Bibliocycle » Administration

Listening to students

Elisabeth Tully — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:08:41 +0000

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.

Tools of the Trade

Elisabeth Tully — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:19:08 +0000

My position as Library Director has recently taken on a new dimension. Because of budget rollbacks, when our Archivist retired this year, another staff member assumed the responsibilities of the position, resulting in the need for him to give up some of the things he was already doing. One of the things that he gave up was “Facilities Management.” I had managed to avoid that aspect of my job for eight years. Now was the time to step up to the plate.

During my first week as facilities manager, I quickly got on a first-name basis with Nancy, who answers the phone and triages problems at the Office of Physical Plant. I acquired all of the building keys, and my own set of allen wrenches. I developed a tracking system so I could keep up with the reporting and completion of work orders.

But yesterday I really came into my own as facilities manager. A plug broke, leaving a metal piece stuck in an outlet. I called it in, but also decided that I should cover the outlet pending the repair. Voila, duct tape! I can do this job.

The phantom of the faucet

Elisabeth Tully — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:51:03 +0000

They don’t teach you everything you need to know in library school. For example, I never imagined that I’d be responsible, as library director, for a 60,000 square foot facility with “quirks.”

One of the more puzzling of our facilities issues is the inexplicable never-ending automatic-shut-off faucet located in the women’s rest room. The faucets are supposed to turn on when hands are waved beneath them, dispensing an appropriate amount of water before shutting down. For reasons that even the consulting plumbers have not been able to figure out, one of the faucets is over eager, turning on in response to someone walking by, and even (this is one of our theories) turning on in response to sun coming in through the window.

We have been told that there is no way to exorcise the ghost, and that the only solution is to replace all of the faucets with the old fashioned kind, that you actually have to turn on and off. I am not quite ready to go there, but it certainly is disappointing that we are wasting water, particularly during the Green Cup Challenge.

The essence of the OWHL in 50 words

Elisabeth Tully — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:05:03 +0000

was recently asked by one of the staff members working on the Academy’s web redesign project to submit a 50 word statement that captured the “essence” of the OWHL. Thinking about responding to this request I was variously indignant (Don’t they understand how complicated we are?) cynical (How about “Got books”?) and philosophical. While I do believe that we can’t be “captured” in 50 words in a marketing brochure (which is honestly what the web site has become) I took up the challenge to try to explain to a general public that is woefully uninformed about the role(s) and purposes of 21st century academic libraries who we are.

Here is what I came up with:

“Helping improve your questions” isn’t just the OWHL’s slogan—it accurately describes the intensive, one-on-one teaching that the librarians do every day. The OWHL serves as the crossroads for the intellectual life of the community and is committed to assuring that every PA graduate has the “information literacy” skills needed for academic and personal success in the 21^st century.

It reminded me that “Helping improve your questions” is a pretty succinct description of what instructional librarians do.