by Jenna Pitera
Instruction Librarian
Union College
My colleagues joke that I am always selling. I am an instruction librarian at a small liberal arts college that calls itself ‘very relationship based.’ When I came to Union College in Upstate New York, in a barely post-pandemic world, I had an uphill battle to climb when I tried to communicate the utility of our library to the campus. During the pandemic, the library was a rockstar amongst campus services, finding innovative ways to continue services and instruction in a remote environment, but despite my colleagues’ immense efforts, many faculty had moved to a research instruction model where they sprinkled how to find research articles into their standard lessons, using the methods they employ in their own research rather than working with librarians. “I just teach my students what I do” said an economics faculty member to me when I asked him how he works with the library. “I know how to find articles.”
While institutional change is my dream as an instruction librarian: a formal credit-based information literacy course, a seminar that incorporates library instruction by design… at Union this wasn’t a reality. The college had recently done away with a required sophomore-level course that had students work on research, and asked faculty to collaborate with a librarian. With the loss of the sophomore research course there was now no single course that made sense to build library instruction partnerships. We would have to explain the utility of the library in a more grassroots way, without relying on built-in course partnerships.
There was no effective way to reach all the faculty at Union at once. Everyone receives too many emails, sees too many posters, and attends too many meetings. In a world of burnout and information overload I’d have to make myself memorable to faculty in a way that was more personal. My first step was to begin assessing which faculty members and departments do utilize research instruction. I started collecting comprehensive instruction statistics that included faculty names and departments. After a few semesters, a clearer picture emerged: we were missing STEM fields. While many humanities instructors utilized library instruction and had strong relationships with our librarians, STEM faculty were not major users of our services. In my first two terms, I did not enter a single psychology, biology, economics, or math course. Most of our instruction was focused on years one and two, and courses where students were working on theses and senior writing work were not typically seeing librarians.
Collecting information on which departments were missing from our instruction program helped me focus my conversations with faculty who might not be aware of our services and skillset. I worked on developing subject-specific library guides in STEM fields, and sending them to department chairs to ask for feedback. This opened up conversations with these departments, and also showed them that librarians had specialized knowledge in their fields, and could show their students how to use available resources.
Next, I hit the pavement. I asked to attend department faculty meetings. When this did not return a lot of invitations, I started attending any lectures or talks hosted by STEM departments. I’d strike up conversations after the talks. “Hi, I’m a new instruction librarian at Union!” I’d begin and take that opportunity to add what I do. “My job is to come into classes and help students learn how to research and use resources in their discipline. Are you from the [biology] department? This was a great talk! Is this talk relevant to your discipline? What’s your research focus?” Asking faculty about their research often led to conversations about their courses and before they knew it, I was explaining to them how the library could help in their field.
When these informal conversations started to work and I began getting invited into the classrooms of departments that the library had not traditionally worked with, I decided to share the secrets of these informal sales pitches with my library colleagues. Other librarians (Johnson; King; and Kranich) have used various sales and marketing techniques to connect with teaching faculty. I constructed a plan: every member of our library’s instruction committee would offer to take a faculty member of their choice out for coffee, attend a talk, or find another way to strike up *one* conversation a term where they learned what the faculty member teaches, and shared their instruction skills and goals. We offered to pay for any coffees purchased, and we kept a chart of who we’d talked with. We attempted to formalize the informal. Often, off-the-cuff conversations can’t be quantified and counted as official library outreach, but by tracking and listing who we had reached, we hoped to make our efforts targeted and organized. Not every librarian had the heart of a seller, like me, so I would help them plan some talking points and key conversation topics.
My next means of advertising was simply by doing a really good job when I was invited into STEM courses. I’d heard in some of my conversations with faculty that one reason they did not invite librarians into their courses was that their time was very limited, and many years ago when they’d asked librarians to lecture… they’d done just that. They had lectured for 50 minutes, without providing much student engagement or personalizing their session to the students’ topics. I had to work to change their perception of what library instruction looked like. I conducted faculty consultations, requested course assignments, and tailored my sessions to the subjects and courses at hand. If the course was on Drug Delivery in Biomedical Engineering, my examples in my information literacy and searching sessions were on cancer vaccines. If I was invited into a Russian literature course… I spent some time rereading parts of Anna Karenina. In environmental sciences my example searches were on brownfields. I demonstrated that I was tailoring, focusing and specializing. The results were fantastic. Almost every faculty member who invited me to their course requested that I come in future terms. I collected exit tickets where the students relayed that they’d learned a lot about databases in their field, targeted keyword searching, and citation.
Our data found that our efforts were productive. During the 22-23’ academic year we offered an average of 21 instruction sessions per term (the college runs on a trimester system). During the first two terms that we have completed in 23-24’ we offered an average of 31 instruction sessions per term. What’s more, during the 22-23’ academic year 31% of the instruction sessions were in Sophomore Research Seminars – where collaboration with librarians was built in. During Fall 23’ and Winter 24’ Sophomore Research only accounted for 7% of instruction. If we remove the Sophomore Research Seminars from our data, we actually go from an average of 14 instruction sessions per term to an average of 29 sessions per term, meaning we had a 104% increase in instruction that was not already built into the course structure.
In two terms of the 23-24’ school year we had taught nearly as many sessions as we’d taught in all of the 2022-2023 school year, and we were hitting a wider variety of course subjects. This was the result of several factors: an initiative to reach out to first year experiences and conduct escape rooms orienting students to the library, increased capacity in the department, and the informal conversations helping to broaden our reach.
The success of these informal conversations, as one piece of a multi-pronged approach to instruction outreach, has inspired our instruction committee to broaden our outreach beyond faculty to class deans, administrators, and notably – sports teams. More than half of students at our college play some sort of sport, and by partnering with coaches, we have been able to teach students research skills during term breaks, when they’re here practicing and competing in their sports. Successful outreach breeds more opportunity: when faculty tell other members in their departments about the utility of our sessions, we get more requests! We plan to continue this work, to continue being present, and to plan more useful talking points for informal conversations as our instruction program grows.
References
Johnson, T. J. (2020). Selling your library to the college community: A look into promoting an underused library to ensure student support. Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings, 10(1), 1. https://newprairiepress.org/culsproceedings/vol10/iss1/1/
King, N., & Solis, J. (2017). Liaisons as sales force: Using sales techniques to engage academic library users. In the Library with the Lead Pipe, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/liaisons/
Kranich, N., Lotts, M., Nielsen, J., & Ward, J. H. (2020). Moving from collecting to connecting: Articulating, assessing, and communicating the work of liaison librarians. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 20(2), 285-304.