Storytelling has been happening for over a century in libraries, but its applications are too often presumed to be narrowly focused on serving children. The skills involved in navigating a dynamic exchange between teller, audience, and story are applicable to the most pressing problems facing libraries and librarians in the 21st century, those of communicating our knowledge and value. This talk will feature storytelling insights based on over 40 interviews from the Storytelling @ Work project, combining insights from librarians with those from storytelling applications in advancement and fundraising. Participants will leave with narrative structures for building informative and emotionally compelling stories from their own knowledge and experience to communicate their value.

Biography:

Kate McDowell is based at the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) at Illinois, where she is an Associate Professor. She has formerly served as Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, and has led multiple transformative projects for the school including the redesign of online education for the #1 ranked Master of Science in Library and Information Science, the implementation of the Master of Science in Information Management degree launched in 2016,  the restructuring of iSchool service to incorporate program committees in fall 2019, and the campus-level course approvals for the new Bachelor of Science in Information Science launched in 2020. She won the 2018 Excellence in Online and Distance Teaching Award, an annual campus-wide award that recognizes sustained excellence and innovation in online and/or distance teaching through innovative uses of technology. Her storytelling research has involved training collaborations with advancement with both the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Illinois system (Chicago, Springfield), storytelling consulting work for multiple nonprofits including the 50th anniversary of the statewide Prairie Rivers Network that protects Illinois water, and storytelling lectures for the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). She has multiple interdisciplinary publications on history and storytelling, including the forthcoming article “Storytelling Wisdom: Story, Storytelling, and DIKW” in the Journal for the Association of Information Science and Technology (JASIST).