Collaboration with the Campus Community

Hi! My name is Hilary Westgate, and I’m the Information Literacy Librarian at Misericordia University and part of the new blog team for the PaLA-CRD blog! I’m the liaison to the English, Communications, Fine Arts, and Religious Studies departments, the FYE program, and the Writing Center, and I also assist with our outreach programs and services. I attended Rutgers University for my MLIS and graduated in May of 2012, and I came to Misericordia in August of that year, so I am still fairly new to the profession. I’m honored to be a part of this blog team and hope that I can bring you some interesting and useful discussions!

I’d love to open up a conversation here about collaboration with other departments and groups on campus. Since I’ve been at MU, I’ve been fortunate to work with staff and faculty members from other departments who are interested in pairing with the library on special programs and projects. In particular, the Student Success Center and the Writing Center have been amazing partners in collaboration. As a couple of examples, we have offered workshops together in which librarians and the Writing Center coordinator have co-taught about citation styles and formats, and I have offered cross-training opportunities for Writing Center tutors about aspects of their work that coincide with where the library can help.

Our most recent project in this partnership is a satellite Writing Center in one of our new study rooms in the library. We recently had eight new study rooms installed on the second floor of the library, and they are extremely popular with our students, especially because the walls are white boards! It’s amazing to see students filling up the walls with words and diagrams as they study. For three evenings during the week before Spring Break, from 5:00—9:00 p.m., we had writing tutors come to the library and set up to offer their tutoring services in a library study room. At the same time, some writing tutors remained in the original Writing Center location. Unfortunately, for our very first try with this outreach project, the writing tutors did not have students drop in to meet with them. We are looking forward to tweaking our approach a bit to offer the same service in April during the week before finals, and we are hoping for greater visibility and increased attendance from our students. We now know what we would like to change and improve for next time!

This sign was placed in the window of the designated study room, along with other directional flyers throughout the building.

What are some of the ways in which your library works with other departments and groups on your campus? What has worked well (and not so well) for you? Please share in the comments!