LIT Retreat 2024

Over the past decades, libraries have evolved with the times to become community centers by creating programs, encouraging social inclusion and equality, and serving their communities as sources of information. When public and academic librarians form partnerships and collaborate with K-12 schools, it enhances the community. And, these partnerships can provide a number of benefits, both within and among different libraries and their respective communities. Collaborative partnerships between different kinds of libraries can allow public, school, and academic libraries to extend their reach, forge deeper connections with their usual patrons, and establish new points of contact with patrons they might not normally serve. Likewise, these kinds of collaborative partnerships can also enable these libraries to scale and grow programs and to achieve outreach and programming goals that might not be possible without a partner. Finally, these kinds of partnerships can also benefit the librarians themselves, enabling the exchange of ideas, connection, and support networks between different types of libraries who might otherwise not have my points of contact.

Collaborative partnerships are important across all different kinds of libraries and are not just a strategic move but also, in many instances, a necessity. As budgets, technology, and society change, collaboration becomes more important to libraries so they can meet the needs of those they serve. This presentation will examine the lessons learned and best practices of academic and public libraries partnering with school libraries and the impact it had on the local community while also exploring what meaningful collaboration can be. In this interactive presentation, we’ll first consider some examples of impactful collaborations between public and school libraries, focusing on a collaborative literacy program for third graders. Next, we will look at some examples of partnerships between an academic library and a group of school libraries, focusing on an outreach event and a professional development program for middle, high school, and academic librarians. Finally, we will share some takeaways and best practices from these experiences and will consider the relative lack of examples of public and academic library partnerships. Attendees will leave with ideas, examples, and strategies that they can employ in their own outreach work. Establishing meaningful collaborative partnerships can take time and effort, but we hope these examples will illustrate just how impactful, empowering, and beneficial these partnerships can be for different kinds of librarians and for the communities they serve.

Student need in the academic setting is ever evolving and the library and specifically librarians have the unique opportunity to anticipate the skills needed to create more prepared and resilient scholars. In this session, I will share the knowledge gained from 13 years as a school librarian and as a recent hire as the Engineering Librarian at the University of Louisville. We will talk through skills, scaffolding, and pedagogy to design a program that builds and prepares students for life and academic success.

A student’s research project is a complex, holistic endeavor, incorporating academic disciplinary knowledge, information literacy concepts and knowledge practices, and rhetorical and technical knowledge about writing or oral communication. However, this knowledge is taught in different silos, with librarians generally handling the information literacy silo. Crossing these silos would allow for holistic instruction that reflects the complexity of student research.

The presentation will discuss a collaborative project between an academic library and a writing and communication center to create adaptable Canvas modules that incorporate information literacy, writing, and oral communication instruction. We will discuss how our team of librarians, a writing and communication center director, and an instructional designer began to develop modules that drew on our different areas of expertise, with the librarians and writing and communication center director melding our different approaches to develop the content and the instructional designer providing knowledge on how to develop the structure and pedagogical approach for the modules. We will also share how we did outreach for the modules using the different campus connections each unit had. Finally, we will reflect on how working together allowed us to take a different approach to supporting our students and instructors.

DuPont Library serves the campus of the University of the South, a small, liberal arts university on the Cumberland plateau, home to a diverse community of students, faculty, staff and community members. Since the pandemic, many new and developing initiatives have been popping up on our campus. We in Research Help wanted to connect with groups around campus focusing on student success, sustainability, and civic engagement among others, not to mention all the student groups. As we worked on our department and library goals through a new strategic plan, we realized we needed a new librarian to bridge this outreach gap.

This presentation will start with a description of what led us to this new position and will move on to share the outreach librarian’s experiences: success and failures, lessons learned, and adaptations to Sewanee’s unique campus community. We will discuss the efforts the librarian in this new position undertook to create new events, engage students in different ways, and build ongoing campus partnerships, as well as how she assessed the efforts.

The presentation will also show how we’ve reached out to students and faculty and spotlight specific events as examples from the previous six months of the Student Outreach Librarian’s activities. Student initiatives include team trivia game nights, expanding office hours, bolstering social media posts, and the early formation of a book club. Campus partnerships include establishing ongoing programs like our nascent Global Book Club with the Center for Global Citizenship as well as arranging events with the Wellness Commons, Student Success coaches, the University Farm, and more. We’ve connected with faculty through ongoing activities and raising awareness in the area of open educational resources.

We will conclude by talking about how the department in which the position is located in, Research Help, has experienced changes in thought, planning, and activities surrounding this new position. We will reflect on the lessons learned throughout these months, as individuals and a department, and consider aspirations and future goals for the role, the department, future partnerships and outreach initiatives.

The Western Kentucky University (WKU) Department of Library Public Services mission centers around library instruction and campus-wide outreach. In recent years, a major shift in how librarians interact with the campus has resulted in an increase of instruction sessions, more student interaction, and an influx of collaboration opportunities. Many of these collaborations involve new and first-year students. According to Murray, et a. (2016), student success can be contributed to library usage specifically in their freshman and sophomore years. This is why our First-Year Librarian and Core Curriculum Librarian have created opportunities to reach as many new students as possible. The First-Year and Student Success Librarian works with University Learning students that are first-year and transfer students, as well as newly enrolled international students. University Learning is WKU’s first-year course with a special literacy component to serve underprepared students in reading and comprehension. This unique class prepares new students for both social and academic university life. By offering information literacy sessions, the First-Year Librarian promotes research skills while welcoming new students to campus. Additional visits to the library are encouraged and many faculty take advantage of these outreach services.

The Core Curriculum Librarian works directly with the freshman level Intro to College Writing course ENG 100. Through in-person workshops and online content, the Core Curriculum Librarian offers another layer of support for new students related to information literacy and research skills. In addition to course specific outreach, all Public Services Librarians provide support to WKU’s Living Learning Communities (LLCs). LLCs at WKU are growing and becoming a recruitment tool for new students. An example of this collaboration centers around the Criminology LLC where two Public Services Librarians partner with the faculty fellows to provide library and research instruction as well as co-curricular activities related to the Criminology theme. On college and university campuses, librarian created co-curricular activities aimed at new students can help elevate retention and success rates. Bergen-Cico and Viscomi (2012) found that undergraduates students that attended 5 to 14 events throughout their university career had significantly higher GPAs than students attending fewer events. These outreach efforts have added to the elevated WKU first-year student retention rate from fall 2022 to spring 2023 to 91.1%.

Bergen-Cico, D. & Viscomi, J. (2012). Exploring the association between campus co-curricular involvement and academic achievement. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory, & Practice, 14(3), 329-343. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2190/CS.14.3.c

Murray, A., Ireland, A., & Hackathorn, J. (2016) The value of academic libraries: Library services as a predictor of student retention. College & Research Libraries, 77(5), 631-642. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.77.5.631