Back In Circulation 2026

You have all heard of situational awareness. But, how much do you really know about it? How good are your observation skills? What about your ability to de-escalate? No one’s skills are perfect, but we can all work together to improve them! This fun and highly-interactive seminar will challenge the audience to gauge their own situational awareness, observation, and de-escalation skills. Everyone is encouraged to attend. We’ll use short videos, experiments, humor, and an (optional) fun game to demonstrate the importance of situational awareness and observation not only in the library world, but in our everyday lives. We’ll cover de-escalation techniques and see how they, along with the power of observation, help keep us safe in the library.

The presenter has been a circulation manager of a medium-sized public library in Chicagoland for eight years.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Participants will better understand situational awareness, observation, and de-escalation, and how these concepts apply to real-world library experiences.
2. Participants will practice their situational awareness and observation skills through multiple activities, including a fun game.
3. Participants will learn mindfulness exercises, including breathing techniques to lower heart rate and adrenaline.

In a time where social media is used more by libraries as an advertising tool, it’s imperative that we use these platforms to get the word out about events, services, and items available for checkout. Over the past year, the Michigan Tech Library has been exploring how to make more relatable and engaging posts so that both students and community members are more informed about what is available for them, as well as what is happening in and around our library.
In this presentation, I will share some key ways to game the algorithms (specifically for Instagram and Facebook) so that your posts will be seen by more people. I will also highlight some ways that you can experiment with finding what resonates with your audiences, such as hopping on current trends, highlighting historical information, collaborating with peers both in and out of the library, and utilizing Stories and Reels to reach a wider audience. We will also do a group exercise where we come up with ways to make a ‘boring’ post more captivating.
By making entertaining, relatable, and attention-grabbing posts, your library can benefit from increased collaboration, visits, and overall visibility.

Access services teams are under increasing pressure to adapt—while navigating staffing constraints, evolving student behavior, and legacy service structures. Often redesign efforts begin with solutions rather than shared understanding.

This session shares a phased service design assessment underway at a mid-sized academic library. The work began by establishing psychological safety and shared goals across departments (Phase 1) and is currently in Phase 2: Discovery, using low-barrier methods to examine both user behavior and internal workflows. The goal is to build a shared evidence base before making structural changes. The project will move into its final design and pilot phase in late spring and summer, and by the time of this conference, outcomes and lessons learned will be available to share.

Discovery methods include lobby whiteboard prompts, social media polling, research help exit questions, transaction analysis, space-use counts, faculty listening sessions, and structured staff insight conversations. Rather than focusing on performance evaluation or quick fixes, this process surfaces patterns of friction, hidden labor, and misalignment between student behavior, staffing capacity, space design, and decision-making structures.

Participants will learn how to implement practical, low-cost discovery tools in access environments; distinguish between collecting data and generating meaningful insight; and frame structural tensions in ways that support collaborative, evidence-informed redesign.

The session includes a guided small-group exercise in which attendees draft an insight statement based on a persistent challenge from their own institution.

Being “Here to Help” is what public libraries do, so creating an overall customer service philosophy and training program is important. Learn how the Johnson County Public Library created a meaningful customer service training program that helps staff understand the role of a public library and our shared purpose, while reviewing basic expectations and how a positive, proactive and empathetic mindset can benefit patrons and staff. The ideals and framework of “Here to Help” can be easily adapted and applied at any public library. 

Join us to learn about the C.A.R.E.S. framework of customer service, how it can be taught to up-skill staff, and how these skills can be assessed by a supervisor. C.A.R.E.S. stands for communication, accountability, response, empathy, and solution - the key ingredients in patron satisfaction. Learning Objectives: 1. understand the C.A.R.E.S. framework. 2. develop ideas on how to teach the C.A.R.E.S. framework to staff. 3. develop ideas on assessing the efficacy of staff with the C.A.R.E.S. framework.

Regardless of a person's socioeconomic standing, everyone is entitled to use their local library. Charging patrons for an item that was accidentally damaged while checked out to them deters them from using the library. This can be for many reasons, whether it be that they are unable to afford it or for the shame they feel for damaging an item. This feels contradictory to what we believe a library should be advocating for within our community. One way that we felt that we could make a difference would be to enact an accident forgiveness policy. This is a multistep process that made us reassess how and why we sent patrons to collections, added a processing fee, and ultimately, how we kept patrons from using the library.