An Update from the LibParlor Team

Hello, readers! We hope you are taking care of yourselves and your communities as we navigate this year. We wanted to provide a few updates about LibParlor with you as we wrap up our IMLS grant and look ahead to what’s next for us.

LibParlor Guest Posts

We are actively seeking out guest posts on LibParlor! If you’re interested in writing something for us, check out the ways you can contribute here. 

As we think about the future of LibParlor, we’re hoping to recruit new membership for our leadership team. Look out for more information on that soon!

LibParlor Online Learning

We’re now six months out from launching our online curriculum LPOL with the world, and here are some stats from our learners so far:

• The top three motivations for users who have enrolled in the curriculum are (1) wanting to learn about research methods & process after having never taken a formal research methods course before, (2) to refresh their knowledge on particular elements of the research process, and (3) wanting to learn from the curriculum as an early-career librarian before pursuing their own original research.
• Our learners range from having 0 to 30+ years working in the profession, with the current majority made up of those from the 0-5 year range.
• Our learners represent 14 different types of library institutions, including public and health sciences libraries!

Whether you’re interested in enrolling to feed a scholarly passion or to write about and support a particular program you’re leading at your library, we would love for LPOL to help you grow and pursue your own original research in the field! The curriculum is not time-bound and can be picked up however and whenever works best for you. You can use it towards promotion and tenure requirements, or you could start a cohort at your place of work to learn together.

To help you determine which parts of the curriculum work best for what you need, we’ll be rolling out a new series of posts over the coming year that highlight a different type of library professional and lessons from the curriculum that best suit. If you’re still unsure how to jump in and use LPOL, or you’d like to incorporate the lessons for professional development within your own institution, feel free to reach out to us at libparlor@gmail.com! We offer workshops to help facilitate research skills development for your team.

The Librarian Parlor Podcast

Have you checked out our podcast yet? We have six great episodes featuring different scholarship and researchers speaking about their work through an open peer-review process. If you’re a researcher interested in having your work be the subject of a future podcast episode, fill out our form!

ACRL 2025

Are you planning to attend the ACRL Conference in Minneapolis? Stop by to see our poster and chat with us on Thursday, April 3 from 9:30-10:15am – we’ll have some new swag featuring artwork from Hanna Barczyk! Hannah helped us create new images to incorporate throughout our curriculum (including the featured image in this post!) and we’re so excited for you to see them.

As always, we’re grateful for you and our library research community for reading, sharing, and subscribing to our work. Thank you!