Diane Hahn, Northampton Community College, Bethlehem Campus, PA & and Cassandra Nieves, Northampton Community College, Monroe Campus, PA
Faced with staffing changes and concerned about being able to continue meeting demand for drop-in research help and requests for library, research, and information classes during the Spring 2019 semester, the Northampton Community College (NCC) Information Services Librarians launched a new Book a Librarian research consultation appointment service for students across the college, regardless of course or research assignment. The process involved little more than utilizing the pre-existing shared research help email account, creating an online form, and establishing a few scheduling procedures yet produced almost immediate engagement and impact. The service allowed librarians to better accommodate students needing in-depth and extended research help, assist students at a time convenient for their schedule, and build relationships with students. Unexpectedly, this service was also the least impacted by COVID-19’s campus and library shutdowns and the easiest to transition from an in-person to an online format. Appointments saw a growth in usage at a time when other service access points experienced reduced volume. In the time since its initial launch, the service has also provided a formal referral option to faculty and instructors who may not be able to fit a library session into their course schedule, or whose students need differentiated or personalized instruction and guidance. As the Book a Librarian service enters its 4th academic year, the NCC librarians are turning their attention to making the process more efficient for both librarians and students, assessing its relationship to student learning, and growing its reach even further.
Carleigh E. Hill, Whitworth University
Carleigh E. Hill will outline the basic principles of open education and what it means to choose open educational resources. She will share quick tips for finding OER and using OER in instruction, including the basics of Creative Commons licensing as well as the difference between subscribed library resources and OER. She will also share some of the research on OER use in higher education, including faculty perceptions, student learning assessments, cost savings, and more.
Mercedes Rutherford-Patten, California Polytechnic State University
The Foundational Experiences Program at the Robert E. Kennedy Library at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo uses Articulate Rise 360 to provide online asynchronous information literacy instruction primarily to students in lower division English and Communication Studies courses; disciplines across campus can also benefit from the foundational information literacy skills taught in these tutorials. Articulate Rise 360 is a web-based eLearning software that allows for easy creation of dynamic, responsive courses. The software offers a variety of options essential for creating inclusive and equitable information literacy lessons including modular design, multimodal formats for content (text, image, videos), interactivity, assessment, and easy LMS integration and grading options. This poster will highlight the process of creating a Research Ethics tutorial using Rise 360; Mercedes Rutherford-Patten will highlight how she created the tutorial with Universal Design for Learning principles in mind, how Rise 360 integrates easily with Learning Management Systems, and student experience and feedback using this software.
The three main takeaways from this poster include:
Kayla Kuni, Pasco-Hernando State College
In this session, Kayla Kuni will describe benefits of embedding librarians in either classes or community organizations. As an academic librarian, she has embedded in classes; however, when Kuni was a public librarian, she was embedded in her city's environmental committee and other community organizations. In both of these positions, she was able to see the role that the library had in information services needs. Kuni will share the challenges of this process as well. It was not uncommon for those in leadership to not see the value in this embedding process and instead see it as a waste of resources (primarily, time). She will highlight some ways to talk about embedding that might make it more appealing to both leaders as well as those that would potentially be doing the embedding work. Finally, she will address the stress related to adding potentially more work to any staff member. Embedding sounds like another task getting piled on top of already overworked information professionals who could be close to burnout. She will share tips and tricks to make the embedding process a bit more efficient as far as time management is concerned.
Jennifer Bidwell & Brinna Pam Anan, Cal Poly Pomona
This project, aimed at supporting student success, began as an undergraduate class assignment with hands-on experience involving collaboration between librarians and undergraduate students to improve library services, such as information literacy workshops. A psychology professor required his students to assess a current, on-campus program for their Program Evaluation class, and asked librarian colleagues if the University Library would participate.
The librarians happily agreed to collaborate with the students to evaluate library workshops designed to assist students with their research. As a result, the librarians created a safe environment of innovation and active idea exchange, thus empowering the students to apply the research methods they have been taught and to share their findings and suggestions on a professional level. The students were deeply invested in the project because they now had the invaluable opportunity to develop an assessment tool that would directly impact services that would contribute to their and their peers' academic success.
The librarians believe interdisciplinary collaborations like this project can set a precedent for other faculty-student partnerships. The students offered meaningful solutions through assessment tools and acted as consultants as they applied theories, research methods, and communication strategies to an existing yet underutilized library resource. They also raised awareness of library programming across campus and developed transferable, professional skills applicable to their future projects and endeavors.
Jennifer Bidwell and Brinna Pam Anan will create a clear and informative research poster highlighting their experiences, observations, and lessons learned from this collaborative project. The poster will include an outline of the challenges and benefits of this cross-campus collaboration and present our model for initiating, realizing, and sustaining other collaborations.
While present at their poster, they plan on interacting with the audience by presenting questions on a slide that ask others about their experiences with faculty-student collaboration and to share their best practices and research methods.