Making a Mark in the First Year: Initiating and Implementing Large-Scale Projects as a New Librarian

New librarians are in a position to bring innovative ideas to their organization, but are often unsure of how to go about implementing big projects. This article presents a case study of two online learning librarians in their first year of librarianship, outlining how they initiated and implemented large-scale projects and discussing challenges they faced and lessons they learned

Informing Website Navigation Design with Team-Based Card Sorting

In 2016, Utah State University (USU) Libraries redesigned the library website’s main menu and underlying information architecture (IA) in response to a number of known usability problems and limitations. Card sorting studies were conducted with a group of USU undergraduate students and a mixed group of faculty and graduate students to help develop a better understanding of users’ mental models of library-related research and service tasks. Participants worked in teams to sort, rank and label cards pertaining to the content and feature of the library’s website. Afterwards, participants discussed and performed usability tasks on each other’s categories. Results were used to inform the design of a new IA and menu structure, while best practices from usability studies and trends in academic library website design were used to help with menu and link labeling. The final design was validated through follow-up discussions with staff, usability tests, and category/reverse category tests

Pizza with a Side of Outreach: Re-Invigorating Library Outreach at Distance Campuses

In Fall 2016, we began hosting library open houses at our Regional Campuses (RC). In collaboration with our RC administrators and student government, these events serve as an ice-breaker for interactions between librarians and students. They raise awareness of library resources and services and ease anxiety about reaching out to the library for assistance, while providing food as an incentive to meet with us

Making a Mark in the First Year: Initiating and Implementing Large-Scale Projects as a New Librarian

New librarians are in a position to bring innovative ideas to their organization, but are often unsure of how to go about implementing big projects. This article presents a case study of two online learning librarians in their first year of librarianship, outlining how they initiated and implemented large-scale projects and discussing challenges they faced and lessons they learned

Ask a Catbrarian: Marketing Library Services Using a Cat

This case study aims to describe how employees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Undergraduate Library (UGL) utilized a cat mascot as part of a marketing campaign to promote awareness of library resources and services and to overcome undergraduate students’ library anxiety. The authors describe how the idea of a cat mascot emerged, how librarians determined campaign objectives, and the process they undertook for developing videos, social media posts, events and displays for the campaign. This article also describes how the campaign was able to build a sense of community not only among the large university library system but the entire campus community

Academic Libraries, Government Information, and the Persistent Problem of Jargon

The shift to born-digital and digitized materials has ultimately increased access and convenience for users, but in many ways it has also complicated the process of finding information. While users may struggle with catalog interfaces or reading call numbers, most have a basic understanding of how to locate a physical book. But in the digital environment, users have no built-in model for what sequence of clicks or keywords will get them to the information they need. This problem is exacerbated for specialized areas like government information, where more and more data and documents are readily available online via a variety of public web portals. Libraries often curate these portals using research guides or other domain-specific reference websites, providing major points of access for users. However, designing these specialized sites to be user-centered, rather than domaincentered, presents numerous challenges. For instance, how should the needs of different user groups be balanced? How should complex information be structured to support domain experts, while also helping orient and remove barriers for new users? Answering these questions is especially important to Utah State University Libraries (USU), which serve as a Regional Depository for the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). USU’s Government Information Department supports not only our community of 25,000 undergraduate and 3,000 graduate students, many of whom learn at a distance, but also local and regional communities as a matter of public access. To be successful, these users need to understand and be able to effectively navigate the “library within a library” that is government information. To support this broad community and their range of needs, our websites need to strike the right balance between straightforward, content-focused design and more supportive, instruction-heavy design

Unlocking Student Engagement: Success and Failure in Redesigning a First-Year Library Orientation

Are you struggling to find the balance between an informative and entertaining library orientation program? This interactive presentation will explore how librarians overcame numerous challenges to develop an engaging, scalable first-year library orientation session. During the orientation, students use the library’s virtual and physical spaces to solve clues and reveal a four-digit lockbox combination. Presenters will share strategies for adopting a similar session and lead attendees in a simulation of the lockbox activity