MiALA 2026 Annual Conference

Start your day off with a continental breakfast!

Menu: Assorted Muffins | Caramel Rolls | Fresh Seasonal Fruit | BYO Yogurt Parfait Station | Hard Boiled Eggs
All Day Beverages: Coffee (regular & decaf) | Hot Tea | Iced Tea

Building a Culture of Curiosity in Academic Libraries: Toward Resilience, Innovation, and Thriving

In an era of rapid institutional change, academic libraries face persistent pressure to defend their relevance and navigate competing demands (shifting student populations, resource constraints, and questions of institutional identity and sustainability). Yet amid these external pressures, a more fundamental challenge emerges: How do we stay true to our values (integrity, inquiry, and genuine connection) while adapting to an uncertain future? And when emerging technologies like AI arrive, how do we resist the temptation to default to either fear or uncritical enthusiasm?

This keynote argues that cultivating a culture of curiosity is not a luxury or a soft skill. Rather, it is foundational infrastructure for organizational resilience, innovation, and the kind of workplace thriving that sustains us through volatility and change. Drawing on insights from the multidisciplinary literature on curiosity, 26 years of design and experimentation in academic libraries, and new AI and service design projects, we will explore:

1) What a culture of curiosity looks like in practice and why it matters for librarians and the institutions we serve.
2) The conditions that enable curiosity to flourish: safety, freedom, equity, and renewal.
3) How deep inquiry into problems and possibilities becomes the foundation for wise action, especially when facing rapid technological change and institutional transformation.
4) Concrete practices for building curiosity into our services, collaborations, and everyday interactions.

This session is designed to spark reflection and conversation. You will leave with frameworks and tangible takeaways, but more importantly, you will leave reconnected to the deeper purpose of your work and your power to shape the culture where you lead.

Birds of a Feather is an informal lunch event where you can meet new people, casually chat about your interests, and engage with a number of MiALA Interest Groups (IGs). Many tables will either have a theme or be hosted by a specific individual or interest group and anyone can eat at any table that interests them. There will be 11 tables hosted by IGs that would love to meet you as well as several fun, unhosted themed tables. Need some time to simply rest and not chat? No problem! There will also be several "quiet" tables as well. We hope to see you there!

Menu: Tortilla Chips with Warm Nacho Cheese Sauce & Jalapeños | Seasoned Ground Beef | Chicken Fajita with Sautéed Onions & Peppers | Shredded Lettuce, Tomato, Onion, Sour Cream, Cheese & Salsa | Soft & Hard Shell Tortillas | Classic Española Sauce | Spanish Rice | Refried Beans

IG-hosted tables:

Archives and Special Collections IG
Cataloging and Metadata IG
Community College IG
Early Career Professionals IG
Higher Education for Incarcerated Students (HEIS) IG
IDEA Committee IG
Instruction & Information Literacy IG
Librarian Scholarly and Creative Activity IG
Mid-Level Leadership IG
Open Education Resources (OER) IG
Upper-Level Management IG

Individual-hosted tables:

Business Librarians - host: Alex Hauser
User Experience (UX) in the A.I. Era - host: Michael Greenlee

Academic libraries act as a hub for science communication, supporting the dissemination of knowledge, facilitating discussion, and encouraging informed decision-making. To highlight some of the science communication work done, this poster describes the education, research, and outreach support offered by two librarians in differing positions and stages in their careers. Through sharing these insights, this poster encourages further conversation about how academic librarians can engage with and facilitate science communication.

While academic libraries offer access to hundreds of thousands of publications, usage can often be less than what we might hope. This poster dives deep into a sample set of academic titles available through Queer Liberation Library, compared to public and university libraries as well as MeL. Usage statistics invite us to consider where library users are really accessing academic works and if university libraries are effectively connecting scholarly work with communities who need it.

This poster reports findings from a small-scale study comparing Google Lens' assisted and human-only descriptive metadata creation for murals in Detroit. AI-supported workflows aided visual identification and reduced initial descriptive effort but introduced epistemic friction, including misidentifications and non-authorized terminology, requiring verification. Results position Google Lens as workflow support rather than replacement, underscoring the continued necessity of human involvement in authority control, contextual interpretation, and culturally grounded description in AI-integrated environments.

Knowledge Commons is a non-profit project centered in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. Knowledge Commons includes five key components: KCWorks (an open access repository built on InvenioRDM), profiles, groups, sites, and a Mastodon server, hcommons.social. Particularly focusing on KCWorks, this poster will demonstrate the strategies the team has used to promote and share their work, which have included customized workshops, regular meetings of a user advisory group, and active social media accounts.

As generative AI use becomes more prominent in higher education, librarians can take a proactive, practical approach and lean on their expertise in achieving transparency, maintaining academic honesty, and avoiding plagiarism, by teaching the citation and acknowledgment of generative AI tools. This poster will demonstrate existing templates used to acknowledge generative AI use in research and writing, as well as citation strategies for any content those tools generate.

In 2025, ACRL adopted AI competencies to support the needs of academic libraries and AI integration. This poster reviews current academic library job postings in response to the explosion in artificial intelligence. Libraries are creating positions with responsibilities to meet the new and emerging needs of students. Examining job announcements ranging from 2022-2026, collected from national job boards, mailing lists and individual college and university websites to analyze trends on preferred AI skills.

In this poster presentation, we will show the differences we have found in what types of research are reported in the various bibliometric data reporting platforms. We will also show how the same researcher could appear to have drastically different output when searched in different places. We will demonstrate why you must carefully investigate the data which is captured and shared by a system before using that data to make any decisions.

Early career librarians (within five years of entering the profession) can strategically accelerate advancement by reframing their status as an asset. Part-time roles provide flexibility for publishing, presenting, and leadership development., as well as gaining experience in multiple disciplines of the profession. Targeted programs through the American Library Association and the Association of College & Research Libraries offer mentorship, grants, and networking opportunities that enhance visibility and professional growth. Intentional engagement during this phase builds momentum for long-term career success.

New tenure-track librarians often find themselves at sea when presented with the scholarship requirements of their faculty positions. While existing research has covered the reasons librarians may be or feel underprepared to engage in scholarship, as well as the varied support measures offered to build their confidence and competence, this poster investigates librarians? perceptions of the most effective support they received during their initial library scholarship and publication endeavors.

Generative AI is altering information work and learning, but campus groups often tackle it from separate vantage points. This poster outlines a survey comparing AI perceptions among LIS students, academic librarians, and LIS faculty at the same institution: Wayne State University. Themes include usefulness, risk, trust, self-efficacy, and policy preferences. Results will inform targeted training and practical guidance for responsible and equitable AI guidelines across campus and library services.

How can MLIS programs better prepare students for computational thinking and computer programming in libraries? This participatory design project integrates library perspectives, examples, and datasets into introductory programming coursework, with the intention of creating course materials that align with the interests and needs of library students.

Why We March, Special Collections pop-up exhibition is an excellent example of integrating library collections in the classroom and in course work. The exhibitions do not have to be one offs but can also be used as educational tools in the classroom. The poster explores the various elements that went into developing a successful collabortive program between the teaching faculty and the library.

Be sure to visit our Sponsor Tables during the Poster Session:

• OCC Library Services and Technology Program
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS)
• EBSCO Information Services
• GALE Cengage Learning
• Clarivate
• JSTOR (ITHAKA)