Reevaluating Our Liaison Program To Meet A New Normal
It seems that one of the most frequently used words over the past few years has been “unprecedented.” How do we as librarians adapt as these unprecedented times become our new normal? This is far too big a question to address in one short piece, but it is one that lingers in the back of my mind frequently as an early career librarian whose career will entirely exist in the environment created by our field’s answers to that question. It has been particularly front of mind for me recently as W&J entered a new strategic plan around the time of my arrival this fall, and the librarians subsequently took time this last month to discuss the library’s mission and goals, and to reevaluate the role that we all play as liaisons. Our updates to our mission and goals are still in progress, but our reevaluation of the liaison program will hopefully guide us as we continue to adapt to changes in our library, on our campus, and in our field and the world.
What does it mean to be a liaison? That is where we started our discussion as we thought through our liaison program for the first time since its creation seven years ago (liaison areas have been reassigned with personnel changes, but this is the first time that the program itself has been discussed to my knowledge). Like for many libraries, those seven years have been filled with lots of change for us at W&J – personnel changes (including the addition of myself and the College Archivist in 2022), a building renovation, and the onset of a still ongoing global pandemic. The way that our students learn, our faculty teach, and we support both groups is constantly evolving. Despite all of this change, the core goal of our liaison program remains the same – to better connect the library and academic departments in order to best support the academic needs of our campus community. To figure out how to refresh our approach to meeting this goal, we found inspiration in the results of the survey published in Antje Mays’ “Dangerous Liaisons: Brainstorming the 21st Century Academic Liaison.” This survey’s range of participants and honest feedback about the pros and cons of their liaison programs helped remind us that we cannot and should not be trying to do everything at one time, especially since we do not have any librarians whose sole job it is to be liaisons or reference/instruction librarians.
We structured our new goals after Salisbury University’s Librarian Liaison Duties. We defined three core thematic categories that represent the work that each liaison is supposed to take on for their departments: serving as a point of contact with academic departments, teaching information literacy skills, and developing the collection in our liaison areas. For each of these three categories, we established an objective, best practices (achievable goals for the category), and aspirational goals to challenge us to grow when we have the bandwidth and faculty buy-in to do so. Many of our best practice goals revolve around a core group of faculty members who have bought into working with us because our other duties require us to pump the breaks on trying to convince more reluctant faculty members at this point in time. This structure and these goals fit our current priorities as we navigate an ever-changing “new normal” without overextending any one librarian. I hope that as we and the field continue to adapt to changes in the academic landscape, we will continue to revisit our best practice and aspirational goals to push ourselves and our departments to better serve the entire campus community.
Has your library also done a similar revamp of policies/programs lately? What did that process look like? How does your library approach liaisons (if they have them at all)? I would love to hear your thoughts coming from a small library where liaisons are not always subject experts (meaning holding a degree in the discipline) in their assigned departments.
References
Mays, Antje, “Dangerous Liaisons: Brainstorming the 21st Century Academic Liaison” (2019). Library Faculty and Staff Publications. 304. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/libraries_facpub/304/
Salisbury University Libraries. (2020, February). Librarian liaison duties. Salisbury University. https://www.salisbury.edu/libraries/research-resources/_files/liaison-duties.pdf.
Academic Integrity and Emotional Well-Being
Every year, Pitt chooses a theme and provides grant funding to projects and events that speak to that theme in some way. This year is the Year of Emotional Well-Being. And while it may be too late to submit something for this particular grant, I have been thinking about how we teach academic integrity could have great impact on students’ emotional well-being.
Consider this scenario:
A student is about to turn in their research paper that they worked on over last few weeks. As part of the submission process, they must run their paper through a plagiarism checker. They fret about this because what if they accidentally plagiarized? They don’t want a bad grade and they don’t want their professor to think less of them. So here they are, stressing about their citations.
Anguish over citation formatting and worrying about getting caught accidentally plagiarizing are not positives for emotional well-being. But think about how the topic is usually framed. Discussion about academic integrity and potential violations of it are often framed in punitive ways. “If you get caught cheating, you will get a zero. There is a zero tolerance policy if you are caught plagiarizing. Don’t cheat or plagiarize because it is bad.”
For students new to college and for those more senior, these phrases are not helpful. They are scary. And, before you say anything about them being deterrents, are they? Over the course of this pandemic, there were more reports of cheating at colleges. Part of this is likely because of the rise of detecting tools, which are problematic in and of themselves. Yes, there are going to be some students who cheat because they can. The majority, however, probably do it because they feel like it’s the only way to keep up.
Learner-Centered Approach
Since 2016, the University Library System at Pitt has offered a badge to students upon completion of a set of Academic Integrity modules. While not required across the curriculum, they have been widely used across many programs first embedded in Blackboard and now Canvas. With the help of an internal OER grant, a group of us decided to expand on the existing modules, incorporating new themes, and taking a less punitive approach to the topic. Once the modules are done, we will be licensing them for reuse through Creative Commons licensing.
The updated modules will help faculty contextualize the topic through a learner centered approach. Students are doing their best and the traditional approaches tend to increase anxiety and fears over academic integrity violations. Updates to these modules focus on creating an interactive, learner centered experience encouraging students to think holistically about academic integrity in their own lives. Modules are more personalized to include stories and real life examples that build upon student experiences rather than focusing on deficit thinking.
Yes, cheating and plagiarizing are bad and there are consequences for that behavior. But we want to teach students why they should care in the first place–scholarly conversation and all.
Presented by
John Russell and Andrew Dudash
Wednesday, February 22 at 2:00 pm EST
This presentation will review efforts to collect election-related Twitter data from Pennsylvania-specific accounts and hashtags for 2018 and 2020 in the run-up and aftermath of both election cycles and what was learned from the process. The presenters will also discuss the work that goes into building social media data collections and some tools that can be used to support such work for platforms beyond Twitter.
John Russell is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Penn State University Libraries, University Park. Andrew Dudash is the Social Sciences Librarian at Penn State University Libraries, University Park.
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.
If you would like to present with C&CS, please contact the C&CS team.
The ethics of digital piracy
As librarians, we often encounter patrons engaging in behaviors that can be frustrating or disruptive, from ignoring due dates to vaping in study rooms. Is digital piracy a problem you’ve considered? Are you aware of the extent to which students and faculty on your campus rely on pirate sites (also known as shadow libraries) to download copies of textbooks and others resources that your library may not provide?
I began to pay attention to the digital piracy problem after the U.S. Justice Department seized and shut down the website of the popular shadow library, Z-Library, in November 2022. Soon after that, I was helping a student request a book through interlibrary loan. The student expressed their disappointment at the loss of the pirate site, which they had relied on to access books for their classes. This event made me question the extent to which students resort to ebook piracy as both a cost-saving measure and a tool of convenience. Despite our efforts to reduce textbook expenses for students through our textbook reserve program and the promotion of open educational resources, it is clear that students are using other methods to get assigned materials.
The ethical dilemma posed by digital piracy is real. While we want to ensure access to information for our students, especially those with limited funds, authors do have a right to control how their work is distributed and to make a living from their writing. Curious about this crucial issue, Haley Dittbrenner (a Susquehanna University sophomore) and I applied for and then received Susquehanna’s March Fellowship for Ethical Leadership. To better understand the prevalence and impact of digital piracy in academic libraries, we will survey faculty and students about their own experiences with shadow libraries. We hope to spark a dialogue about the ethical implications of digital piracy at Susquehanna University, raise awareness among those who use pirated materials of the risks and consequences, and identify measures students and faculty can take to reduce digital piracy.
We are currently reviewing the literature and designing the survey, but we plan to share our results with Pennsylvania Library Association members at the annual conference or through another medium. Are you also curious about ebook piracy on your campus? Interested in collaborating? Get in touch with us here!
Note: This post includes text originally written for our March Fellowship application. The final text was edited with the help of the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.
Librarian-Student Connections
It can be uncomfortable when pausing for questions during an information literacy session and all you hear are crickets. Every time I hear the silence, I worry that I’m not doing my job well, that the students aren’t learning anything new, and I’m not helping.
But maybe I’m looking in the wrong place for confirmation. Maybe it’s not the questions asked or silence that indicates that they are “getting it.” Maybe it’s more than an outward confirmation and maybe it’s sometimes intangible.
Recently as part of our library’s Information Literacy Committee, we read the article “The Power of Presence: One-Shots, Relational Teaching, and Instruction Librarianship” written by Veronica Arellano Douglas and Joanna Gadsby. In this article, they suggest that it’s not the length of time spent together in a teaching session, but rather “openness to relationship and connection.” As I’ve continued to teach information literacy classes, I’ve thought if they forget everything I’ve told them today, at least they’ll remember that I’m here to help in a variety of ways.
Instruction librarians know how hard it is to cram everything we want to cover in one class. It can be daunting and leave you feeling drained. The authors state that “the quality of our presence in the classroom becomes greater than the duration of the encounter.” This also suggests that it may not always be the tangible question and answer format that indicates students are connecting with the content, but rather students knowing that you can support them; That you’ve showed up and will continue to show up. Not every student interaction will be one of connection, but if we’re open to connection, we can demonstrate our willingness to help, support, and engage with our students.
I enjoyed reading this article and thinking more of genuine connection with students when possible as a success. Even if I can’t find the book or article they are looking for, which in the past has made me feel like it was a failed interaction, I can now reframe it as a success because I demonstrated interest, willingness to help, and effort, all of which can positively impact the student. It’s still a meaningful, positive connection that will “make the students more willing to seek out help in the future and increase their sense of agency.” After reading this article, I realized this was always my goal when helping students. I want them to know and remember I’m in their corner ready and willing to help.
References
Arellano Douglas, V., & Gadsby, J. (2022). The power of presence: One-shots, relational teaching, and instruction librarianship. College & Research Libraries, 83(5), 807-818. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.5.807
It's Academic 