Virginia's Academic Library Consortium

Welcome & VIVA Update 

Genya O'Gara, VIVA Director 

Keynote: Nancy Falciani-White

Library Director, Randolph-Macon College

Member Talks - Lightning Round

Building Together: Lego Workshops for Literacy and Resilience

Kelsi Dunman, Amanda Battle, and Sarah deRosa from Virginia Wesleyan University

This presentation outlines a low-cost collaborative endeavor between the H. C. Hofheimer II Library and VWU’s Learning Center to create workshops geared toward information literacy and student success. Intended to be the first stop in a three-part series, the workshop takes advantage of the library’s new Lego Room, a space intended to provide students, faculty, and staff a space to play, build, and destress together. The preliminary Lego Literacy Workshop is set to be piloted in August 2025 through VWU’s WesBridge program, a summer bridge program for incoming freshmen, and later extended as a campus-wide offering; faculty will be able to request the workshop for their classes, and the library and Learning Center will run the workshop throughout the year for those who may be interested. Taking from the ideas presented in Lego Serious Play, the workshop series is meant to provide a playful, positive environment through which students can discuss difficult topics and learn through creativity. While the overall workshop series is tiered and addresses multiple facets of information literacy and student success, the Lego Literacy Workshop is geared toward first-years and aims to impart knowledge about copyright and plagiarism on the library side, and socioemotional intelligence and stress management on the student success side.

Embracing Change: Leadership in the New Title II Era

Karen Bjork from Virginia Commonwealth University

With the 2026 deadline for Title II ADA compliance approaching, the Digital Libraries and Publishing (DLP) Department at VCU Libraries is working to address accessibility in digital collections, open educational resources (OER) publishing, monographic and journal publishing, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and institutional repositories. This session will explore how we are identifying priorities at the collection level, preparing and training staff, and developing accessibility assessment templates to establish sustainable workflows that meet compliance requirements. Ensuring accessibility across a broad range of digital content presents challenges and opportunities. This session will highlight strategies for auditing existing collections, setting remediation priorities, and integrating accessibility checks into new projects. It will also showcase the development of accessibility assessment templates that standardize evaluations and guide decision-making for future projects. By adopting a proactive and strategic approach, we are enhancing our services because it is the right thing to do and ultimately better for all our users.

What if? Adapting and rebuilding after changes inside and outside the library

Rebecca Grantham, Victoria Koger, Artemis Vex, and Jody Hanshew from Emory & Henry University

We are a small library in a small university. Weeks before the start of the fall semester, the library staff was cut, and so was our budget. Outside the library, processes were revamped, and academic departments and divisions were reorganized and reduced. We were lost and in shock. What is a library to do? We spent the first half of the fall semester down by a quarter of our normal staff hours. Keeping things running was a challenge. We restructured job duties and schedules, and became huge fans of “schedule send”. With the changes in staffing and job duties, several library policies were no longer sustainable or applicable. So, we changed some and scrapped others to be more adaptable to any coming developments. And, because we are a library, the ancient heating system is cranky and the cold winter has created more problems. Over the last semester and a half, we have found unusual ways to manage the challenges within the library. Institutionally, like most small private institutions we were adapting to already limited budgets being cut, reorganized academic divisions, and faculty/staff representation and organization that was no longer sustainable with the changes within the university. The changes in divisions changed what instruction and reference look like in the library, so are working to make more adaptable systems. This is a presentation about how we are handling the frequent changes and challenges. Sometimes, there is a silver lining when everything is broken. So, what does a library do? You and your amazing team break everything even more and then fix things. You also ask: What if?

Wrap Up

Loftan Hooker (VCU), Chair of the VIVA Outreach Event Planning Committee