ULA Annual Conference 2026

This session explores the Eccles Health Sciences Library’s (EHSL) role in commemorating milestones across the University of Utah’s health sciences campus. As colleges, schools, and departments celebrate anniversaries and historical achievements, they often turn to the library for curated materials, particularly photographs, from EHSL’s historical collections. Additionally, these collaborations help the library grow its own archives through new donations of historical material from the respective collaborators.

This session showcases how these partnerships can bolster both physical and digital collections. Attendees will discover how these efforts helped foster campus engagement, preserve institutional memory, and develop inclusive historical narratives.

This session shares practical strategies for assisting campus partners, fortifying institutional memory, and further developing archival resources at the library.

No time for planning programs? Come learn about some programs that require little or no set-up or planning and can be run by almost anyone. Also includes supplies to always have on-hand in storage and what programs can be created with these supplies.

Come hear the results of a recent statewide survey conducted by researchers from the U of U and SUU about Utahn's attitudes towards reading and learn more about how librarians can address challenges adult readers in their community might face.

Auditing digitized AV files is essential for ensuring accuracy and preservation, but our early approach was anything but efficient. We started with spreadsheets and formulas to compare filenames and descriptive metadata, paired with separate tools for technical metadata checks—a process that was slow and prone to human error. To speed things up, we introduced small scripts for individual tasks, then refined each by identifying the essential steps for a comprehensive audit, and eventually combined them into a single, streamlined tool that verifies filenames against spreadsheets and audits technical metadata in one pass.

When imaging AV media became part of our workflow, new standards demanded additional checks for image files. Instead of introducing additional manual steps, we expanded our script to handle these requirements too, creating a unified solution for auditing across formats. Today, this tool saves significant time and ensures consistency, but we’re not stopping here. Future plans include adding progress indicators, notifications, and even rewriting the script in Python for greater flexibility and scalability.

This session will share how we transformed a tedious, manual process into an automated system that supports quality control at scale—and what’s next on the horizon.

“Your Librarian Is In!” In this session, two subject librarians share our experiences of holding office hours out of the library, on site where our liaison departments are housed. We discuss the origins, benefits, challenges, and related statistics of the arrangement. We feel that holding office hours outside of the library has improved our services and strengthened our relationship with faculty.

Utah State University (USU) Libraries has recently created a Metadata Application Profile (MAP) to successfully map and crosswalk metadata fields in DigitalCommons to DublinCore and DataCite. We created this MAP to help authors and librarians better understand our records in DigitalCommons; this MAP ensures consistency and readability with other Institutional Repositories. In this presentation, we will cover our process for creating a MAP, the relevant context for creating a MAP, and how we plan to implement this MAP to remediate metadata and increase accessibility of our materials.

The Marriott Library (University of Utah) has three media production studios as part of their ProtoSpace emerging technologies and digital scholarship hub. This presentation is part of an article under submission entitled User scheduled media production studios in academic libraries: A case study. This is a follow up article to my publication: Podcasting services in academic libraries: A case study. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2021.1897722.

The Marriott Library has two Podcast Booths and a Simple Video Studio. Students, faculty, and staff can reserve these spaces for audio and video production. This presentation will discuss use statistics, the types of projects scheduled, and charts on how often and when each studio is in use.

While the purpose of each studio is media production, the data results show a variety of non-media projects taking place supporting coursework, teaching, outreach, research, and personal projects.

In addition to the use data, this talk will discuss suggestions for physical studio creation and affordable equipment lists. The purpose is to generate podcasts and film videos in any library type maker space location/environment.

The BYU library recently did a gallery exhibition on the renovation of the Salt Lake Temple. This project took roughly three years to plan. It included four main curators but also a large variety of organizations, student contributors, and stakeholders as we navigated legal concerns, developed content, sought permissions, and accessed materials.

In this session we will take you through the challenges, rewards, and lessons learned as we completed this project; including:
o Timeline issues
o Permissions, Legal Concerns
o Identifying Stakeholders
o Asking for what you need and what you want