Keytag It: An Exploration of a Creative and Customizable Research Guide Promotion

The research guide is a common tool librarians use to communicate with and instruct their audiences. Despite their prevalence and value to users, research guides remain underused. There are many examples of efforts encouraging guide use, but few studies have measured the effectiveness of that promotion. Academic Outreach librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) promote research guides through inexpensive and small keytags--similar to retail customer loyalty keychain tags. Findings of a quantitative analysis suggest the keytags have positively influenced guide use and support anecdotal reports of increased interaction with intended audiences

Creating a sustainable graduate student workshop series

Purpose - This paper reports on librarians’ experience creating and sustaining a workshop and webinar series for graduate students over the course of four years. Design/methodology/approach - Difficulties hosting and promoting stand-alone graduate workshops and a collaborative method for planning workshop days and webinars are described in this case study. Attendance data were collected and recorded for each event and additional quantitative data were collected via registration forms and post-event surveys. Findings - Working collaboratively as a department eased planning and promotional responsibilities, allowing for a sustainable workshops series. Focusing on a limited number of events per semester and developing a brand identity for the series streamlined promotion and increased attendance, relative to discipline-based, stand-alone workshops. Originality/value - While many libraries host workshops, the originality of our program lies in the collaborative planning and promotion process that efficiently uses librarian time and expertise to continuously offer well-attended graduate workshops and webinars. This case study could be used as an example for institutions considering starting a workshop series or those experiencing difficulties with stand-alone workshops

Innovate at Your Library with Business Model Generation

The Business Model Canvas has been widely adopted and adapted for use in wide range of business settings to explore innovation. This poster considers its use in the library to transform current practices and create new value for our audiences

Social Media Best Practices in Academic Libraries (2016)

In order to understand current trends and use of social media in libraries, VCU Libraries created and conducted an online survey using SurveyMonkey. Our approach was informed by the study of social media and public relations practice conducted by Wright and Hinson (Wright, Donald K. and Michelle Drifka Hinson. 2015. “Examining Social and Emerging Media Use in Public Relations Practice: A Ten-Year Longitudinal Analysis.” Public Relations Journal 9). The VCU Libraries survey consisted of 22 multiple-choice, multiple-answer, and open ended questions. The survey was distributed to email discussion lists frequented by library professionals involved in management or communications. The data presented here in summary form includes responses from all 198 respondent

Same Question, Different World: Replicating an Open Access Research Impact Study

To examine changes in the open access landscape over time, this study partially replicated Kristin Antelman’s 2004 study of open access citation advantage. Results indicated open access articles still have a citation advantage. For three of the four disciplines examined, the most common sites hosting freely available articles were independent sites, such as academic social networks or article sharing sites. For the same three disciplines, more than 70% of the open access copies were publishers’ PDFs. The major difference from Antelman’s is the increase in the number of freely available articles that appear to be in violation of publisher policies

Innovation in libraries may be as simple as staying on the bus

Innovation is often thought of as doing something completely new. In fact, innovation may also be viewed as an iterative process that builds on existing knowledge and, through trial and error and incremental successes, makes something better. This iterative process is the focus of this paper that expand on our presentation given at the 2016 Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians.Using the Helsinki Bus Station Theory and other perspectives as the framework for exploring how innovation and entrepreneurship can be applied to libraries, the authors identified activities that initiate and encourage innovation in library settings. Conference attendees learned techniques for implementing interactive innovation

Digital Portfolio: Storytelling from Student to Professional

The Digital Portfolio helps employers validate skills and employability. For students, the digital presentation of creative material, skills and competencies becomes a life-long resource. This presentation, by a business research librarian and a career and industry adviser, will provide participants examples of students transitioning their digital storytelling. The presenters will share resources and strategies to coach students from simply managing a collection of digital material through to a Digital Portfolio demonstrating a professional identity

Advance Graduate Research: Re-examining Outreach with Workshops

Academic Outreach librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) offer a full range of instructional services to support upper-level and graduate students. Like most academic libraries, this includes workshops as well as course-integrated instruction and small group or individual consultations. While the latter have grown over the years, workshop attendance has dwindled. Offerings were cut until almost none were left, leaving a void but more importantly providing an opportunity to re-envision the role of workshops in outreach efforts. The Advance Your Research workshop series was developed to go beyond traditional instruction to explore new and different themes and audiences, demonstrating the libraries’ relevance to the research process. Sessions and promotion efforts specifically targeted graduate students embracing new channels of communication and topics more closely aligned with the needs of today’s scholarly communication including the world of data, scholarly publishing, and modern copyright issues, as well as old standards like literature reviews and citation management. Collaboration between subject specialists and other experts in the library encouraged the creation of strong instructional content. This poster presentation details the launch of the successful series that included two full days of workshops with additional online and in person sessions. Thus far, the sessions have exceeded attendance expectations and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. The poster covers the planning process with illustrative examples of promotional material and strategies, as well as discusses evaluative measures used to continually improve the workshop experience

Face(book)ing the Facts: A Librarian’s Guide to Surviving Facebook

Social networks are increasingly popular tools for personal communication. Large numbers of patrons use Facebook or similar websites daily, but can libraries use Facebook effectively? Our presentation will provide an overview of Facebook and its use in an academic library setting

A new life for the READ Scale: Calibrating a time and effort measure for patron interactions

Why did you do this activity, project, or research?Patron interaction statistics tell compelling stories. However, rich interactions are often reduced to a single number. The READ (Reference Effort Assessment Data) Scale adds a welcome qualitative dimension. Academic libraries embraced the scale to measure the effort and knowledge provided by those staffing information and research service points. The 6-point scale is relatively simple and easy to implement, with interactions involving no specialized knowledge and effort at one end with those requiring the most on the other end. Developed by Gerlich and Berardt in 2003, it is still widely used in the United States. In fact, VCU Libraries adopted it over a decade later as part of a move to a new reporting system that incorporated it. Our experience was positive, but it became clear the application of ratings was inconsistent and the standard guidance and examples did not always resonate with local and current practice. One major concern was that frontline employees felt that the nature of their patron interactions were not reflected in the original READ scale\u27s examples and therefore frequently rated their patron interactions as being less complex than they actually were. How did you do this? A workshop with a series of interactive activities was held to bring multiple departments together to calibrate everyone’s understanding of the rating levels and collaboratively develop updated READ Scale guidance and examples that reflected the reality of their patron interactions. We began with a pre-test where employees were asked to anonymously score 10 scenarios using the READ Scale. In the workshop, we divided attendees into small groups and gave each group new scenarios to work on. Group members talked through how they\u27d individually score each scenario and came to a consensus READ score for each scenario. This was followed by a full-group reflective discussion, a post-test with the original 10 scenarios, and elicitation of example patron interactions for each READ Scale score. These examples informed the development of our localized READ Scale. What did you discover? What are the limitations? The resulting READ Scale documentation and examples provided much-needed clarification and allowed us to gather more accurate statistics on how we engaged with our users and ultimately make better data-informed decisions. The process itself was also transformative as three departments with different roles learned from each other and worked together to improve an important but often frustrating assessment procedure. How have findings been applied? What lessons did you learn? What is the potential value to the wider performance measurement/assessment/user experience library community? The updated READ Scale has served us well for over three years. In addition to the increased confidence in our statistics, the experience gave us a common language to continue the discussion as new questions and challenges arose. The original READ Scale offers great promise, but it has become dated since its creation in 2003 and may not reflect local circumstances. Other libraries who currently use the READ Scale or who are considering its adoption could potentially find our experience helpful to create more relevant guidance and examples