Becoming a Competent Graduate Librarian

As I enter my fourth year as a graduate librarian (and my 10th year of academic librarianship and my 29th year of teaching), I’m struck by how my approach to graduate students continues to shift. To my surprise, every academic year has brought a new revelation concerning what our students don’t know and do need, which necessitates a corresponding revision of service on my part. Although “competence” is a relative term, I feel strongly that the needs of our graduate students—and the skills necessary for us as providers to fulfill these requirements—are similar to those at other institutions and would like to share some of these findings with my fellow graduate librarians. Points for discussion will be: getting to know student needs (for real); empathy and perspective; problem-based and lifelong learning; partnerships. I will provide examples of how these shifts in perspective have manifested with regard to explanatory content for students, particularly with literature review and the writing process overall. I will also discuss the search for internal versus external sources, which I expect will foster input and dialogue from participants

How I Learned to Love Peer Review

In this editorial, Editor-in-Chief Wendy Doucette reflects on academic peer review in general, outlines the peer review process used at the Journal of Graduate Librarianship (JGL), and offers tips to future authors for improving the peer review process. She concludes by thanking JGL’s existing roster of peer reviewers for their continued contributions

Bad Scholarship

Despite increasing expectations of transparency, academic fraud does exist. We will examine some of the most blatant examples as well as some of the most effective measures to combat it

Empower and Engage Students in the Pre-Writing Process through Mental Mapping for Increased Contextual Understanding and Self-Directed Research

As instructors, we want our students to become successful critical thinkers who are able to internalize and interpret complex and often conficting information. The often-overlooked strategy of mental mapping empowers students to make connections between concepts, ideas, and arguments in a way that is visual, organic, and self-directed. This scafolded learning process increases contextual understanding and helps to organize thinking by making planning visible. Attendees will learn diferent types of mapping (no software required)—which aid students in developing writing topics and academic arguments—and will be able to incorporate them in their teaching

Not a Challenge but an Opportunity: Harnessing the ACRL Framework to Situate Graduate Students as Active Members of the Academic Community

There is NO more traditional library function for instruction librarians than teaching information literacy. Without sacrificing expected librarian services such as demonstrating searching and citation management, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education allows us to orient students with a high-level, integrated view of how the seemingly disparate pieces and requirements of graduate research form an integrated whole

Teaching Motivation that Works: Structuring Graduate-Level Research Support Workshops to Foster Centered, Focused Self-Sufficient Learners

All too frequently, instruction librarians’ only opportunity to teach students distills down to the fifty-minute, one-shot, make-or-break experience. We disseminate the essential information as requested—how to use the library, how to search the databases, and so on—with little time to explain why all the pieces fit together and why they are important. Worse, well-intentioned librarians often strive to cover as much as possible in these sessions, oversaturating and frustrating their student audience. Even in settings of brief duration with no follow-up, another approach is possible. Rather than attempting to demonstrate everything at once, we can interject effective, real-life motivational tactics into the session by highlighting the underlying purpose of the process demonstrated. In other words, we can focus not simply on “what” or “how” but on “why.” Providing this context and structure not only grounds students, it clarifies and demystifies the process. Understanding that purpose and method are as important as data better empowers students with strategies to pursue their own needs independently. This chapter focuses on graduate students, particularly those in doctoral programs, but with a little creative thinking, these strategies could also be adapted for application with undergraduate learners

Not a Challenge but an Opportunity: Harnessing the ACRL Framework to Situate Graduate Students as Active Members of the Academic Community

There is NO more traditional library function for instruction librarians than teaching information literacy. Without sacrificing expected librarian services such as demonstrating searching and citation management, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education allows us to orient students with a high-level, integrated view of how the seemingly disparate pieces and requirements of graduate research form an integrated whole

Why Our Financial Literacy Programming Died (and How Yours Can Succeed)

This is the story of a financial literacy endeavor that sputtered, surged, and then died. While it did not succeed at my institution, I share the story and the resources in the hope that its successes and failures might be of use to others. Although I had already been a professional librarian for seven years when I took my new position as Graduate Research and Instruction Librarian at East Tennessee State University near the beginning of fall semester 2014, I had never worked in public services. Fortunately, I had been a teacher, received professional training in pedagogy, and was comfortable with the instruction piece of my job. “Outreach” was a little more difficult. For my first effort, I chose something I believed would appeal to a wide diversity of students: money

Culture Matters: Three Initiatives to Understand International Students’ Academic Needs and Expectations

This paper describes three initiatives to target our library\u27s outreach efforts through better understanding the challenges faced by our international students. We first convened a research advisory focus group of international graduate students to hear first-hand the type of specific support students were seeking in their programs. The majority of our graduate students are African, a group severely underrepresented in library literature regarding instruction and services. Letting students speak in their own words and tell their own stories reveals not only their preconceptions about academic success in the United States but their experiential ability to identify the gaps which present so high a risk to retention and graduation. We then broadened the participant base to include undergraduate international students to solicit qualitative responses with the goal of understanding how the cultural background, educational expectations, and research process differ domestically and abroad; challenges that our international learners face using academic libraries in the United States; and the problems posed by working on complex material in English. Finally, all international students were invited to participate in a pilot workshop on academic writing. The paper concludes by describing how strategies for serving international students through instruction and outreach have resulted in internationalizing our services for all students

Our Community Chimes In

In this edition of Practitioner Panel, we share comments from the graduate librarian community about key research skills librarians cover when providing course instruction, workshops, and research consultations; types of training offered for new faculty, adjuncts, and graduate teaching assistants; and some AI tools librarians are currently using and strategies for discussing AI use with graduate students. (Some responses have been very lightly edited for typos or clarity.) After the questions and answers, we present overviews of two notable resources, adapted from responses to our Spring 2024 call for information about conference presentations pertinent to graduate librarianship. While we did not receive enough submissions to warrant a standalone “conference roundup” issue, we are pleased to share these two contributions as part of this issue’s Practitioner Panel