Vilelle Luke and Barber Maryke

Introduction

If no one on campus is aware of an academic library’s excellent staff and services and collections, does the excellence exist? For today’s college library, this is not a rhetorical question. As the forces of disintermediation, digitization, and crowd-sourcing separate the library from its traditional role as an information gatekeeper, libraries must respond by showing their value in the multitude of interactions that take place among campus community members every day.

An excellent library actively engages its constituents, and many libraries have found avenues to achieve this engagement, from outreach to instruction to collaboration. At the Wyndham Robertson Library at Hollins University, we believe our engagement, and thus our excellence, manifests itself in the number of friends, partners, and allies we have across the Hollins campus. This is no accident. We have worked intentionally and diligently over the past decade to seek, create, and foster these partnerships with individuals, departments and organizations across campus.

In this chapter, we will first describe how prevailing trends can result in the worst-case scenario: a library’s fall into irrelevance. Next, we will examine solutions presented in the literature and also from our own experience. We will describe how our library staff has approached the problems identified in the worst-case scenario by designing programs and services that focus on being outward-looking and on taking the library to our patrons, rather than waiting for them to come to us. We will look closely at our own practices, and why we have implemented certain activities. To help the reader understand potential outcomes, each section also contains a detailed case study of partnerships we have built across the Hollins campus.

The challenges of today’s academic environment

In a worst-case scenario of the future for academic libraries, users ignore our services in favor of more convenient commercial options. Gradually but surely the value of our collections will decrease; even when content is unique, its relative invisibility will make it useless to people who are accustomed to bypassing libraries altogether. Faced with declining usage statistics and loss of the campus community’s support, libraries will lose funding and have to decrease services and resources as a result. The outcome is obvious: obsolescence. This scenario starts with a widening gap between the library and its users, a disconnect that futurists like to predict will occur sooner rather than later and that librarians everywhere fear may one day happen on their watch. The potential for disengagement exists in today’s trends, and we can project it across the various groups that make up our campus constituencies: students, faculty, administrative departments, and, finally, our own organizations.

The current generation of students is most likely to begin a research project by using a textbook or a simple online search. Research confirms this: OCLC’s most recent study of undergraduate students found that 83 percent begin a search for information using a search engine, while 0% begin on the library’s web site (2010: 54). Even when students do use library resources, because of the proliferation of e-journals and e-books and our best efforts to make access to them as seamless as possible, students can be frequent library users even as they have completely disassociated our resources from the library in which their access originates. The students do not believe they need us to facilitate their searching: one of the characteristics of the millennial generation is that its members are self-directed and self-sufficient. In a 2002 survey of student library use, Gardner and Eng noted that only 12.6 per cent of the students in their sample were coming to the library for research assistance. Most, while coming to do academic work, were engaged in self-directed pursuits: studying alone or in peer groups, and using library computers for class work (Gardner and Eng, 2005: 408, 412). If they did get stuck, if they needed help, would they ask a librarian? Not necessarily: because of “library anxiety,” most users are likely to ask assistance from a friend or a known person before asking a librarian. The knowledge that librarians are experts, that working with a librarian may save them time and enhance their work, does not necessarily affect this preference. In an oft-quoted study by Judith Andrews, she describes how students showed a marked preference for learning library skills from each other: “Inevitably students preferred to ask friends for help” (1991: 12).

Our relationship with students is not guaranteed, and neither are our ties to the faculty. Their disengagement from the library might look like this: a generation of professors who do their research via databases and other repositories but who know little or nothing about the librarians who administer them; who have no communication with the library other than to use services such as interlibrary loan and reserves. Most academic librarians can name a few professors who fit, or almost fit, this profile. The faculty are busy preparing, teaching, grading, advising, serving on committees, working to keep up with their field, doing research, and publishing. It is not surprising to note, then, that “faculty have been trained through years of schooling and practice as professionals to value solitary work highly and to maintain exclusive control over teaching and research projects” (Christiansen et al., 2004: 118). This poses a challenge to librarians: with faculty thus isolated, is it any wonder that “collaboration with librarians is something faculty think about rarely and act on even less frequently”? (Jenkins, 2005: 23). While some libraries have had success collaborating with faculty on information literacy instruction, this relationship is by no means guaranteed. To quote Paul Jenkins again, “Historically, faculty have shown that while they support the idea of library instruction in principle, they do not always follow through once specifics need to be planned” (2005: 59).

Like the faculty, our colleagues in the university’s administrative departments are very busy. For several decades, American higher education has been under pressure to demonstrate greater productivity and efficiency, while experiencing a steady course of belt-tightening measures. Unfortunately these trends can result in competition, with departments vying against one another in a race for scarce resources. William Massy pictures this struggle in his 1996 book Resource Allocation in Higher Education: “Each group argues for its view in terms of high principles, often reinforced by the fact that success also furthers self-interest … value diversity politicizes efforts to reallocate resources among units, since downsized departments see themselves as victims of an ideologically driven conspiracy” (1996: 5–6). It is unclear who will be the library’s ally among university departments who characterize the allocation process as an intra-institutional battle about values, who see their departments as “besieged” and their neighbors as conspirators. In an environment of division and competition, it would be more convenient to marginalize libraries by characterizing them as ancillary rather than integral to the institution. To make matters worse, isolation can result in the hoarding of power: libraries may not be at the decision-making table as often as we would like to be if we are thus isolated from our colleagues. In our worst-case scenario, libraries cannot remain relevant because they are not present and in a position of influence when budgets are set and other decisions are made.

Libraries also play a role in our doomsday scenario: the role of the ostrich. The truth is that we are quite capable of hastening our own demise by hunkering down and holding fast to the known model: we have the information and our users should come to us; if they don’t, it isn’t our fault. Who could blame us, really? With reduced resources and smaller staff, even if fewer users come to us we are still very busy. Smaller libraries have to consider that there are only so many services one person can fit into their job description. The larger institutions have large commitments: to their own many internal projects, to cooperative ventures with other libraries, to the associations we have built to enhance and serve our profession. There is so much to do, surely now is not the time to add yet another bullet point to the agenda.

The outward-looking library; or, why it is natural and beneficial to play well with others

Except for this: if we don’t change our agenda, it will be changed for us, as others perceive that the library is no longer a contributor to the success of our institutions. The current environment provides a challenge to libraries: engage, or risk obsolescence, and we can choose to see this as a threat or as an opportunity. If we see it as an opportunity, the result can be a library that is newly revived as an outward-looking organization.

There is a shift here from viewing ourselves as mere provider of services to a more social model; one in which we focus on the possibilities for collaboration with those same constituencies we have always served (and still do). Many of today’s librarians have already made the change: they have successfully ventured beyond their desks and outside the walls of their buildings. They have found that partnerships can bring in additional resources in terms of both funds and staff. And once outside, they have also found that the connections they make can serve as bridges to bring their constituencies back into the library, virtually and/or in person. Their stories, and other stories from the literature on higher education, confirm the possibilities and positive benefits of cooperation between different campus constituencies: increased strength, improved relationships, a boost to creativity, and lasting gains that can be measured and assessed.

Some call this model user-centered; in his writings about user experience design and marketing, Brian Mathews has gone one step further to adopt the term “user-sensitive” library: “It is a user-sensitive library, one with genuine interest toward its users, that builds an ongoing and beneficial relationship” (2009: 9). Perhaps this term can point us toward a new paradigm: instead of the library being one single place where we wait for our users to congregate at the proverbial “heart of the campus,” the user-sensitive library is part of its central nervous system, connected and vital to both organs and limbs, and active throughout the body.

If this is what a user-sensitive, collaboration-driven library looks like, what might be the characteristics of a user-sensitive librarian operating within that system? First and foremost, this librarian must be able to collaborate effectively both within and outside the library walls – and to do so, they must be up front about their own identity. For example, liaison librarians who have subject knowledge in a particular field or staff with advanced technical skills can be important assets to a library’s outreach efforts when their skills are placed front and center. Stephen Abram makes the following argument in support of library involvement on social networking sites, but it is equally applicable to any setting:

As library users get to know their librarians as individuals, so too must librarians get to know their users. Brian Mathews gives the example of observing student habits around campus to learn that students have different needs at different times of day (2009: 25). He suggests that library staff can gain knowledge and build relationships by becoming integrated into the campus fabric via events, taking lunch in the cafeteria, lectures, and so on, and calls this practice “Becoming ubiquitous” (2009: xiv).

About Hollins University and the Wyndham Robertson Library

The staff of Wyndham Robertson Library, comprised of ten full-time staff members (including six librarians), two part-time reference assistants, and several work-study students, is intentional about our regular engagement with the campus community: we actively seek and foster relationships with individuals, departments and organizations across campus.

It is important to note that our institutional setting is an integral part of making this approach possible. Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, is an independent liberal arts university, established in 1842, dedicated to academic excellence and humane values. Hollins offers undergraduate liberal arts education for women and selected graduate programs for men and women. The university has an undergraduate population of approximately 800 students and a graduate population of about 250 full-time equivalent (FTE) students. The undergraduate student/faculty ratio is nine to one. As President Nancy Gray wrote in a recent issue of Hollins magazine, “When students are asked about what they most appreciate about their Hollins experience, most reply by expressing their gratitude for our faculty and small classes and an environment that encourages personal interaction”(2011: 2).

Gathering and sharing information, as Abram and Mathews suggest, puts our librarians, and thus the library, in better position to respond to the needs of users. This brief example demonstrates how we use communication to actively engage them and invite interaction: when we respond to a comment or request by making a change (to our policy, an instruction tactic, whatever it might be), we have found that the best way to introduce such a change is to announce the news accordingly: “You asked, we listened.” We acknowledge the change and include the feedback that prompted it, making it that much more likely that we will continue to receive feedback in the future. All suggestion responses are posted on the suggestion board and online, and responses from the library’s most recent survey will also be given the same treatment – posted online and responded to.

We take every opportunity to promote our user-centered approach. A small but important example is the images we use; initially our library’s website, brochures, and other publications featured a set of beautiful photographs, taken when the library was first built. Aside from being attractive, the images had one other thing in common: they were completely devoid of people. By working with our marketing department we were able to have the library included when a professional photographer came to campus to take publicity shots. In two hours, with student models recruited from our student employees and Advisory Committee, we had a series of print-quality shots of students reading, working, meeting, and consulting with our librarians. The library’s website, brochures, and other publications now reflect our building as we see it every day, and show our users how we want them to see us: not anonymous but personal, not empty but filled with people.

As we revisit the doomsday scenario, instead of assuming the worst case, we will examine the constituencies that make up our community, and consider our relationship with them. Who are they, what are their goals, how might we work with them? In working together, what more can we learn – and what might we all gain? We will then outline examples of how we have transformed our library and our community relationships through active outreach and collaboration. We have grouped our collaborations by partner, and for each partner, we have identified one case study of collaboration to provide additional details and the outcomes we have realized.

Students: working as a team

Let’s take our students, designated collectively as Generation M or the Millennials. Studies have shown them to have two traits that are particularly relevant as we consider them as partners: they are team-oriented and service-minded. In her introduction to Teaching Generation M, Vibiana Cvetkovich points this out: “Generation M … are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork” (Cvetkovic and Lackie, 2009: xii). Deborah Tenofsky also characterizes Millennials as “team-oriented, highly motivated, and respectful of authority, “ and she notes students’ positive response when librarians use team building exercises in instruction (2011: 285, 289). Students’ preference for working in groups also manifests itself in their library use: Gardner and Eng found that over 55 percent of the students they surveyed responded that they used the library for group work, and 30 percent mentioned using the collaborative study rooms (2005: 412).

Teaching styles in higher education are shifting as a result of this trend: faculty are incorporating collaborative learning, group assignments and service learning into their syllabi. Libraries can take the same tack, considering that we have everything to gain by working to engage our students. At Hollins, a redesign of our orientation changed a traditional tour to a “poker run” in which small groups use a map to discover the library, receiving information and playing cards from strategically placed staff. In this model the students are no longer passive recipients of information; instead they work together in small autonomous groups. The change in student reactions confirmed the success of our group game: the feedback changed from lukewarm at best, to enthusiastic approval. Following our debut poker run orientation in 2008, one Hollins orientation peer mentor emailed us to say, “Kudos for the awesome activities y’all have had to get to know the library.” Data from subsequent poker run evaluations confirms that students come away from the tour with both a strong appreciation for the building and resources and the friendliness of our staff.

In addition to encouraging students to work in groups, librarians should also present themselves as members of the campus community alongside our students. Liaison librarians, for example, fulfill two goals when they leave the library to attend project presentations, lectures, and concerts: they strengthen their ties with the sponsoring academic departments, and they show interest in the students and their work. It has already been established that students prefer to work with someone they know and trust; their reluctance to engage a staff member usually comes from fear of disclosing their lack of knowledge to a stranger (Andrews, 1991: 12–13); while we cannot relinquish our “differentness” as adults/staff/authority figures, joining the student in pursuits that matter to them can go a long way toward bridging the distance between us. These experiences build positive associations that can then serve as a foundation for a successful academic experience when they encounter us in the library. And our students want to be successful: when asked why they went to the library, the top three reasons given by respondents in Gardner and Eng’s survey were all related to academic work. They had come to study, alone or in groups, and to use a computer for class work (2005: 410). If we are able to have students think of us as partners, then partners in their academic success, they will ask for our assistance – and they will return.

The faculty: partnering by providing solutions

Partnerships with faculty are most successful when the goals of the partnership are aligned with both library and faculty needs. In the case of faculty, proposals most likely to get their attention are those that acknowledge the many demands on their time and offer convenient, time-saving solutions. The key to finding such solutions lies in proximity and communication. The movement in libraries to create departmental liaisons is a good example: liaison librarians operate as personal consultants, communicating directly with faculty in a particular department. This relationship enables us to learn more about the departments and respond better to their needs by customizing and enhancing services. Faculty and students benefit in turn from materials and services that are selected and designed to suit their areas of study and specialization, rather than the organizational structure of the library. The arrangement is mutually beneficial, thriving on and therefore ensuring regular communication. Liaison work may occur in the context of providing collection development suggestions, information literacy instruction, or reference assistance; at Hollins, the liaison librarians fulfill each of these functions in a close and complementary arrangement. As a result, there are faculty who treat our librarians as partners in building the collection, as consulting experts in research and as colleagues in teaching.

Teaching provides a particularly fruitful opportunity for collaboration: faculty are usually in agreement with librarians that there is a real need for students to learn effective information literacy skills. “This shared resolve presents perhaps the most natural opportunity for faculty and librarian to work together on campus”(Jenkins, 2005: 77). Successful collaborations in this arena have been well documented, for example at Cornell College, where an effort to bring the library forward as a collaborative partner in teaching resulted in a robust increase in the number of instruction sessions, increased circulation, and improved relationships between the library staff and the teaching faculty (Donham and Green, 2004). The Wyndham Robertson Library staff has certainly spent a great deal of time in partnering with faculty to improve students’ information literacy and research skills, doubling our annual instruction session load from about 50 classes to 100 over the past four years.

Much of that growth has been made possible by interactions with faculty outside of the classroom or office. It is difficult to quantify the effect of developing collegial relations outside classrooms and committees, but a sociological analysis of librarian–faculty relations suggests that such face-to-face time may be critical for librarians’ outreach efforts. In trying to understand the disconnection between faculty and librarians found in many research studies, Christiansen et al. write: “The physical and temporal separation of librarians and faculty impacts the opportunity for meaningful interaction and the mutual recognition of expertise and collegial respect” (2004: 118).

In the case study below, we examine a source of librarian–faculty interactions that can bridge this gap.

Administrative departments: find common interests

In the first part of our chapter we described the divide between administrative campus departments as characterized by mistrust and a “silo mentality.” A 2007 article by Swartz et al. follows collaboration between the library and Student Services at UCLA, describing these departments’ relationship as follows:

This state of isolation is common, but it does not need to be; as with the faculty, the key to successful engagement is communication and the identification of projects that involve mutual interests. In Marketing Today’s Academic Library, Brian Mathews proposes viewing collaboration first as service; he urges libraries to seek connections with other entities on campus in a “social entrepreneurial spirit,” considering how we can contribute directly to their success (2009: 84).

Swartz describes further benefits of building partnerships:

Student success and student engagement are critical benchmarks in determining progress toward institutional goals. They have also become important considerations for the allocation of resources within the university. For example, Gansemer-Topf and Schuh conclude their 2006 study of factors influencing retention and graduation rates by suggesting a direct link between student success and resource allocation:

If we then look at attracting and serving library patrons within the larger context of university-wide goals such as student success and retention, obvious partners emerge: admissions, student and academic services departments, and alumni services.

By creating campus partnerships, library staff can do more with less. Financial support and/or operational support from other departments and groups can help support programming the library would never have the budget or staff to organize solo; all it takes is a creative idea and the willingness to take the lead. Additional benefits are derived from working with these departments. As Lavoie and Markiewicz have noted, collaborating with student activities on planning a party is particularly successful because of their knowledge about the ebb and flow of the school year, and access to funding (2011: 174–175). It also helps that they are not part of academic services:

For example, rock concerts and film screenings in the library are an important part of our outreach exactly because they are not tied to the curriculum: they demonstrate to our users that the library is also place for engagement and recreation. We have learned that programming is a crucial part of public relations; parties celebrate the patron, “our greatest asset,” according to Lavoie and Markiewicz. As more academic libraries have become involved in extracurricular programming, they are seeing positive benefits from such celebrations: “strong patron loyalty and a very positive ethos for the college” (2011: 167). Mathews offers a holistic perspective, considering the importance of library programming alongside other services: “By offering a balanced array of academic, social, creative, and cultural experiences, the library can become a premier campus destination, rather than just a place that students have to go … academic libraries can be a source of inspiration” (2009: 2).

Conclusion: partnering across the campus

Requests for the library to participate in events sponsored by Student Affairs have markedly increased, with suggestions coming from both sides. Because of the library’s record of collaboration and partnerships, it has also become a desired partner for collaborations with other entities at Hollins: for instance, the library’s bookmobile, known for its monthly visits to the dining hall, has received invitations to show up to such disparate events as an Earth Day celebration and art exhibit openings at the campus museum.

As the library gains an increasing number of partners, we look for projects that can bring partners together under one umbrella. For example, in developing the library’s undergraduate research award, we worked with partners from across the campus spectrum.

We invited faculty and students to sit on our research award judging committee; we asked the administration for financial support to fund the reception at which we presented the awards; we asked faculty to publicize the award to their classes and encourage students to enter; and we asked our president to attend and speak at the reception.

The award proved a resounding success across all fronts, with 18 high-quality entries from across all the academic divisions and grade levels at Hollins, a judging committee that valued the input of students, librarians, and faculty, and an awards reception that reflected well on all involved in the competition. President Nancy Gray, who spoke at the reception, indicated her pleasure with how the award reflected the academic mission of Hollins. She also expressed her wish and desire that we find a donor to provide an endowment for the award, and we are now partnering with the Development office in the hopes of securing the award’s place on campus for decades into the future.

Our vision of an outward-looking library has been realized in many ways on the Hollins campus, in relations with faculty, staff, and students. By building connections and then partnerships with community members from across the campus, we have laid the groundwork for a library that can not only survive, but thrive no matter the circumstances.

The energy we get from these partnerships helps to drive the library forward in our day-to-day work. When a library only has ten full-time staff members, no matter how vibrant and active and entrepreneurial those staffers may be, there is a limit to the inspiration and energy available inside the building. When we move outside the building, and tap into the enthusiasm of other innovators on campus, we expand our capabilities both physically and mentally. Thus, to the library staff, our self-imposed obligation to participate in the larger community becomes more than just a service commitment. We find there is a significant connection between collaboration and staff morale. When half of our full-time staff join with students to participate in a campus Olympiad for charity, it is clear that an attitude of team has prevailed, and our team extends beyond our building. The relationships that have been built between library staff and the campus community create an environment in which we collaborate with those we serve – an arrangement that pays dividends on both sides in productivity and trust.

We may not always know the exact shape our next collaborative venture will take, or who will be our next partner(s), but we know that we will be well-positioned to ensure the Wyndham Robertson Library has an integral role in the future of Hollins University, helping the institution achieve its mission.

References