It's Academic

By: Kim Karim

As the supervisor of student workers in an academic library setting at a small liberal arts college, I have always been motivated to make sure my students have the best possible working experience. For the students we hire here at Snowden Library, our Circulation Assistant position is often times their first campus job. It is also their first time truly balancing a full course load with work and other campus activities.

At our circulation desk, there is downtime between helping patrons find and check out materials, answering questions and helping students print from our computers. As a service desk that must be staffed at all times during open hours, we’ve struggled finding the right balance between having our students be just a body at the counter and making their work here at the library meaningful and also supportive of the full-time employees.

Many of my student workers have come to me when putting together a resume and asked for describing what their job duties consist of here at our library. I point them in the direction of the job description we post on our library website, but I often challenge them to think more critically about the skills they have learned here.

Often times, this will get me thinking about what we are actually teaching them, aside from library policies and procedures. I strive to show our students that punctuality is very important when arriving for a shift. Being respectful of their peers’ time and not being late is an expectation the students have set amongst themselves. Communication, respect, honesty – these are all values the students have said they expect when working with their fellow circulation assistants. Knowing this has challenged me, and our Head of Access Services, to think outside the box on how we can allow our students to grow in their positions.

We have added new responsibilities to the students’ checklists, including a question recorder form and patron head counts they conduct during their shifts. We have challenged the students for their input and suggestions about library changes – such as our physical space, collection ideas and more. We often seek their input for book displays and allow them to pick the materials we place on display. We want them to take pride in their job here. Walking into our front doors and seeing a display or project they had a hand in putting together allows them to feel more included in the library.

It is gratifying as a supervisor to see when my students get excited about something they know has made an impact here. I’m sure it’s comparable to the feeling a faculty member feels as they see the light bulb turn on for a student in their class as they grasp a once foreign concept.

Are there any student engagement strategies that have worked for your team? Feel free to share!

Presented by 

Maria Barefoot, Sara Parme, and Elin Woods

Wednesday, April 26 at 1:00 pm EST

Registration Link

Academic librarians can apply storytelling in the same way that teachers, entertainers, lawyers, and businesspeople have done for centuries. Once Upon a Time in the Academic Library explores applications of storytelling across academic librarianship in three sections: The Information Literacy Classroom, The Stacks and Physical and Virtual Library Spaces. This presentation, given by the books’ authors, will explore the theoretical application and cultural considerations of using storytelling principles in these three areas of librarianship and share some examples from the book. The first five registrants will receive a free copy of their book, Once Upon a Time in the Academic Library: Storytelling Skills for Librarians, published by the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2022.

We will mute participants on entry into the Zoom room. Session will be recorded and available on YouTube after the session. We will enable Zoom’s Live Transcription feature during the session.

Maria Barefoot is currently the online learning librarian at the University of Delaware. She has used storytelling in all of her library roles and is currently developing digital badge programs using storytelling principles. She became interested in the connection between storytelling and learning while pursuing her Master of Education degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She recently presented at ACRL and has published in Reference Services Review, Pennsylvania Libraries: Research and Practice, and The Library Assessment Cookbook.

Sara Parme, MLIS, MBA, is the Project Director for the Appalachian College Association’s Open and Affordable Resources Initiative and the Grants Coordinator of PA GOAL, Pennsylvania’s open and affordable grants program. After working in academic libraries for nine years, thanks to the mentors and some wonderful people she’s met along the way, her professional interests are virtual community building, project management, and not reinventing the wheel. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Administration and Leadership Studies. Her dissertation focuses on status and incivility among academic library employees. She’s a productivity geek and can have lengthy conversations about planners and focus apps.

Elin Woods is an independent researcher previously holding librarian posts at Saint Francis University and most recently at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania as a student success librarian. Her slightly unconventional path to libraries included time spent working at a newspaper and planning events before pursuing her MLIS from Clarion University. Since then, she has worked in both public and academic libraries, believing that they both have something to learn from one another. Her favorite way to tell stories is in the form of food, as she especially loves baking her way through historical Welsh and northern English cookbooks and the recipes she has from her grandmothers.

If you would like to present with C&CS, please contact the C&CS team.

This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, Governor.

Support is also provided by the College and Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association.

I had the opportunity to attend the recent Connect & Communicate session (recording posted below on March 22) and the topic was quite timely. I’ll be honest – I went through the session with the belief that I certainly wasn’t “wrong about” my expectations of digital literacy among my students. I nodded in agreement during much of the webinar, particularly when Emily shared of witnessing students completing essays on their smartphones and, I too, have bitten my tongue watching computer users googling rather than typing a URL into the address bar. While I did garner useful new information, I still felt that I was already pretty aware of the “incorrect assumptions” shared during the session – we are very much on the same page, library friends!

But then, just a few days later, when providing database instruction for a class, I shared a Padlet that would facilitate discussion to allow me to gauge prior knowledge and provide direct links to some resources I planned to share. I used tinyurl to create a shortened web address and also provided the QR code for display if using a smartphone was preferred. As you may already imagine, I had several students struggle to access the Padlet. One student got lost within the actual tinyurl webpage. I admit – I am wrong!

Going forward, I plan to create a specific page for instruction directly on my library webpages. Most students don’t have difficulty navigating to this area on the website, especially after following an on-screen demonstration.

On a larger scale, I find myself with further concerns. Less than 4% of our total materials budget is allocated for physical books. The vast majority of our go-to course supporting resources are found online. While this makes sense to provide equitable access for the many students attending virtually and not on our physical campus, statistics suggest underutilization.  Access to the databases requires several steps. It’s far from straightforward and many reference assistance requests are only after a student has exhausted google and are already experiencing frustration.

One long-term project I have planned is to evaluate our existing databases. In addition to pricing and curriculum alignment, another focus is now on the overall accessibility and user experience. I’ll explore the mobile displays as I can’t assume users will even have access to a desktop or laptop. I’ll also be looking for best practices for entry points from library websites. Our main goal is to improve the student experience and, especially today, that means the online experience.

Did you know 20-30% of YouTube videos about emerging infectious diseases contain inaccurate or misleading information? Learn how to spot health misinformation & improve media & health literacy! Attend the NNLM Health Misinformation Symposium April 4-6, 2023. #HealthMisinfoNNLM #healthliteracy https://nnlm23.vfairs.com/

Source: Infodemics and misinformation negatively affect people’s health behaviours, new WHO review finds

Join librarians, public health professionals, health professions, and researchers to explore the history, research, and solutions to health misinformation! My presentation “Strategies for dispelling health misinformation: Prebunking and Motivational Interviewing” is Wednesday, April 5th 1:30-2:30 ET.

Here are some other sessions relevant to academic librarians:

Librarians and educators are accustomed to treating information and media literacy as broadly subject agnostic. It is therefore not surprising that we have positioned ourselves on the front lines against the spread of mis/disinformation about COVID-19. As with other kinds of sources, we show students how to identify markers of unreliability and reliability, and how to read laterally in order to fact check. Once students can do this, we hope they will not believe or spread health mis/disinformation about COVID. Research in science and health communication, however, indicates that evaluating health journalism comes with its own particular issues. In this presentation, I will discuss three of these issues: the media framing of how science in general works, how science/health journalists get information about research, and the particular tells of unreliable health journalism. In each case, I will suggest some approaches/tools that will help address these issues in information literacy instruction around COVID.

Building off of a preliminary report presented at the NNLM 2021 Symposium, this presentation will describe the development of a teaching module deployed through the Public Health Science department at a mid-sized midwestern university. Focusing on key considerations in assessing whether information is truthful vs. misleading, this module illustrates such questions as “What is a fact? What is an opinion? What makes them different from each other?” using public health-related examples, ranging from lead in gasoline to COVID-19.

The presenters will discuss the design process that informs each element of the module, the module’s integration into the university’s learning management system to facilitate student access, and what specific learning outcomes each module element is designed to foster. Finally the presenters will discuss how best to assess this module for teaching effectiveness.

Evidence based scrolling: Using experts on the internet to improve scientific literacy skills.

Jocelyn Swick-Jemison

This discussion will explore science and health influencers online and how they can be used in the classroom to improve science literacy skills. Can we apply the principles of evidence based practice to evaluating science in the media? There are media influencers such as John Oliver, Rebecca Watson and Mama Doctor Jones (amongst many others!) using their expertise and platforms to demonstrate science literacy through exploration of reliable (and unreliable) evidence.

Academic Librarians are often tasked with teaching information literacy skills according to the ACRL Framework. While these skills are essential to college level research and writing – they are also required for navigating the every day bombardment of information that we get from the media. How can academic librarians integrate these media influencers into their teaching in order to teach evidence based science literacy skills for use in the “real world”. Science literacy does not require being a science expert – it means being able to rely on those who are experts and discern evidence from reliable sources. Science and health headlines are often over simplified and sensationalized – how can we used evidence-based practice principles to come to our own conclusions?

Among many others! Check out the agenda for the symposium.