Lamar State College Port Arthur's Shin wins national leadership award

What did you do during the COVID-19 lockdown?

For Dr. Yumi Shin, coordinator of reference and access services at Lamar State College Port Arthur, it was research, write reports and get recognized.

Dr. Shin was recently named winner of the 2021 Community College Learning Resources Leadership Award by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

The award recognizes significant achievement and leadership in advocacy of learning resources/library programs that are associated with the mission of community, junior or technical colleges.

"Winning this was quite a surprise, actually," Dr. Shin said just outside her office at LSCPA's historical treasure, Gates Memorial Library. "This is a national award given to just one person a year and I'm in a small college in a small city. Last year, the award went to somebody from the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City."

In 2019, Dr. Shin won the Texas Library Association's Vivian Greenwood Award, which came with a $1,500 grant for library supplies designed to help motivate and teach LSCPA's 600-plus dual-credit high school students to visit and use the library.

That preceded her study, "Impact of Library Instruction Class on Student Writing at the Two-Year College Level," proving the value of library instruction classes for those students, which was published and won another award.

And the entire process went into this latest award: "Shin was selected for her commitment to leadership both within her library and in the library community, and her efforts in pursuing a grant to explore ways to get dual-credit high school students involved in their college library through new technology and services," the American Library Association said in announcing the award by ACRL.

She was set to present her paper at the Texas Library Association annual meeting in Houston in March of 2020, but it was among the first large gatherings canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. Shin instead offered her findings via a virtual presentation to a virtual TLA meeting in July, 2020.

The move from on-campus to online instruction led Dr. Shin to more research. The statistics generated by students demonstrated that synchronous learning (real-time two-way communication, like a Zoom meeting) was a better style of online teaching, according to students, than prerecorded video lectures that could be viewed at any time of the day or night.

She is presenting the results, "Change and Impact of Library Instruction Classes During COVID-19," to the Texas Library Association 2021 Annual Conference this month, which is, again, being held virtually. It will also be published in Texas Library Journal this summer.

In May 2020, again during the pandemic, Dr. Shin was named Lamar University Student of the Year in Doctoral Studies after she completed her doctorate in Educational Leadership.

Her doctoral thesis, "The Perceptions of Academic Librarians in Texas Regarding Library Leadership," will be published in Portal: Libraries and the Academy, later this year.

Also, she will present "Information Literacy at Lamar State College – Port Arthur," to the American Library Association Annual Conference (Virtual) this summer.

Dr. Shin says she couldn't have done it all without the aid of her peers at Lamar State College Port Arthur:

"I personally thank all the faculty who participated in the research," she said, "and they are: Dr. Michelle Judice, Dr. Roszella Offord, Caitlin R. James, Chelsey A. Galloway, Zebulon Low, Casi L. Rekieta, and Chandra G. Brooks."