Relationship Building One Step at a Time: Case Studies of Successful Faculty-Librarian Partnerships

Building strong relationships between academic librarians and teaching faculty is paramount for promoting services and resources. While librarians face challenges ranging from new technologies to heightened expectations and fiscal difficulties, the key work remains in solid relationship building. Drawing on the experience of a group of subject librarians and teaching faculty at The Ohio State University, this study examines the qualities that help liaison librarians develop relationships with faculty and support ongoing library services. It explores how liaison librarians build opportunities for ongoing relationships and how they assess the successes or failures of those interactions. It chronicles interview findings that detail the importance of such skills as patience, expertise, follow-through, responsiveness, and individuality if librarians are to build solid relationships and fruitful collaborations. Finally, it offers some preliminary observations on the teaching faculty's understanding of the librarians' relationship-building efforts.No embargo

The New Knowledge Environment: Quality Initiatives in Health Sciences Libraries

published or submitted for publicatio

Policy Barriers to School Improvement: What's Real and What's Imagined?

Some of the most promising reforms are happening where school leaders are thinking differently about how to get the strongest student outcomes from the limited resources available. But even principals who use their autonomy to aggressively reallocate resources say that persistent district, state, and federal barriers prohibit them from doing more.What are these barriers? What do they block principals from doing? Is there a way around them?CRPE researchers probed these questions with principals in three states (NH, CT, MD). These principals cited numerous district, state, and federal barriers standing in the way of school improvement. The barriers, 128 in all, fell into three categories: 1) barriers to instructional innovations, 2) barriers to allocating resources differently, and 3) barriers to improving teacher quality.Upon investigation, researchers found that principals have far more authority than they think. Only 31% of the barriers cited were "real" -- immovable statutes, policies, or managerial directives that bring the threat of real consequences if broken.The report recommends educating principals on the authority they already possess, to help them find workarounds to onerous rules. The report also outlines a number of specific state and district policy changes to grant schools the autonomy they need to improve student outcomes

Identifying customer expectations is key to evidence based service delivery

As librarians and information professionals we share a common rationale: to deliver enhanced services for our customers. The importance of this is self-evident - if we don’t have customers we don't have a job. We therefore put our services at peril if we don’t put the customer at the heart of what we are trying to do. The now-familiar description of evidence based library and information practice reminds us that we need "to integrate user-reported, practitioner-observed and research-derived evidence as an explicit basis for decision-making" (Booth, 2006). This begs several important questions - Who are our users? How can we best capture reports from these users regarding their expected outcomes? How might we as library practitioners observe (and act upon!) what our users require? In attempting to answer such questions we discover potential value in methodologies with a business orientation; utilising tools from the commercial sector such as Customer Value Discovery research (McKnight, 2007a; McKnight & Berrington, 2008)

The Information Commons: a public policy report

This report describes the history of the information commons, presents examples of online commons that provide new ways to store and deliver information, and concludes with policy recommendations. Available in PDF and HTML versions.BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE at NYU SCHOOL OF LAW Democracy Program, Free Expression Policy Project 161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th floor New York NY 10013 Phone: (212) 998-6730 Web site: www.brennancenter.org Free Expression Policy Project: www.fepproject.or

The Information Commons: a public policy report

This report describes the history of the information commons, presents examples of online commons that provide new ways to store and deliver information, and concludes with policy recommendations. Available in PDF and HTML versions.BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE at NYU SCHOOL OF LAW Democracy Program, Free Expression Policy Project 161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th floor New York NY 10013 Phone: (212) 998-6730 Web site: www.brennancenter.org Free Expression Policy Project: www.fepproject.or

Beyond CD-ROM : wider horizons in the provision of electronic information

The availability of information across the networks is explored and described, along with plans for the navigation and filtering tools which will promote access to them. Issues of funding of datasets, end-user training, document delivery, the marginalization of the traditional library and the Follett Committee Review of Library Provision in Higher Education are explored. The current level of investment in CD-ROM is discussed, as well as the possibilities and limitations of the technology. The two technologies are compared and contrasted and the particular importance of services free at the point of use stressed

Cultivating Partnerships/Realizing Diversity

Academic librarians should not only seek methods for continuous learning about an increasingly diverse college student body, they are encouraged to pursue partnerships with campus agencies that work directly with students, especially those charged with building a diverse community of students. The authors present two examples to illustrate strategies-in-action