What’s happening at your library?
Ben, Valley City State – It has been a very busy couple of weeks. They had a Banned Books event, with several activities, including outreach at the student center, where they had a pop-up library. Hannah, the teaching and instruction librarian has been busy with a lot of bookings for research assistance.
Patty, Minot State – they have Halloween displays, and they are giving away 3 pairs of tickets to a haunted house in Sawyer, ND.
Amy, NDSCS – they also have Halloween decorations. One part-time employee is working on an archival photo project, and another is working on a microfilm deletion project. She has been working on educating herself on more accessibility items in an attempt to fix a bunch of PDFs. She has also been working in the sandbox to create a new discovery experience for Primo. She enjoys working on it, but is finding it frustrating at first. The director of the Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Center hosted two days of professional development that faculty and staff attended.
Drew, University of ND – They had some library events around Banned Books Week, and they are hosting workshops for students and faculty for the International Open Access Week this week. On Saturday, they are having a pumpkin painting event. They have been working on setting up Tipasa for ILL and Rialto for helping with ordering ebooks for the subject librarians.
Jenny, North Dakota State – a couple of weeks ago they had the library’s 75 anniversary birthday of their building. They are busy with library instruction sessions. They are currently in the process of hiring a collection strategies librarian, and hopefully they will have someone in place next month. Regarding Rialto, they are anticipating some canceled print book orders as Baker and Taylor wind down their operations, but they will still use it for ebook purchases.
Danita, Jamestown University – they hired a reference librarian. He started in the beginning of September, and their director, Amanda just gave birth to a baby boy last Tuesday.
AI in Technical Services/Libraries Discussion – Ben
Ben led a discussion on AI in libraries. He has been taking an online course sponsored by Clarivate and LibTech Insights. The first week was context and overview, week two was about the ethical implications of AI, the third week was AI policy, and the most recent one he finished was about prompts. There are eight weeks total, and so far, he has found it pretty helpful. Here is a link to register AI Literacy Essentials for Academic Libraries. All eight weeks have already been released, and you can go through at your own pace or skip a few. He was looking for more cataloging-specific information, and these sessions are broadly about academic libraries. Ben led a conversation about the AI tool in the metadata editor, an upcoming book called AI Powered Cataloging, AI research assistant in Primo.
November Release Notes:
The November 2025 release is on the Sandboxes now.
- Improved camera handling in the MDE
- Relative date search
- Select all search results from All Titles search
- Added “fuzzy search” to the menu search
December
- Reschedule December meeting- perhaps December 11? Decided to schedule the meeting for December 11.
- ODIN User Group elections are coming in December
Patty asked a question about replacing a problematic term with a DEI-sensitive term. This was a Primo VE conversation, and Lynn said they can discuss it in the Discovery meeting on Friday.