Earlier this year, I attended the ACRL Instruction Section Virtual Engagement Committee’s lightning round presentation:Engaging Students in Library Instruction – Experimentation and Innovation. Stefanie Hilles’ portion of the webinar – Engaging College Students in the Library through Serendipitous Browsing: A Creative Exploration – caught my fancy. She took inspiration from Nina Katchadourian’sSorted Book series to create an activity engaging students with her library’s print collection.
Our library recently completed a collection overhaul, transforming our stacks from overstuffed shelves crowded with faded titles to a sleeker, fresher look. We want students to browse, so for our summer book display, I asked library staff to create book spine poems of their own. The submissions ranged from ironic
to lyrical
to celebratory.
The poems are on display now, along with a sign encouraging students to make their own.
So far we haven’t gotten any takers – it’s been a slow start to the summer – but I’m hopeful that some students will try their hands at book spine poetry. If not, maybe we’ll try the display again during a higher traffic part of the year!
Focusing on college faculty and students in our work as librarians can make it easy to overlook the potential of reaching everyone else who works at our institutions. At Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, we have launched a variety of initiatives that help us connect with college staff, which we believe help us promote library resources to staff.
In my role as Student Success Librarian, I work with college staff who are also connected to student success and represent a wide variety of departments on campus. Part of my role is to connect staff to as much information about our college as I can to make sure that students are receiving the most accurate information the first time and to decrease inaccurate referrals. We have created several ways to do this. These programs go beyond the library’s traditional role of articles, books, and video.
Sinclair Community College campus
We created a series of programs, called Sinclair 101, that help staff learn about other departments on campus. The Sinclair 101 team hosts two events each month – one where we tour a campus space (such as our automotive department, culinary spaces, theatre backstage, etc.) and one where we have a question-and-answer session. Staff are generally excited about the opportunity to talk about their area and other staff appreciate the opportunity to learn about the services, resources, and offices on campus and how they can help students. The cross training and new knowledge allow everyone to better serve students and improve referrals between departments.
Our library hosts an Employees Pursuing Graduate Degrees group once a month to allow employees to share successes and struggles while encouraging one another. As the participants discuss their experiences on their way to advanced degrees, we have been able to talk about library databases, citation management apps, predatory publishing, interlibrary loan as well as general research topics. We have also been able to make referrals to our Institutional Review Board and Research, Analytics and Reporting departments. Staff appreciate the attention to their “outside of work” projects and we benefit by being on the cutting edge of community college research.
We created a series of programs called Tips, Tricks & Hidden Gems that focus on various software programs or apps that are used on our campus. A “super user” leads the session and shares tips or work arounds that are helpful to others who also use the systems. Participants in the sessions are encouraged to share their shortcuts as well as ask questions to allow the group to problem solve as needed to help everyone do their job better. We were able to have one session focused on the library where we reviewed our website and used that as jumping-off point to talk about all our resources – which are, of course, available to staff as well as students.
In general, we have raised the visibility of the library by reaching college staff to help them do their jobs better as well as helping provide current accurate information about our institution to help our students succeed.
Come join us as we honor our section award recipients this year! Following the award presentation, the awardees will be doing presentations on their work. Register for the Awards webinar online by June 1.
Yumi will present on various leadership roles she has had, including: managing a grant to promote library services to high school students, creating a student centered learning environment, and adapting to Covid-19.
Please contact Laura Mondt, CJCLS Awards Chair, with any questions or concerns: lmondt@necc.mass.edu.
Scholarly Research Committee Webinar
Thursday, June 10, 3-4pm EST
Are you a community college librarian interested in publishing in LIS Journals? Want to learn more about when, where, and how to submit? Are you curious about workflows for review, editing, and publication? Register for the Scholarly Research webinar online.
Join us for a panel discussion and lively Q & A with editors from three key LIS publications. Our participants include:
Kristen Totleben, College & Research Libraries
Marianne Ryan, portal: Libraries and the Academy
Matt Roberts, Journal of Library Outreach and Engagement
This event is sponsored by the Scholarly Research Committee of the Community & Junior Libraries Section of ACRL (CJCLS). Free, and open to all community college librarians.
CJCLS Executive Committee Meeting
The CJCLS Executive Committee will be meeting on Monday, June 28, 2021 from 2-3pm EST. We will be reviewing the accomplishments of this last year and brainstorming plans for 2021-2022. Please join us.
In June, the Zoom meeting link will be shared on the CJCLS Section page.
A couple of weeks ago, we shared this photo that was originally posted on the Vintage Books & Anchor Books Facebook page. It generated interest and shock. We also thought it might not be accurate, and we found a 2014 revision. Read this to get the inner scoop. It isn’t as “juicy” as the first version, is it? (Let this also be a lesson in verifying information and not spreading misinformation. More on that later this week…)
Here are two share-worthy resources from Pew and Gallup that paint a different picture on the state of reading.
In 2014, the Pew Research Center released “Younger Americans and Public Libraries.” In the report, 88 percent of Americans younger than 30 said they read a book in the past year compared with 79 percent of those older than 30. You can read the short version from The Atlantic’s overview, “Millennials are Out-Reading Older Generations.” In a poll that was conducted in December 2016, Gallup found that 48 percent of Americans ages 65+ read 1 to 10 books in the last year and 53 percent of Americans ages 18-29 read 1-10 books in the last year. Read more about the findings in “Rumors of the Demise of Books Greatly Exaggerated.”
How do you promote reading at your community or junior college library? Do you have partnerships with the local public library? Contests? Displays? Book clubs? Let us know in the comments.
What is your community college or community college library doing to highlight materials from other parts of the world? Do you have a collection of translated works from your international students’ home countries? Do you have a book club focusing on books from around the globe? How do you learn about books from other countries?
…for adults and children at the local, national and international levels. We intend to do so by facilitating close and direct collaboration between translators, librarians, publishers, editors, and educators, because we believe that these groups in collaboration are uniquely positioned to help libraries provide support and events to engage readers of all ages in a library framework that explores and celebrates literature from around the world.
We want to increase the visibility of international works in English translation so that more readers can enjoy the amazing diversity in these books and the perspectives they present. And we would like to do this by increasing cooperation between literary translators, international literature advocates, and librarians, who are already experts at guiding readers to new titles. Whether you are a children’s librarian or a YA blogger, a rural library director or a teacher at a large urban school with a diverse student population, we would welcome your insights as we explore collaborative opportunities to encourage readers to explore beyond the boundaries of their own culture and language.
Goals & Projects:
Book lists and guides tied to major translation awards and library themes
Programming ideas for various library user groups: children, teens, college students, adults, English Language Learners, etc.
ALA conference involvement: workshops and sessions, networking through various ALA units and offices to explore the best ways to provide information and services to librarians
Joint webinars with various ALA offices
Publisher and journal lists organized by vendors/distributors to help librarians more easily acquire books in translation
Advocacy on behalf of small publishers to increase their visibility on the review platforms that librarians commonly use for their acquisitions decisions
General education efforts to help librarians understand more thoroughly the value of translated literature and of contemporary foreign-language literature
Pan-publisher catalogs crafted specifically for librarian users, as a form of “one-stop” shopping to learn about new works coming out in translation
Exploration of ways in which non-US publishers of English translations and non-US, non-English-language publishers can more easily promote their works among libraries (Global Literature in Libraries, “About,” 2016)
If you would like to get involved with GLLI, please contact Rachel Hildebrandt at rehildebrandt@gmail.com. GLLI also have a Facebook group, which you can find here.
