Challenges and opportunities of creating library services for the Singapore campus

When the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, opened its Singapore campus, it was critical that library services be provided and integrated into the curriculum. The University Libraries team overcame many challenges to create a libraries services infrastructure to support the students. Work began with then-hospitality liaison librarian Cory Tucker and has been carried on by current hospitality liaison librarian Lateka Grays. Our greatest strengths were the expertise of the liaisons and the support of the university. We faced challenges to our mission of establishing library services in three key areas: access, communication, and technology. We developed a list of questions to help us address these challenges and keep us focused on the desired outcome

Interpreting the Las Vegas Strip

This poster will explore the idea of adapting the framework used by the National Park Service to train park rangers to develop interpretive talks to create a research project that integrates communication and business information literacy skills. The goal is for students to conduct an interpretive talk of a hospitality-related business or casino/hotel property in the same manner that a national park is the focus of traditional interpretive talks. Ideally, the assignment could be embedded into any tourism or management course and has potential implications for general business courses as well. The William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has an enrollment of over 2,300 undergraduate students. Given its proximity to the Las Vegas Strip, the College has cultivated strong industry connections that are ideal partners for this project. In collaboration with a Hotel College faculty member and the Hospitality Librarian, the creation of an engaging research project for undergraduate students is plausible. Studies cite critical thinking and strong communication skills as important for successful hospitality professionals.The opportunity to help students develop these skills using a nontraditional method with feedback from professionals is beneficial because of the networking opportunities it can provide potential employers and employees. It could also become a unique method for librarians to embed library instruction in a course to impact business research and professional communication skills

Vendor of the Month: A Marketing Collaboration

Marketing library resources remains an important issue despite library reductions in staff and collections budgets. In order to maintain or expand marketing programs, libraries could do well tapping into the expertise available through the vendors supplying resources to libraries. A case study of a library marketing program called, “Vendor of the Month,” at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas explains the collaboration between the library and its vendors to increase awareness and use of selected electronic resources

Career information literacy for students’ interview success

Cross Campus Relationship Building • Seek unique opportunities • Cross-promotion opportunities • Problem Solving • Appreciation by leadershi

A Collaborative Voyage to Improve Students\u27 Career Information Literacy

Librarians, a member of the Hotel College faculty, and a member of the Career Services staff at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas collaborated in the design, implementation and evaluation of a non-traditional research assignment asking students to demonstrate real world information literacy skills. Session attendees will explore the process by which the traditional librarian-teaching faculty member collaboration grew into a richer project involving a non-traditional partnering. Attendees will be guided through a discussion on levels of collaboration and an audit of potential non-traditional partner opportunities at their own institutions. Attendees will examine the product of this partnership: an assignment that asks students to generate informed questions to ask in a job interview. The assignment was designed to be useable in larger classes where a classic “term paper” style research assignment might be unrealistic to effectively administer and grade. After a session with the librarians on conducting research, students enrolled in a course on professional development within the hospitality industry are required to develop questions that they might ask of an interviewer that demonstrate the company- and industry-specific knowledge they gleaned via their research. Students are motivated by the idea of positioning themselves favorably in an interview in a way that a traditional term paper on a company or an industry fails to motivate. Attendees will brainstorm ways a similar approach (assigning the development of informed questions) might be used in different settings. The presentation will close by describing the personal and professional benefits of collaboration for those involved

Use and satisfaction of library resources and services by hospitality patrons: An exploratory study

A great challenge for present day libraries is to move from the thought process of being a destination location with a captive audience to positioning its services to meet the needs of its users. This paper explores the frequency of library use and satisfaction of library resources and/or services by hospitality education patrons. Using data collected with patrons (N=368) of five Hospitality Management programs across the country, the study found significant differences in library access, use, and satisfaction based on gender, academic status, and international versus non-international patrons

Hot Topics Trade Publications Connect Research with Career Ambitions

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), is home to the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality. Due to the college’s size and its importance for the city’s economy, it is a separate school from the College of Business. Information literacy for hospitality has been a priority for the college’s first-year seminar program since its inception, and the hospitality librarian has been working with seminar coordinators to refine this aspect of the curriculum for over six years. Five years ago, the hospitality librarian began collaborating with a new teaching and learning librarian in order to give him more teaching experience at UNLV and to consider new ways to work with a large program like a first-year seminar, which averages five to ten sections each semester. Among the products of this collaboration is the “Hot Topics” lesson plan, which gives students a hands-on introduction to trade publications as a vital resource for aspiring hospitality professionals. After an icebreaker activity to establish rapport with students, the librarian begins the Hot Topics lesson plan by providing a brief overview of research sources so that students have a basis for understanding how trade publications compare with other sources, especially the news articles and scholarly articles that are covered in first-year English courses. Work with upper-level undergraduates in hospitality revealed that students lacked familiarity with trade publications as an essential resource for continued learning about the field as it evolves, and through curriculum mapping with other instruction librarians, we learned that trade publications were not emphasized in other classes. The rest of the lesson plan is relatively student-driven. Students begin by considering a topic from one of the concentration areas of the college (food and beverage, hotel management, tourism, event management, golf, gaming, and more). Rather than demonstrate how to find trade publications, we provide students with instructions that they can follow at their own pace. Focal points for these instructions include keyword searching, reading a database record, and retrieving full text (not just stopping with the abstract). After students select the article that they feel would most impact the hospitality industry, they present a summary of the article to the rest of the class. In order to leverage students’ competitive spirit, we ask students to vote on the most impactful development (besides their own). We work with instructors to arrange for the top vote-getters to receive extra credit. This part of the activity gives students an opportunity to get a low-stakes experience with presenting and to share their findings with the rest of the class. Playing an active part in the class (especially with extra credit involved) dramatically increases students’ level of engagement. Presentations also give librarians an informal way to assess students’ progress. Depending on the circumstances of instruction, student activities can be group-based, individual, in-person, or online. We have used it most frequently in fifty-minute, one-shot sessions in the library computer labs. We will share the templates we used to prompt and organize student activities. Regarding adapting the lesson plan to different applications, the versions discussed in this entry are self-contained lesson plans that we used and adapted for approximately three years. More recently, the Hot Topics exercise has been integrated more completely into the assignments for the first-year seminar course. In one instance, research in class served as a starting point for teams to build an annotated bibliography on an issue in hospitality management. Most recently, students worked in teams to present virtually on their Hot Topics issue