Southeastern NY, Library Resources Council, offers ongoing professional development opportunities. These come in the form of in-person classes, workshops, lectures, and webinars. These classes help to enrich our members’ professional experience and can be used to fulfill some requirements needed to maintain public librarian certificates.
Are you looking for information about a past event? Click here for an archive of recent Southeastern events.
Are you looking for similar events? Click here for a calendar of all Empire State Library Network events.
Southeastern welcomes people of all abilities to programs. If ASL interpreter services, captioning or audio description are needed, contact Carolyn Bennett Glauda – carolyn@senylrc.org or leave a message in the notes field to request those services when you register. Please register as soon as you know you will be attending. Requesting accommodations as early as possible is critical. Requests made at least one week in advance will help to ensure availability.
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This seminar is a chance to pose your “What ifs” “Whys” and “Howabouts” for employment practices in the future. Stephanie “Cole” Adams will answer your questions about HR-related issues in this session designed by you!
This is the fourth event in our 4-part “Ask the HR Expert” series.
About the presenter: Stephanie “Cole” Adams is an attorney who represents libraries, educators, students, and creative professionals. Cole provides the Ask the Lawyer service that New York State’s nine library resource councils provide to each library in the state. She is a member of the ALA Lawyers for Libraries faculty, the Vice Chair of the Erie County Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Committee, and served as the General Counsel of Niagara University for over ten years. Cole is a proud graduate of SUNY Buffalo School of Law and Hampshire College.
We invite you to submit a question for the presenter – there will be a place to do that during the registration process. The deadline to submit questions is Friday, April 11, 2025.
Free to ESLN Members. Registration is required. This webinar will be recorded.
This session is sponsored by Empire State Library Network.
Reference Special Interest Group
Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Time: 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Facilitator: Lara Sibley, Goshen Public Library
Location: Southeastern NY Library Resources Council, 21 S. Elting Corners Rd., Highland, NY
The Reference Special Interest Group is open to library workers who provide reference services or want to learn more about it. The group is not limited by library type and comprises academic, special, public, school, and hospital library staff. You do not need to be a degree-holding librarian to attend. The facilitator will bring an agenda, and attendees are welcome to share their thoughts, ideas, experiences, and questions.
This month’s topic is: Zen and the art of the reference interview: Meaningful reference work in a fast-paced world
How do we provide meaningful and metered reference service when patrons have places to be and we have a line of people and a to-do list waiting. Each reference interview is unique in its scale, pace and timing. Some questions are short, specific and transactional, some are long, winding and collaborative. How do we, as information professionals, manage the variations in these interactions when so often things seem to happen all at once. Come discuss your successes, fails, tips and tricks for providing present reference services in a frantic world.
DART Workshop
Featuring: Cynthia Stewart, PhD
Date: Wednesday, May 7th, 2025
Time: 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Location: Southeastern NY Library Resources Council, 21 S. Elting Corners Rd, Highland, NY
Are you interested in helping older adults avoid scams? Come learn about a project called DART (Deception Awareness and Resilience Training), Our speaker, Cynthia Stewart, recently presented to a group of Digital Navigators to discuss her research and preliminary findings on playing DART Learn in libraries, senior centers, and other educational institutions. Our Navigators wanted to see the product in action, so we have invited her to our conference room to share with you.
What is DART? It is a cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional, user-centered effort to develop games to help older adults recognize and navigate scams. Online deception disproportionately targets seniors with disastrous effects. The DART platform helps seniors recognize threats and protect themselves. A collaboration between researchers, game designers, and community organizations, DART is unique in tailoring its curriculum and using gamification to make training accessible and engaging for seniors.
Who is this program for? Anyone who works with older adults and wants to help them improve their relationship with technology is welcome. You do not need to be a Digital Navigator to do this work! Library workers from all types of libraries are welcome. This event is free.
The DigPres SIG will focus on strategies, activities, and technologies relating to preserving digital content for the long-term. The topic for this month’s meeting will be Bagger. This is a free and simple tool developed by the Library of Congress to support the packaging, transfer and validation of file sets. At this SIG meeting, Palash Bosgang (Bard College) and Zack Spalding (Southeastern) will discuss and demonstrate its use in their digital preservation workflows.
Recruitment and Retention (ESLN Academic Leadership Series)
Join us for the next event in this series, Recruitment and Retention! This session will focus on the strategies libraries have used to attract staff members at all levels and on strategies our libraries and institutions have implemented to help retain employees.
Topics discussed may include:
– Strategies to recruit a diverse pool of job candidates
– How to work within limitations institutions may place on recruitment efforts
– Successful interview strategies
– Managing virtual versus in-person interviews
– Effective elements of onboarding plans for new employees
– Implementing plans or programs aimed at retaining or incentivizing employees
Panelists: Liz King (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute); Elaine L. Westbrooks (Cornell University); Andrea Falcone (Binghamton University)
Facilitator: Cara Howe (Colgate University)
This series of six 90-minute panel discussions will feature academic library leaders from across New York State discussing various topics relevant to new and emerging leaders. Panelists represent a wide variety of academic institutions and provide a diverse set of experiences. As part of each session, participants will have opportunities to network with other new and emerging leaders through breakout rooms and small group discussions in addition to the larger panel discussion. These sessions will not be recorded.
All attendees will receive a certificate of attendance for 1.5 hours of CE credit.
Free to Southeastern & ESLN Members. This event will be held on Zoom Meeting; registration is required.
Live transcription will be available. We are committed to offering inclusive, diverse, and equitable services to all of our members. To request specific accommodations, please contact ESLN at least five business days ahead of this program.
This event is sponsored by Empire State Library Network.
2025 Annual Meeting
Date: Friday, June 6, 2025.
Time: 8:30 am – 12:00 pm
Location: The Wallace Center at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum in Hyde Park, NY
Cost: Regular registration: $35, Friends registration: $15, Livestream Free
Topic: Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World
The meeting program includes a brief membership meeting, an update on yearly activities, a catered breakfast, and a keynote delivered by Rebekkah Smith Aldrich.
About the Keynote: Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World
While change is inevitable, most would agree that the pace at which we are experiencing disruption of all kinds is faster than ever before. Sustainability was named a core value of our profession in 2019 in response to the emergence of climate change as a top threat to global health that is also impacting our environment and economy. How will the library community respond? Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Co-Founder of the Sustainable Libraries Initiative, explores the challenges and opportunities for libraries and shares how many in our field are already answering the call for leadership on sustainability. Learn how a mindset that uses the triple bottom line definition of sustainability can change how you see the world around you and shape your future decision-making at home and at work to ensure a more hopeful future. This session focuses on actionable, practical ideas to address climate change that will help you to contribute to a future that goes far beyond “going green,” to create more resilient communities.
About the speaker: Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, MLS, LEED AP, is the Executive Director of the Mid-Hudson Library System, a cooperative public library system working with 66 member libraries in New York State. Rebekkah is also the Co-Founder and Board President of the Sustainable Libraries Initiative, a worldwide award-winning project to empower library leaders to advance environmentally sound, socially equitable, and economically feasible practices to intentionally address climate change and co-create thriving communities. Rebekkah is the principal author of the award-winning Sustainable Library Certification Program, the Resolution for the Adoption of Sustainability as a Core Value of Librarianship, and the recently released National Climate Action Strategy for Libraries and its companion implementation guide. Rebekkah is Library Journal’s Sustainability columnist and has authored three books on the topic of sustainability: Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World; Resilience (ALA Library Future Series); and Libraries & Sustainability: Programs and Practices for Community Impact. Rebekkah is also the author of the Handbook for New Library Directors in New York State and co-author of both the Handbook for Library Trustees of New York State and the Public Library District Toolkit: Strategies to Assure your Library’s Legal and Financial Stability for the New York State Library.