Library Directors, especially in small and rural libraries find themselves dealing with situations and knowing things they never could have imagined when they started working in libraries. This panel will share stories of lessons learned, advice on dealing with the unexpected, and answer questions. What is something you have had to deal with or wondered how others would address? Questions can be submitted prior to the session or asked during the discussion.
Explore innovative and low-cost youth services programming designed to inspire curiosity and creativity, support early literacy, connect with the community, and build lifelong readers. Participants will learn practical and cost saving strategies for implementing engaging programs for children, teens and families, including ideas on reusing materials, promoting through free marketing, engaging activities, and community partnerships.
Want to add readers services into your adult programs? This session will spark ideas for building engaging, reading-based programs that fit your capacity and inspire your community.
We’ll highlight two successful adult programs, sharing practical tools, lessons learned, and creative strategies for designing, scaling, and sustaining programs that deepen community connection through reading.
You’ll leave this session with new ways to think about program design and actionable steps to turn resources into powerful, people-centered programs.
What’s happening in technical services right now? In this fast-paced session, four librarians each spotlight a project, initiative, or area of expertise from their technical services work. Topics will range from collaborating in a consortium to cataloging and metadata remediation to a discovery catalog to and an ILS evaluation. Attendees will discover practical strategies and new ideas they can apply in their own institutions.
Assistant Director, Metadata & Cataloging, University of Central Oklahoma
Shay Beezley (she/her), Assistant Director of Metadata and Cataloging at University of Central Oklahoma's Chambers Library, leads a team of six catalogers and up to four student employees in providing accurate, effective and timely access to library resources. As someone that the... Read More →
The partnership between the Great Plains Black History Museum and UNO Criss Library is preserving and more widely sharing the museum’s archival collections. This session will explore how partnerships can transform technical services like archival processing into opportunities for community engagement. By combining archival description with active outreach, libraries can play a vital role not only in preserving community memory, but also in ensuring those stories remain visible, meaningful, and part of the community’s identity.
Director of Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Amy Schindler (she, her) is an archivist and has been the Director of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Libraries since 2014. Previously, Amy held appointments in academic archives in the Mid-Atlantic region as well as holding contract positions... Read More →
Thursday October 15, 2026 3:15pm - 4:00pm CDT Gatsby12520 Westport Parkway, La Vista, Nebraska
The programmable Reachy-Mini robot from Hugging Face is an open-source robotics platform designed to support the embodied deployment of large language models (LLMs). Because it can operate without cloud-based computing, it also offers a reduced-impact approach to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Equipped with auditory and visual sensors, the platform can interact with patrons and respond to prompts in real time. A team in our student-driven Makerspace has programmed our Reachy-Mini, named Robin, as a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system that is responsive to queries within limited bounds while maintaining sensitivity to patron privacy. Robin is being deployed as a greeter to provide a unique and engaging way for patrons to discover our services. Rather than automating librarianship, Robin serves as a novel service interface that expands patron engagement while giving Makerspace staff an opportunity to explore and develop practices aligned with the AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers issued by the Association of College & Research Libraries.
