Ensemble Cast: Reinventing First-Year Library Orientation to Feature All Departments

As the year winds down, you may already be planning new student orientation activities to showcase your library and services. This unique program, designed by a committee of departments, offers insight into the types of activities they implemented to help enhance interaction between library staff and students

Regram and Repost

Creating new content for a library on Instagram can be time-consuming and require a lot of planning. This entry will detail strategies for “regram-ing” and “reposting” that can help curate content and build relationships with other departments on your campus. This practice will connect with other library users (students, staff, or faculty) who are taking photos on Instagram and geotagging or using hashtags related to the library (Salomon, 2013)

Casting Students in the Leading Role: Peer Learning in Academic Libraries

Peer learning services are an emerging trend in academic libraries of various sizes. These models allow students to engage and support the research needs of other students. These interactions may build off their classroom experiences and library training, while further developing their own research skills. This handout provides the context and questions for the roundtable discussion, “Casting Students in the Leading Role: Peer Learning in Academic Libraries,” at the ACRL 2019 conference. There are also resources for additional reading on the topic

Teaching Students to Fish: Creating a Sustainable Student Peer Research Program

A Peer Research Mentor (PRM) program was developed at Musselman Library, Gettysburg College to augment traditional reference services and expand library outreach. Goals included enhancing these students’ information literacy skills helping them become better researchers, as well as sharing that knowledge with peers. This poster will highlight the initial and on-going training, their involvement at the reference desk, and outreach projects to date

Turning the Key: Unlocking Library Support Through the Syllabus

First-year seminars (FYS) provide an opportunity for librarians to engage with students early on in their academic careers. Some of these FYS courses might lack formal research or writing assignments, proving challenging for successful library integration. The presenters encountered this scenario during the spring of 2021 with sections of a University Success Skills course. They developed an instruction plan that helps students identify how the library can support them in any class and breaks down the hidden curriculum by exploring a syllabus in depth. The presenters use a syllabus to anchor the content and establish a framework for how the library can contribute to students’ academic success. We deconstruct a sample syllabus into sections-- course readings, academic integrity, exams, and research assignments throughout the session. These sections connect with different library services – course reserves, citation assistance, study space, reference help, and more. The session flows from discussing a portion of the syllabus to highlighting the related library service. Participants that work with first-year seminars or library orientation will find value in this example. This activity can scale into different settings and adjust depending on the local context. The content could adapt into a digital learning object/module as well

Milner Library: Centering Healing as an Act of Radical Transformation

Milner Library is uniquely positioned as a unit to facilitate student, faculty, and community success with our services and engagement. At this intersection, we implement critical praxis to disrupt traditional notions of academic libraries. Specifically, this poster will address shifting the concept of thriving as a form of production to one that considers how thriving can support and encourage transformational healing. This poster will highlight how our library approaches programming, collection development, instruction, and physical space and examine these concepts as tangible connections in foregrounding critical praxis. Participants can expect to develop new and deeper perspectives on how Milner Library can support their classroom endeavors and students

Ensemble Cast: Reinventing First-Year Library Orientation to Feature All Departments

Hear how library staff reimagined their first-year student orientation activity in order to highlight the work being done by individual departments and communicate how each department supports the library as a whole. The poster will explore the first-year library orientation passport activity that got students moving around the library building to engage with each department and collect passport stamps. This is a modified PowerPoint version of the poster, which had been created in the digital iPoster system

Musselman Library Passport: Extended First-Year Orientation Activity

First-year students completing Musselman Library’s portion of the fall 2018 Charting Your Course (CYC) orientation received one of these passports before beginning the activity. After visiting each of the Library departments and learning about work staff members do there, students received a passport stamp in order to track their progress

5 Banned Book (Librarian Approved) Must-Reads: In Honor of Banned Books Week

Each year, the American Library Association celebrates Banned Books for one week to inspire conversation, thought, and awareness around censorship. This Banned Books Week, Musselman Library is celebrating the freedom to read by promoting books that are banned or challenged in other libraries. We have pulled together a list of 5 books, some old and some new— but all equally beloved — that have been banned or challenged. [excerpt

Innovating Peer Research Programs Together

This presentation provides details about two distinctive and unique peer learning programs at Gettysburg College and Millersville University. It also highlights how our collaboration sparked new initiatives to advance each of our peer research programs