#LISprochat lead-in - topic & how to send questions for Mon Sep 18 2017 - 8:30pm ET

via Outreach Ltd.

TOPIC

GUEST CHATTERS: Community Outreach Projects in Libraries

9/18 8:30 EST #LISprochat will be hosting a special chat on Community Outreach Projects in Libraries. Two University of Pennsylvania librarians will be the guest chatters, Margaret Janz and Aman Kaur. Here’s some information about them and what they will be talking about:

Margaret Janz (@MargaretJanz) is the data curation librarian at Penn Libraries and a member of the Data Refuge team. She also participates in the Libraries+ Network, a network that grew from Data Refuge that's aimed at creating a sustainable backup curation solution for born-digital federal information.

Margaret will be talking about community outreach as it relates to the Data Refuge project and the associated Data Rescue events. From January through May the Data Refuge team at Penn and our partners worked tirelessly to support libraries and other organizations around the country and abroad organize Data Rescue events. These events were designed to create awareness of the importance and vulnerabilities of the federal environment and climate data and participants were able to help create copies of these data and contribute to other federal information archiving efforts.

Amanpreet Kaur (@akaur0) is the 2015 - 2017 Eugene Garfield Resident in Science Librarianship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is based in the Biomedical Library. Aman has devoted the last stretch of her residency to Community Health Outreach (https://guides.library.upenn.edu/communityhealth) and will be piloting an information prescription program to encourage credible health information seeking behaviors among patients in Sayre Health Center in West Philadelphia. This pilot program builds upon the existing health corners initiative, the Biomedical Library's partnership with the School of Nursing and the Free Library of Philadelphia. In addition, Aman serves as the 2017 Special Libraries Association (SLA) Philadelphia Chapter Community Outreach Committee Chair. 

The Community Outreach Committee formed earlier this year and has picked 3 initiatives to implement this year:

1. Host two Outdoor Volunteer Days to give back locally. We have a Volunteer Day coming up (http://philadelphia.sla.org/blog/2017/07/29/mt-cuba-center-volunteer-day/)
2. During the Chapter Annual Banquet last spring, Ancil George, the Community Outreach Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed the importance of school libraries and how we can continue to support elementary and high school students over a dozen public schools in West and South Philadelphia. by collecting books for school libraries in partnership with Penn Libraries and the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children (http://philadelphia.sla.org/blog/2017/08/10/support-school-libraries-in-philly/ )
3. Earlier this year, chapter members were inspired by a national movement to save government web pages and datasets. We would like to host a Data Refuge event to add useful metadata to previously-rescued EPA files to make it easier for people to search for and find the datasets https://www.datarefuge.org/

Aman is excited to share her community outreach experiences at the Penn Libraries and with the SLA Philadelphia Chapter as well as learn about community outreach initiatives at your library and/or with your professional organization.

For this chat, please submit any questions that you have for Margaret and Aman to be asked during the chat as well as any community outreach questions or topics you would like to see covered to LISprochat@gmail.com Or feel free to ask your questions during the chat and share your community outreach experiences!

PLEASE CONSIDER JOINING IN ON TWITTER AT 8:30 PM ET MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 USING THE #LISPROCHAT HASHTAG.