Bridging Gaps: Creating Workshops for STEM Librarians at the University of Maryland

Abstract

STEM Librarians face unique challenges serving their constituents, and many students and current STEM librarians feel unprepared to address them. Past research suggests that many of these challenges come from a lack of education in their subject specialty, a need to be interdisciplinary across the sciences and research methods, and not having the proper context for issues in STEM. As an MLIS student interested in serving the sciences, I was curious to know if those issues were being addressed by the STEM Librarians at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). This project sought to identify and address those challenges through a series of interviews and workshops.

All six librarians employed at UMD’s STEM Library were interviewed in-person and via Zoom about their educational and work experiences, and the communities they serve. They expressed a wide variety of needs; some needs, like those surrounding open data and data visualization, were already being addressed by other departments on campus. However, other needs, such as improving outreach and engagement techniques and improving faculty understanding of student use of artificial intelligence, were not already being directly addressed.

Taking this information, under the guidance of Lindsay Carpenter from Research Education, I developed two workshops: the first is aimed at understanding and teaching STEM faculty about how to talk to their students about artificial intelligence. STEM faculty have a unique relationship with artificial intelligence but, according to their Librarians, do not understand how their students are engaging with it. This workshop seeks to bridge that gap for faculty so they may better understand how to talk to their students about this new technology. The second workshop brings subject specialists at the University of Maryland, College Park together to hear from panelists about their outreach experiences, in-person at the STEM Library. The panel includes a mixture of librarians and a representative from the Libraries’ Communications department.