SW 317 Class Handout

This handout highlights resources to find statistical information for class assignments

Social Work 603 Library Handout

A handout designed for SW 603 students who need to learn how to find articles and policies on a chosen topic

Rev up Your Résumé: Determining Factors in the Race for an Academic Library Position

Like Indianapolis 500 drivers preparing for the race, LIS students today are gearing up for a job search in a tight market. We are examining how certain choices impact a graduate’s success in the job market. Our survey of recent graduates determines the extent to which program rankings, coursework, activities, and internships provide a competitive edge in the academic library job market

Teaching Public Administration in an Age of Austerity: Librarians and Hybrid Instruction

Eleanor Crumblehulme recently said, “Cutting libraries in a recession is like cutting hospitals in a plague.” While a number of university libraries have received drastic budget cuts during the current recession, Grand Valley State University (GVSU) has chosen to invest in their library, keeping its services and materials up-to-date and relevant for student learning. Despite receiving the lowest appropriation per student among Michigan state universities, GVSU has embraced new practices in teaching public administration and other disciplines while balancing the need to serve more students with a reduced budget. The greatest challenge amidst these changes is to continue providing students a quality education while ensuring access to the necessary resources. One of the most important resources is the library. The School of Public, Nonprofit, and Health Administration (SPNHA) at GVSU has a designated liaison librarian to order books, teach students information literacy, and connect students and faculty with needed information. The librarian’s role in teaching and assisting students becomes more difficult as students transition away from the traditional classroom and enroll in hybrid or online courses. The increase in hybrid and online courses is one strategy for maximizing resources and minimizing costs in this age of austerity. Students enrolled in online classes find less time to visit the library in person and cannot always receive library instruction in the classroom. Additionally, many students in the SPNHA Masters programs are part-time students who are working full-time. They are seldom on campus and therefore GVSU has begun to offer alternative library services for online and distance students. These services include video tutorials, online library subject guides, a rapidly growing collection of eBooks, and email and phone reference consultations. Other student services are also expanding to include online offerings for distance students and to cater to the new education environment that is more heavily based upon remote learning. This paper explores best practices in the provision of library services across course formats and across various colleges and universities. Recommendations are made for new practices for connecting students in hybrid and online courses with library resources such as library instruction and reference consultations. Recommendations are based upon a review of the literature, the services offered to hybrid courses over the past two years at GVSU, and recent practice at GVSU. Observations will include comparison of a Winter 2014 semester pilot of new library instruction for one online and one hybrid public administration (PA) class to an in-person PA course. Student pre- and post-tests as well as professor evaluations will be utilized to evaluate student learning outcomes from different instruction formats. These experiences will be used to inform the literature and provide recommendations on ways to increase student use of library resources in an age of austerity

A Good SCAM for Building Connections: Scholarly Communications Activity Mapping

Are you looking for new ways to connect with faculty? Do you know how to best support faculty publishing? Grand Valley State University Libraries has developed a scholarly activity mapping template to document current scholarly and creative practices of faculty. The data gathered can be used to identify unmet faculty scholarly needs and reveal new opportunities to build relationships with faculty. Over the last several years, our liaison librarians have worked to closely integrate library instruction services into the curriculum of their liaison areas through the use of instruction plans. At the same time our research and publishing support expanded, largely driven by faculty needs in these areas. These two threads combined in 2016 as a group of librarians collaborated to develop a framework for exploring and documenting research practices across the university. By mapping current scholarly activity, we are gathering information that can strengthen library connections with faculty, identify needs our services can meet, and inform our instruction and collection development. A few liaison librarians are piloting this new scholarly activity map for the 2016-2017 school year. Challenges and lessons learned will be shared, in addition to benefits already noticed and future plans for utilizing these scholarly activity maps more broadly. In this poster presentation we will describe the process of developing our template, challenges we have encountered, and the progress of our pilot project. This poster will be of interest to academic librarians looking for new opportunities to connect with faculty, especially liaison, subject, and scholarly communications librarians. The information and resources we share will help academic libraries grow a scholarly communications program and expand support for faculty research activities. In addition to the poster, we will share copies of our current scholarly activity mapping template and the documents that inspired this project

Factors that Increase the Probability of a Successful Academic Library Job Search

Finding a position in an academic library can be challenging for recent Library and Information Science (LIS) graduates. While LIS students are often encouraged to seek out experience, network, and improve upon their technology skills in hopes of better improving their odds in the jobmarket, little research exists to support this anecdotal advice. This study quantifies the academic and work experiences of recent LIS graduates in order to provide a better understanding of what factorsmost significantly influence the outcome of their academic library job searches. The survey results demonstrate that the job outlook is most positive for candidates who applied early, obtained academic library experience (preferably employment), participated in professional conferences, and gained familiarity with committee work

Thanks for the Feedback Taskforce Presentations

The Thanks for the Feedback Task Force was empaneled to build a libraries-wide professional development experience including learning circles and workshops for formative colleague feedback and constructive handling of ‘conflict’ using the book Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen as a guiding text for Summer 2018. Three goals were 1. Develop shared vocabulary on receiving (and giving) feedback. 2. Identify strategies and customize scripts for navigating conversations. 3. Create a tool kit on giving and receiving feedback

UL Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility Framework

This framework is meant to provide a shared understanding of the University Libraries’ commitment and approaches toward Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA). The framework is intended to ground us in theory as we move toward action, to guide us as we make decisions about IDEA-related initiatives, and to prioritize our IDEA commitment in all that we do. The framework allows us to leverage systems thinking as well as to connect library efforts to the University’s goals, values, and frameworks for IDEA. While the framework does not provide action steps, it is meant to provide ways for all library colleagues to connect themselves and their work with the Libraries’ IDEA efforts. The framework includes working definitions, design principles for IDEA efforts, an equity lens, and a selected organizational assessment tool

Can Data Drive Success?: Implementing Instruction Evaluation Forms

A committee comprised of seven Research and Instruction Librarians at Grand Valley State University met to analyze, evaluate, and recommend changes to a newly-implemented librarian instruction evaluation form. Prior to the creation of this form, instruction assessment forms were used on an individual, ad hoc basis for personal self-evaluation. In 2010, there was a grassroots effort to trial a standardized form, but it did not result in widespread adoption among teaching librarians beyond the duration of the project. In 2013, with a formal Instruction Program in place, there was renewed interest in creating an effective, sustainable, and practical library assessment that could be adopted by our colleagues. We wished to scale up from unshared, nonstandard evaluations to a standard evaluation form that would make student perceptions of library instruction more widely accessible to all instructors in order to make data driven decisions within our Instruction Program. For this reason, the Head of Instructional Services created an instruction evaluation form based on a combination of common library instruction evaluations, current evaluations in use in other GVSU programs, and research on student confidence. The intent of this trial was threefold: to test the utility of the web-based form itself, to examine the data to determine whether the form was collecting usable information, and to summarize the findings and make recommendations. More broadly, we wanted to adopt a best practice within our profession. During the 2013 trial, instruction librarians asked students to complete the evaluation by providing the link to the form either in a class session or asynchronously. The data was collected using LibAnalytics software. Numerical data was analyzed using basic statistics and Excel PivotTables. Qualitative data was coded by the committee for statistical analysis. Our preliminary findings consist of 680 student evaluation forms from September 6 through October 1, 2013. Moving forward, connecting evaluation forms to course and section number would allow librarians to compare student responses to other data sets in Libanalytics including our instruction statistics and consultations. One key to this ongoing trial’s success has been the development of a data driven culture within our Instruction Program, due in part to our newly established Head of Instructional Services. Other institutions can learn from our library’s first attempt at utilizing a standard library instruction evaluation form (2010) and a second more successful implementation (2013) along with future recommendations that we will share