Chelsea Heinbach is the teaching and learning librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She was named a 2023 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work (with Nimisha Bhat, Hailley Fargo, and Charissa Powell) in developing the blog and related podcast (created by Amber Sewell):  LibParlor, a site dedicated to helping researchers find community resources and have a place to ask questions, discuss issues, and share expertise. She and the team received an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to create LibParlor Online Learning (LPOL), a free, online curriculum devoted to research topics and how-tos. LJ recently followed up with her to learn more about her work.

LJ: At the time of the 2023 Movers & Shakers award, you were anticipating the launch of LPOL in 2024. Is that on track?

Chelsea Heinbach: Absolutely. We just completed our pilot program. We had a pilot of 25 folks test the curriculum and provide feedback. Next week we’ll start incorporating that feedback, and we’re launching on June 29 at ALA .

That’s exciting! Has it been a long time coming?

It’s been quite a long journey. We’ve been talking about this for about five years. We launched LibParlor, the blog, in 2017. It’s a great place for people to connect, share their stories, get insight. But it’s really whatever the community is feeling and sharing at that time. We were hoping to supplement it with a more didactic piece—“Here's step one, step two, step three”—and incorporate the great resources that were being shared by the community on the blog into a system that can be approached in a way that feels a little more complete, like you’re getting a full story, as a student and as a learner. What is LibParlor doing well, and what is it not great at? How can we make sure we're meeting various needs for folks interested in doing research? That was the idea for the curriculum, and where it came from.

What was the development process?

We received the grant in 2021 and got started. We did a needs assessment and sent out a survey to the academic library community, we held focus groups, we did interviews with folks that all fit different personas we were hoping to meet the needs of. We had people who had not that much experience doing research and maybe were MLIS students or early career. We had folks grouped together who were mid-career with some research experience. Then we had those with a really incredible amount of experience with research. We really wanted to get those different personas’ perspectives on what they needed from the curriculum.

After we held the needs assessment, we did an in-person and a virtual forum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for two days where we brought together experts and newer folks in the field and asked them to generate a draft of the outline for the curriculum based on all the information that we had. We did a lot of participatory design activities that were really fun and got people's creative minds going, which was incredible. And we got to develop a lot of great community there.

Then we finally got started putting everything together that everybody requested. There was a lot of focus on developing a research identity. Many really talked about how that was challenging at the beginning of their career, so we ended up prioritizing that in the curriculum. It runs through the entire thing. We hired 21 people with amazing expertise in different areas and matched them with a particular part of the curriculum. So the curriculum is inspired by the community, generated by the community, written by the community. We’re just the facilitators to bring everybody together to meet everyone’s needs.

What role do you think the curriculum will take to support people who want to expand their research knowledge and skills?

It can work in a couple of different ways. We created the curriculum so that if you’re brand-new to the idea of doing original research, you can start at the beginning and go all the way through, and it will take you on a journey through a research proposal and project that you can develop. But it can also work more piecemeal for folks who have more experience and are trying to level up in a certain area. You can see what learning outcomes are. We really see it working for early career people who want to go at their own pace in their research, scholarship, and professional development time, and for those with some experience who are trying to gain a little more and want to spend an afternoon learning something that they didn’t feel like they had a ton of experience with. And we’re hopeful that it will also be a space that people use to connect with one another, because that community is just so huge.

How do you see the curriculum being able to build community? Is that to replace the blog or supplement it?

Right now, it’s a post-launch goal. But we want to add in places throughout the curriculum that will prompt people to say, “Are you thinking about starting a research project, you should go head over to the classifieds in LibParlor where you can post.” Finding those places in the curriculum when people are thinking through topics, when they’d want to reach out and find another human to talk to about this. We also have some future dreams around having cohorts go through the curriculum all together so that they can develop community with each other. But that’s probably a little way down the road.

This is kind of a sub-sub-sub-goal, but we’d also love for it to be supplemental support for people teaching research courses in an MLIS program. It’s not meant to replace that, if an MLIS program has a great research methods class. We’re just hopeful that these might be helpful to someone who’s going to teach that class. It’s always good to take a look at how others are talking about different ideas.

Right now, we have this core curriculum that’s the most important thing, but we still have a set of other lessons that would be good for advanced researchers. We want to keep the curriculum at a manageable amount of time for folks, but we envision that it might be possible in the future to build on it and have some optional extra things that will probably result directly from the community, from their feedback.