Sail with the Wind: Inspiring Students and Faculty to Reach Horizons of Academic Success

Abstract

Building relationships with faculty and students can be challenging for subject librarians. Reaching out to the scholarly community offers opportunities for collaboration through teaching and research. Furthermore, the large spectrum of students’ learning styles creates a challenge for faculty instructors to teach high-level research skills in physical and online classroom environments. In addition to their teaching responsibilities, university faculty pursue research projects as a requirement for tenure and promotion. Rather than continuing the old practice of streamlining information literacy into one-shot lectures where students and faculty alike learned about library services and collections, the author established a partnership with the Associate Dean for Educational Innovation at the School of Public Health. This collaboration proved to be instrumental for further developing a series of library services that support student’s and faculty’s research. This poster presents the evolution of the author’s efforts as a subject library liaison to provide teaching and research assistance to students and faculty in the School. It discusses collaborative activities, marketing the services, assessment methods and insights for the future. Participants will be introduced to effective methods and tools for teaching information literacy concepts.