Bibliocycle

For the past few years the OWHL has had a Student Advisory Committee. Students are our most important constituency, and we realized that if we wanted to continually improve our program, we needed to understand what spaces, resources, and services they needed and wanted. We had been periodically convening student focus groups, but established a standing committee in order to obtain input from the same group of students over the course of the year. I was able to arrange for the SAC to count as the students’ mandatory work duty, so recruitment was not difficult. We are able to get a balance of students by gender, graduation year, and boarding and day. We deliberately sought both library users and non-users, and we invited some students whose behavior had been particularly challenging. The input from the SAC has been invaluable.

This year, instead of having regular weekly group meetings, we are experimenting with a different format for the committee. Each student has selected a time for “work duty” and is matched with a librarian partner. Each week we develop a task for each student to do with supervision by the librarian. They have conducted usability studies of our online catalog and other electronic resources, helped us select citation software, solicited input from their friends on topics of interest to us, participated in a trial of an online information literacy assessment, and completed an extensive survey of their use of technology. The students are pleased to be working one-on-one with their partner librarians, and we have learned a lot about how our students approach real research. They have provided us with insights that we have used to make changes in our web site, our “marketing” of resources, and the arrangement of our space. The students on our SAC all have social networks. It is our hope that they will share what they have learned with their friends. We have some preliminary evidence that this is true. We recently accelerated the purchase of a new citation tool because it was the clear favorite in a head-to-head competition with our existing product. We had arranged for our SAC to test the new tool, but the outcry when the trial was over came from many students NOT on the SAC who had been directed to the trial by their friends!

In subsequent posts, I’ll describe some of the specific tasks that we gave to the students, and summarize our results.