It's Academic

Digging into student employees’ expectations of their supervisors

September 13, 2023

By: Kim Karim

In a supervisor and employee relationship, understanding the expectations that each party has is crucial to a healthy working environment. Working in the realm of academia, it can be tough to connect with student employees, especially since their job as a library assistant is only one small aspect of their overall journey on the path to graduation.

To make my student circulation assistants’ experiences meaningful and fulfilling, I felt it was important to lay out expectations they had for myself and our Head of Access Services during the student training sessions we hold at the beginning of our fall semester. While I am directly responsible for the supervision of the circulation assistants, our Head of Access Services supervises our evening proctors, which was transitioned from an outside-hire position to a student-led position within the last few years.

We asked students during the first day of our training to list up to three expectations they had for their peers and three they had for their supervisors. Their answers are listed below and give an insight into the kind of leadership they are looking for when it comes to doing their job successfully:

Communicate about library events and any important information students need to know. Continue with the weekly updates (a weekly email sent out to circulation students and proctors.)
Give us opportunities to build trust, listen to student ideas, and treat all students equally.
Be respectful and understanding about our needs and issues.
Continue being nice.
Give frequent feedback – good or bad – on job performance. Be consistent with rules.
Help manage conflict if needed or help if someone hasn’t showed up to take over the next shift.

This year marked the second time we have held our fall training sessions, and the feedback listed above is fairly like what we heard in 2022. Students appreciate being kept in the loop of library events, and rightfully so as they are the first point of contact for our patrons.

I firmly believe that being a supervisor of college student employees goes well beyond being able to teach them library policies and procedures. It is often being a mentor or lending a listening ear on their bad days. Giving students space to be themselves, while also making sure library tasks are completed efficiently and properly. This balance can be tough to navigate, but at our library, students often say this is their favorite place to work and in general be on campus.

Have you held a similar activity with your student employees? If so, share your feedback! I’d love to read what students are saying in your library.

Experimenting With Popular Media: Using Short-Form Videos on Social Media to Market Reference Services

September 8, 2023

tags: marketing, outreach, Reference

by Cecelia Lasley

A new academic year offers an opportunity to try something new for students, faculty, and librarians alike. One of the new things going on around W&J and our library is a new strategy for marketing our reference services using short-form videos on social media. Short-form videos are videos created for social media that are typically no more than 60 seconds long (Oladipo, 2023). Since we are currently only using Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), our limit is 90 seconds. Short-form video has become the dominant form of social media content on a number of platforms since the explosion of TikTok’s popularity in 2020. So why is it noteworthy that we are catching up with the times and following in the footsteps of other very creative and successful library and cultural heritage social media accounts?

Our goal for this new strategy is to boost our reference engagement. We discuss how students can get help from a librarian and what a librarian can help students with during our instruction sessions and other events such as our orientation welcome sessions. However, our reference usage statistics remain below pre-pandemic levels. Our hope is that by meeting students where they are in the format they have come to prefer, in addition to our other efforts, they will internalize the information and start reaching out to the library for help in greater numbers. Cheng, Lam, and Chiu (2020) found in their survey of community impressions about the University of Hong Kong Libraries’ Facebook page that students viewed social media content as more helpful than other community members (pp.4-5). Even though the social media environment in Hong Kong is different from that in the United States, Cheng, Lam, and Chiu’s findings are encouraging that there is potential to increase student engagement with library services through social media marketing.

Alvis, Porter, and Ayling (2023) discussed in their RBMS conference panel, “Video Thrilled the Biblio Star: Communicating Rare Books on Video,” how to engage audiences through video content on social media and stressed the role of a central figure to hold viewer’s engagement. To ensure consistency in the central figure regardless of who creates the video for our video series, we are going to use a stuffed cat as our central figure. In addition to bringing a little childhood whimsy to the videos, we are hoping that the cat will help emphasize the simplicity of using library services. We are currently planning to have videos about how to use the Library’s chat reference, make an appointment with a librarian, and generally how librarians can help with research.

Have any of you tried similar strategies for marketing your reference services? What was the experience like? Please share in the comments!

References

Alvis, A., Porter, D., Ayling, T. (2023, June 30). Video Thrilled the Biblio Star: Communicating Rare Books on Video [Paper Panel]. RBMS: A new kind of professional, Indiana University – Bloomington/Hybrid, Bloomington, IN, United States.

Cheng, W.W.H., Lam, E.T.H., Chiu, D.K.W. (2020). Social media as a platform in academic library marketing: A comparative study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 48(5), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102188.

Oladipo, T. (2023, May 30). Ask Buffer: What is Short-Form Video, and How Can You Use It?. Buffer. https://buffer.com/resources/short-form-video/.

What’s a PTRC?

September 7, 2023

tags: guide, outreach, pa, patent, patron service, PTRC, trademark, uspto

by denisewetzel1

Do you ever think, “Wow, someone should patent that?” Or do you have students/researchers ask about what the differences between a trademark and a patent are? Do the words intellectual property sound a bit intimidating? Well, there are a multitude of resources available and even centers dedicated to helping with these and many other questions.

The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) is a federal agency that follows the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Essentially, the social contract between inventors and the public. As a part of the USPTO mission, the office runs a program called the Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC) program. PTRCs are a network of 85 public, academic, state, and even special libraries located across the United States. In fact, the state of Pennsylvania is lucky enough to have 3 PTRCs! They are located at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania State University’s University Park campus.

Screengrab of current (as of August 2023) PTRC locations. While you may notice the locations span the entirety of the United States and Puerto Rico, there are still large swaths of the country without easy access to PTRCs.

One important consideration is that PTRC services are available to everyone in the community. This means for the University Park PTRC, I do not only limit my help to Penn State faculty or students, rather I work with community members from across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as well. Part of this program is to reach everyone. At the University Park PTRC, this also helps me with meeting the Land Grant mission of Penn State University. So what can a PTRC offer?

Each PTRC has an official PTRC Representative to the USPTO who receives yearly training and reports statistics. These representatives are usually librarians who are eager to share their knowledge about the patent and trademark process. It is important to note that PTRC representatives are not lawyers and cannot provide legal advice. Representatives become experts in searching for patents trademarks in databases across multiple platforms. They will also offer classes and workshops on intellectual property basics, intellectual property searching, and using the USPTO website.

As part of my job, I regularly visit classes to share about the PTRC. I also work with Pennsylvania’s Patent Pro Bono Program, which moved to the Penn State Law Intellectual Property Clinic in January of 2023. I provide workshops on trademark searching and patent searching for events, both online and in-person, such as for Global Entrepreneurship Week in November. I have a research guide dedicated to all things intellectual property if you are interested in learning more.

Overall, the PTRC program is a unique resource for everyone. While an institution may not have a PTRC right on campus, that does not mean their students, faculty, and/or staff are out of luck. Feel free to refer them to any of Pennsylvania’s 3 PTRCs for support. If you are interested in learning more yourself, you are welcome to reach out to me at dawetzel [at] psu.edu.

Diamond Open Access?

August 16, 2023

tags: open access, scholarly publishing

by Darren G. Poley

Venn diagram highlighting the different levels of open access in scholarly publishing, as a function of cost to the readers and authors, copyright retention, and peer review (Jamie-farquharson, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

Plan S seemed promising when it was launched 5 years ago. Early in 2022 cOAlition S, Science Europe and others jointly published an Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. A year later Johan Rooryck, Editor in Chief, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, proposed “Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing.”

The principles were meant to move perception of Diamond Open Access away from just a new business model for OA publishing. They are:

Principle 1: Publishing is part and parcel of research and scholarship

Principle 2: Ownership and governance

Principle 3. Equitable by nature and design

Principle 4: A federated and global network of communities

Principle 5: Service provision

Principle 6: Transparent and aligned quality standards

Principle 7: Openness and innovation

Principle 8: Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Principle 9: User rights and privacy

Principle 10: Sustainability

Building on this idea is a group funded by the EU called Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication or DIAMAS for short. A DIAMAS report delivered a few months ago, IPSP Best Practices Quality evaluation criteria, best practices, and assessment systems for Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) includes an extensive self-assessment checklist for IPSPs based on the best practices delineated by the report.

This all may seem very Euro-centric and oriented to scientific literature but is really a part of a much larger movement for advancing Diamond OA worldwide for all disciplines. So, we look forward to the results of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access happening in Mexico later this year.

One reason this caught my attention is that last year Falvey library at Villanova University launched the first academic OA journal in the Igbo language of Nigeria. More details on this are in the blog post written by a colleague: “Welcoming a New Academic Journal: Ugegbe.”

Fall Virtual Journal Club Sign-Up and Interest Survey

August 16, 2023

by Alex K.

Greetings!

You are cordially invited to participate in the Fall 2023 series of the Virtual Journal Club, sponsored by the College & Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association! Please use this form to indicate which topic(s) you would be interested in reading about in the fall series, as well as indicate your scheduling preferences.

You are welcome to attend one, two, or all three of the meetings to discuss the readings. If you are interested in participating, please feel free to sign up – there is no cost and no commitment beyond your time to read and discuss the articles.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our Summer 2023 series on making the most of the one-shot instruction session!

Please feel free to reach out with any questions.

Thank you, and have a great day!

—

Melissa Correll (she/her)

Student Success Librarian

Assistant Professor

Liaison to the School of Education & HAPS

Arcadia University