CURRENT POSITION Assistant Professor, Medical and Bioengineering Librarian, Director of the Grainger Engineering Library IDEA Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign DEGREE MLIS, iSchool at Illinois, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 FOLLOW Facebook ecabada; idealab.illinois.edu; doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2021.1881680 Photo courtesy of Elisandro Cabada

Centering Support

Elisandro Cabada wears many hats for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s currently interim head of the Mathematics Library, director of the Grainger Engineering Library IDEA Lab, medical and bioengineering librarian, assistant professor for the university library and the university’s Carle Illinois College of Medicine (CI COM), 3-D printing project coordinator, and Health Maker Lab mentor and node manager. For Cabada, the common thread tying these roles together is service and outreach.

“The library’s role is to reach out to underserved and underrepresented communities,” Cabada says. “That could be defined by ethnicity, [or] are you a first-generation student, are you a woman in science? The greatest asset that the library has…is our values—democratizing access to information. And technology is just another form of information.”

Throughout his career, Cabada has been closely involved with the creation of tech spaces in libraries, including the design and development of the IDEA Lab, and the Breakerspace digital scholarship and innovation center at the University of Minnesota’s Walter Library. In addition, he was involved in the design and deployment of the Grainger Library’s Center for Academic Resources in Engineering (CARE) center and is currently developing library services for CI COM—described as the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine—with a focus on “innovative instructional support, scholarly productivity tools, and entrepreneurship,” says nominator William Mischo, head of the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center.

Cabada cites virtual reality (VR) as one example of new tech that the university’s libraries are helping incorporate into coursework in innovative ways. The IDEA Lab has become “the center of VR support across campus with our consultations, equipment, [and] our workshops,” he says. 

Those workshops, along with surveys of students and faculty, reinforce Cabada’s belief that libraries play a key role in introducing people to new technologies. “We have faculty and Ph.D students who attend our workshops, [some of which] are very introductory, so we know that there is a huge community in academia that doesn’t have access to this equipment. Their departments don’t have the spaces or the staffing…or what they would consider the pedagogical need for it. So, the library is slowly introducing all of those groups to new tech.”

Mischo describes Cabada as “the quintessential example of an evidence-based, student-focused, and technology-astute academic librarian who takes an over-the-horizon view of key library services. His work exemplifies the evolving and transformative role of the library and librarians.”