Projects and Duties

I worked under Pia Russell, the Teaching and Learning Librarian, and contributed to the Library Instruction Group (LIG), a small team of librarians and staff who focus on maintaining and improving research skills instruction in class, online and in print.

I also worked closely with the Website Redesign and Portal Project (WRAP) group for my largest task of the term, creating and updating pages for the new library website. Other duties included reference desk service, designing and leading peer-training sessions, assisting with student tours and starting work on online tutorials and print instructional guides, projects on which I will focus during the next term.

+ Creating and updating web pages
+ General reference
+ Peer training
+ Student tours

Creating and updating web pages

With the existing website sorely dated and suffering from redundancy and general disorder, the WRAP group began planning its redesign in 2006. Tasked with creating several of the newly conceived Research Help pages, I started the co-op two and a half months before the redesign went live. Prior to my arrival, LIG determined much of the preliminary planning for these pages, including basic structuring and page naming. The pages themselves, however, had only nominal sketches for content and organization, with many existing solely as a title.

I worked on a total of thirty pages. Ten pages comprised minor content updates and various design readjustments, necessary once the old pages were transferred into the new site template. The remaining twenty pages required in-depth content development, which I created in collaboration with Pia.

I tackled twelve pages, ones for which I could intuit the purpose and appropriate text, e.g., the "Scholarly vs. popular sources" page. Pia handled the remaining eight, pages for which she already had ideas and understood better the direction LIG envisioned, e.g., the "Tips for teaching research success" page. I later revised and edited her content, adding some of my own, and together we decided on final wording and organization. Though Pia wrote some of the content, I created all of the pages, first in Dreamweaver and later in Adobe Contribute.

Visit the Page Gallery to see a number of the pages. Working on the website is discussed in greater detail in the Learning Objectives section.

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General reference

I staffed the "Library Help Desk" with in-person and over-the-phone reference service between four and eight hours each week. Though the summer was somewhat slow, I had plenty of opportunities to practice my reference skills.

I also received a number of questions about navigating the new website. While firsthand feedback was great, people who love the site were not the ones asking questions. Many patrons could no longer find their favorite pages and were confused about the tabbed interface on the home page. Although I had no hand in this design myself, I recognized it as a vast improvement over the old site and enjoyed showing users how it worked and how to get the most from it.

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Peer training

In previous jobs I have created procedural guides and trained individuals one on one, but I had not conducted peer-training sessions until now. The main instruction classroom in McPherson Library, used for both student instruction and staff training, was recently equipped with Sympodium presentation software and iClickers, an audience response system. I created quick guides with the basic functions of each and led six training sessions of small groups of librarians, demonstrating how the tools work, guiding the participants in hands-on practice and leading discussions on how librarians can meaningfully integrate these tools into their teaching.

I will be teaching more—students, and in larger numbers—in the coming term when the regular library instruction sessions begin during the fall semester.

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Student tours

With the university's growing attention on student recruitment, the library has assisted with an increasing number of tours for high school students. There are also tours for new university students and their parents at the beginning of the school year.

I co-conducted and led on my own a few tours, striking the recommended balance between the library's hipness (the new café, laptop and camcorder lending, and the 24" fully loaded multimedia iMacs) with the fundamental tools of research: books, journals and electronic resources—and, of course, pointing out the Library Help Desk and explaining what it is for.