition of manga titles by copy cataloging alone. This poses a real challenge to academic libraries who may no longer have an experienced catalog librarian on staff.