Community NotesA group of early-career librarians approach a dark cavern. It is off the well-traveled path and exudes a mysterious aura. With only hope as their strategy, they roll for Perception. But wait...do any of them have high Wisdom scores? Do they even know how to play this game? Were they ever taught??
Approaching new projects can be a daunting task for early-career librarians, especially when those projects are not reflective of an assigned Class (i.e. cataloger, instructor, data services librarian) or a preferred area of interest. In this series of lightning talks, a group of new players will discuss how they tackled responsibilities and initiatives that were outside of their usual realms of expertise, and advanced through their campaign regardless.
But boy howdy, hot damn, there's more! Audience participation is a key feature of this session. Taking inspiration from the
drawings of the Upside Down tunnels created by Will Byers in
Stranger Things 2, audience members will take a dabble in cartography by drawing maps of each librarian's journey and noting the choices and decisions made in those journeys. While the speakers are describing uncharted territory, the audience will be charting that territory for them, using paper, crayons, and colored pencils.
To top it off, faciliated small-group and large-group discussions will follow the lightning talks and mapmaking, as these invividual stories become part of the larger story of how to best support early-career librarians confronting the unknown.
