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

Your Key(tag) to Success: A Creative and Customizable Method to Promote Research Guides

The research guide is one of the most common tools librarians use to communicate with and instruct their audiences. Despite their prevalence and the general consensus that they are useful, research guides remain underutilized. The literature offers many examples of efforts encouraging guide use but little work exists measuring the effectiveness of that promotion. The VCU Libraries Academic Outreach department promote their guides through inexpensive and small keytags­­ similar to retail customer loyalty keychain tags. The objective of this research is to measure the effectiveness of this approach, using both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Each tag has a URL printed on one side and a subject­related image on the other. Starting with 10 tags in fall 2013, we now have 41 tags with more in production. Given away individually or strung together as a keychain, the tags are used at events, during instruction, and in one­on­one consultations. With more than 20,000 tags distributed, anecdotal response is overwhelming positive. These tags provide an astonishing number of opportunities for conversations and interactions. To determine the impact of the keytags on guide use, we are analyzing guide use before and after the advent of the tags, as well as comparing use for guides with tags to those without. We have tags for a variety of guides in many disciplines, which allows us to customize our promotion and message for the needs of users from different disciplines with different focuses

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

Research Guides: Getting Past the Home Page

LibGuides, or research guides, are an essential tool for many librarians. However, students rarely navigate beyond the home page, leaving many resources unused. The purpose of this research is to determine if students fail to use secondary pages because they are not finding them or because their information needs are being met by those resources found on the home page. Six scientific LibGuides are being studied. On three, the primary feature of the home page is a menu leading to the secondary pages. Except for one featured book, no links to resources are provided on these home pages, forcing students to navigate to a secondary page. On the remaining guides, the menu was replaced with the more traditional “top” links to databases and reference sources, making it possible to use only the home page. Using the internal LibGuide statistics, we hope to determine if students using the guides with menus are both finding and using more resources than students using the more traditional guides. If so, guides designed with “top” links may not be meeting students’ information needs, and efforts should be made to make secondary pages more discoverable or enhance the resources found on the home page. This poster will include images of the LibGuides used for the research, as well as results on the behavior of the guide users. Based on the results, I hope to provide practical advice on designing home pages that best serve the needs of students

Informationist Supplement: A Collaboration to Improve Collaboration

Four librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University teamed up with faculty in mathematics and biomedical engineering to receive an NIH informationist administrative supplement. The supplement supports a research team developing a mathematical model of ventilator-induced lung inflammation. Our goals are to develop workflow strategies to enhance team communication, provide information and data management services, assist with dissemination of the research results, and assess the impact of the grant. We are currently examining the team’s workflow to find data management and communication gaps and are evaluating tools for group annotation and sharing of articles and references

Providing Support for an Interdisciplinary Research Group with a Multidisciplinary Informationist Team: Is It Effective?

Background Three subject librarians and a data librarian, representing three departments and two libraries at a university, were awarded an NLM Informationist Supplement to support an interdisciplinary Research Group with an NIH grant. The Informationist Team developed a model to utilize the skills of multiple librarians to support the increasing number of interdisciplinary and interprofessional research groups at the university. Librarians routinely attended lab meetings and shared notes with each other to monitor researcher needs. Methods The Informationist Team regularly provided support for literature searches, creating search alerts, bibliographic citation management and sharing, and data management to an interdisciplinary Research Group over a two year period. Two new library workshops were also developed after observing researcher needs. Surveys were administered to the Research Group prior to, during, and after a two-year period to assess the effectiveness of an Informationist Team model that employs the skills of multiple librarians. Results Surveys administered to the Research Group showed that the group increased their use of appropriate resources to find scientific and technical information over a two-year period. Additionally, by the final survey, all members of the Research Group had worked with a librarian and all felt it had saved them time. The data librarian also facilitated the creation of a form to collect data for a lab protocol that helped the group avoid significant errors. Conclusions The relationship between the multidisciplinary Informationist Team and the Research Group was mutually beneficial. The Research Group was able to improve its knowledge and efficiency with the Informationist Team’s assistance, and regular librarian attendance at lab meetings enabled librarians to enhance their understanding of basic science research. Having a multidisciplinary team of librarians allowed for sharing the workload and for deeper assistance to the Research Group in specialized areas such as data management

Collaborating to Improve Collaboration: Informationist Team Support for an Interdisciplinary Research Group

Objectives Three subject librarians and a data librarian, representing three departments and two libraries at a university, were awarded an NLM Informationist Supplement to support an interdisciplinary research group with an NIH grant. The Informationist Team developed a model to utilize the skills of multiple librarians to support the increasing number of interdisciplinary and interprofessional research groups at the university. Methods A pre-survey was administered to the Research Group to provide a baseline assessment of their use of librarian expertise and library services. The Informationist Team met to identify areas of expertise to support the objectives of the grant. Literature searching, bibliographic citation management and sharing, and data management were the first areas to be considered. Librarians routinely attended lab meetings and shared notes with each other to keep up with researcher needs. When possible, research questions were answered in the lab meetings by librarians. Interviews with Research Group members were used to develop a data management plan. Collaborative tools to facilitate team communication and support research being conducted in multiple buildings on two campuses were investigated. Future work will include publication support, assessing research impact, and appraising the usefulness of the Informationist Team to the Research Group

Can you spare 2 hours? Target your audience with customized e-news

E-newsletters (built in an affordable or free online mail platform) allow librarians to reach faculty with pointed, subject-based information. This poster features a sample from a series of e-newsletters created by liaison librarians, as well as tips for producing custom newsletters and discussion of impact