Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) unless otherwise noted)

The LGBTQIA+ community has come under increasing hostility in the North America through policy and challenges to library holdings and funding. These challenges to professional jurisdiction have prompted renewed scrutiny of the library-as-institution’s responsibility toward society and the LGBTQIA+ community specifically. Safe spaces for this community remains a nebulous and contested concept. This paper reports preliminary findings of conceptualizations of LGBTQIA+ safe spaces in scholarly and practitioner literature in library and information science. Undertaking a critical literature review, this work outlines conceptualizations of the librarian’s role in cultivating safe spaces and contrasts the theme of safe spaces as consisting of in-group safe spaces. This paper collocates discussions of sociocultural contexts informing the ideas within literature alongside critical appraisals of and tensions with lived experience of queer folks. Surfaced is the gap between the two bodies of knowledge and conceptual and practice-oriented approaches to reduce this gap.

Public libraries are rapidly changing in response to societal and technological shifts. This change comes with serious demands on the identities of library staff, who are asked to be all things to all people. This represents a type of identity regulation, which is a form of socio-ideological control employed by organizational actors to define worker identities. While this manufacturing of subjectivity can be unproblematic, it can also lead to alienation, exhaustion, and a loss of authenticity. In this study, 21 public library staff members in the SE United States recorded audio diaries and sat for an interview about their experiences in routine library work. Findings reveal the presence of several different identity suggestions centered around things like productivity, continuous improvement, customer service, and organizational citizenship. Participants responded to these regulation attempts in several ways, including identification with the suggested identity, dis-identification, and ambivalence. Findings suggest the need for proactive support structures that enable staff to align their work identities with their authentic selves.

An important aspect of human information behavior research is to understand the motivations of people as they interact with information and technologies to make a difference. This paper presents exploratory findings of a qualitative study of public librarians’ motivations to expand civic engagement for racial justice in the American South. The geographical region is stereotypically characterized historically as being solely racially intolerant in public perceptions, scholarly discourse, political networks, and news media. This research challenges such limited notions, highlighting public librarian’s logic-based motivations to further civic engagement for racial justice in context of the nation’s historical/contemporary racialized political climate. In the process, the authors acknowledge the voices/perspectives of public librarians, an often-underrepresented group in privileged academic information behavior research. Thematic narrative analysis is explored as a strategic mode of presenting the findings.

Immersive narrative creates a vivid experiential environment that allows users to be participants rather than mere observers, holding immense potential in the field of cultural heritage. However, current research primarily focuses on technological applications and integration, lacking in-depth exploration of the fusion between technology and content as well as limited user engagement. Following a systematic review methodology, this study conducted searches and two rounds of screening in 7 major databases, resulting in the inclusion of 176 studies on immersive narrative in cultural heritage conservation. The study summarizes and extracts the current state, development trajectory, trends, research methods, and key elements in this field, innovatively categorizing them into 6 core levels of research patterns while proposing corresponding optimization strategies. Additionally, this study identifies research gaps and suggests future directions, aiming to facilitate the enhancement of immersive narrative development and deepen user engagement in the cultural heritage field.