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Felicia Smith, Head of Learning & Outreach at Stanford University Libraries, will present her unconventional and successful interactive activities used during information literacy sessions. She will discuss her outdoor classes, using mobile devices. Felicia uses professionally developed instructional videos as part of her flipped classroom workshops. She will explain the funding, narration, story-boarding and promotions/marketing procedures involved in the video production. During her classes, she conducts a scavenger hunt, aptly called the Amazing Race, which utilizes “amazing” books that contain lots of profanity in their titles. Lastly, Felicia will share her new proposed project to use Oculus Rift technology to teach Information Literacy, in Virtual Reality. She will share examples of her game design planning, including specific vendor requirements and projected costs, based on scope.

Know Systemic Racism (KSR) is a project envisioned and led by the inaugural Racial Justice and Social Equity Librarian at Stanford Libraries, Felicia Smith, to make systemic racism evident. The project is a partnership between the library, research centers, community activists, investigative journalists, and non-profit organizations that advocate for civil rights. The role of the library is, essentially, a traditional one: the library provides curation, access, and preservation of records and data. This is a new approach to traditional practices because we intentionally seek to answer Julie Lythcott Haims’ call to “humanize the harm” lost in the abstraction of statistics, policy documents, and legislation. This summer KSR staff have been working with students at Foothill/DeAnza Community Colleges through a fellowship program sponsored by CESTA (the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford) to gather, analyze, and present data. The projects range from a collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to collect information about the military equipment held by California law enforcement agencies, to a historical study of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. The students will present the results of their work, combining research practices from the humanities and social sciences with digital library practices including document processing, entity extraction, the creation of linked data authority records, and visualization in the form of maps and graphs to support collection discovery.

In this keynote, Felicia Smith will share examples of outreach efforts she conducted for libraries, that included the Office of Accessibility, First-Generation and/or Low-Income (FLI) students, incarcerated juveniles, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and underrepresented minority students. Inclusive outreach and engagement with diverse communities is important and can easily be incorporated into everyday librarianship with just a little imagination and a minimal amount of effort. It is helpful to start by conducting an environmental scan of campus and identifying opportunities for outreach. It is vital to compose a measurable set of objectives, and clearly articulate what will be achieved, including a way to assess outcomes. It is also important to understand the differences between inclusion and diversity, which are misused interchangeably. Felicia Smith’s mission as the only Racial Justice & Social Equity Librarian is to highlight communities that have been systematically devalued resulting in underrepresentation in scholarly settings and publications. This is problematic because important communities are being “disappeared” from the historical narrative, leading to a distorted interpretation of the past that then leads to dangerous implications for the present. Simply put, lack of inclusion matters. The goal of this keynote is to encourage attendees to amplify notable voices that have been intentionally silenced – so that those voices can be heard; and to make the excluded or unseen – seen.

This presentation will cover one-shot instruction sessions. These include a flipped classroom approach using professionally developed videos that required acquiring funding, creating an animated character, storyboarding and finding the perfect narrator. I will also discuss teaching outdoors using mobile devices; incorporating Special Collections into my classes and creating an Amazing Race based on the television show, but using books with profanity in the titles. In the past, I have taught dressed in a full pirate costume as well as in the virtual world of Second Life. I’m happy to answer questions about any of my unconventional sessions.

Stanford University Libraries collaborated with Eastside College Preparatory School to provide paid summer internships to 7 local, low‐income, minority, first‐generation college‐ bound students. Our goal is to create successful students, with transferable skills, who love libraries. Our presentation will detail the logistics required to implement such a program, as well as challenges we encountered. We will discuss programmatic details including interviews; I‐9 documentation and work permits; dress‐codes; dietary considerations; supervision; scheduling; email accounts and communication; employee IDs; timecards; off‐campus events requiring permission slips and conflict‐resolution contingency planning.

November 30, 2022, marked the return of (in)VISIBLE Designers podcast at Stanford's d.School. This podcast returns with Season 2/Episode One featuring a conversation with Natalie Wilson & Derrica Wilson, founders of the Black and Missing Foundation (BAMFI) and co-hosted by Felicia A. Smith, Racial Justice & Social Equity Librarian along with Milan Drake, d.school Community Design Lead and Aleta Hayes, Lecturer in the Stanford University Department of Theater and Performance Studies. BAMFI was featured in a four-part documentary series, by multiple Emmy® winner Geeta Gandbhir and award-winning documentarian, journalist, author and activist Soledad O’Brien. The HBO Max series follows Derrica and Natalie Wilson as they fight an uphill battle to bring awareness to the Black missing persons cases that are marginalized by law enforcement and national media. This community partnership brings different campus groups together, in-person, at the d.school.

This interactive lightning round presentation allowed participants to experience my Pirate-themed library instruction classes during which I dressed in a full Pirate costume as part of my Informational-Treasure Scavenger Hunt concept. This presentation demonstrated my most successful active learning exercises. My “creativity” stems from my belief that a didactic approach to teaching library skills has proven to be dreadfully dull and thus ineffective. My solution to combat boredom is to incorporate educational games with predetermined learning objectives. I included activities that received the best feedback from student and professor evaluations when I taught a Chemistry Research Skills class for academic credit for sophomore chemistry majors. My exercises were published in a peer-reviewed journal that has been downloaded more than 3,022 times, titled “Games for Teaching Information Literacy Skills.” My classes were in high demand because I not only incorporate the latest brain-based theories in my class design, but I also taught class dressed in a full pirate costume. My “PirateTeacher” article has been cited by other peer-reviewed journals since it was published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship. I showed images of my pirate costume and students’ favorite activities during my presentation. I also showed my “Citation Cop” RefWorks YouTube video that has been viewed more than 8,900 times by people in different countries and RefWorks actually used my video in their training. My proven effective and creative examples offer something for everyone. More are available in my recently published book, Cybrarian Extraordinaire: Compelling Information Literacy Instruction.

On Thursday, January 21, 2021, the Stanford community celebrated the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The program was sponsored by the Black Staff Alliance, Black Community Services Center, Diversity & Access Office, University Human Resources, Stanford Redwood City, and Office of Campus Engagement. The program included a tribute to Dr. Clayborne Carson, and a moderated panel discussion including speakers Ralph Richard Banks (Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice), Felicia Smith (Head of the Learning & Outreach department for Stanford Libraries and creator of the exhibit titled, Say Their Names – No More Names), and Mohammad Elmojtaba Gumma (B.A. Candidate in Human Biology, Co-President of the Black Student Union, and Co-Director of Racial Justice Associated Students of Stanford University). Respondents to the panel discussion included: Dr. Clayborne Carson (Ronnie Lott Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor of History), and Kimya Loder (Doctoral student in Department of Sociology, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Graduate Fellow, and President of Black Graduate Student Association). The program closed with a Q&A.