Since receiving our IMLS grant in September 2021, the LPOL Project Team has been hard at work. As we concluded December 2022, we ended Phase 1 (Needs Planning & Assessment) and are now fully in Phase 2 (Curriculum Creation & Assessment). The Project Team wanted to share some high level updates with our readers, including where you can find us at ACRL 2023 in Pittsburgh! 

Phase 1 Milestones

• A year ago, we launched our needs assessment survey and focus groups. We’ve gathered these findings along with our in-person and virtual forums and will use 2023 to explore additional publication venues to share this meaningful data from our community. 
• In May 2022, we hosted an in-person curriculum planning forum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This day and a half forum brought together professionals from across the United States to discuss our personal research journeys and our vision for LPOL. You can read more about this in person forum by checking out Kevin Seeber’s recap post as a participant. 
• In September and October 2022, we hosted a virtual forum to gather additional feedback for our curriculum outline. Colleagues from all types of institutions participated in this mostly asynchronous forum to provide their insight and perspectives. 
• The LPOL Project Team came together during the last three months of 2022 to take all feedback and turn it into a curriculum that we will bring to life in 2023.

Phase 2 Milestones

• With our curriculum outline, we recently put out a call for curriculum creators to help us build LPOL. This work starts in March and will continue through August.

Scholarship Milestones

• LPOL presented a poster at ALISE 2022. Our poster focused on our needs assessment findings specifically related to participants’ experiences with taking a research methods course in their MLIS program. It was great to connect with library and information science education professionals and envision ways LPOL could support the curricular work of the field.
• Charissa and Nimisha represented LPOL at the 2023 Empirical Librarians Conference and presented a talk entitled Diversifying and improving LIS literature through an open-source professional development program. During this session, participants reflected and shared how the LPOL curriculum could best serve individual librarians as well as the larger field of librarianship. 
• The full project team will be presenting at ACRL. Join us on Thursday, March 16 from 3-4 PM in rooms 401-402 for our panel, “Forging the Future of LIS Researchers Through Community.” This discussion will briefly provide a few grant updates and discuss the process of getting a grant.

We continue to be thankful for the support from the LibParlor community as we put LPOL together. We look forward to seeing some of you at ACRL and encourage you to reach out to us if you have questions, ideas, or feedback!