This week, through the readings and resources, I learned about the hyperlinked community in relation to libraries generally and considered what the hyperlinked community looks like in my work setting, an academic library. The video about the Bronx “Wash & Learn” Pop-Up Library Program particularly stood out to me, because that library was leaving the library space to meet their users—those who they may not reach otherwise—where they were at. In thinking about my academic library, I’ve considered ways that we are currently trying to do this and other ways we could try to do this.
One segment of the population that we don’t often seem to reach is our student athletes. Just this week, a colleague had a discussion with one of the athletic directors about ways the library can better support them. A simple idea that they came up with and which we are going to implement is to have subject librarian profile pages filter through on the monitor located in the common area of the Student Athlete Building. These profiles will have QR codes that the students can scan with their phones to contact us or set up in-person or virtual appointments. By doing so, we are trying to meet the athletes in a place they spend quite a bit of time.
Another idea that we are going to try this coming Fall semester is to have a “Research Help” booth in the Student Center around midterms and finals. During this time, library student employees and some full-time librarians will man the booth and be available to help students learn about helpful library resources for research papers and projects and demonstrate how to use them and locate sources. We’re hopeful that by going outside of the library, we’ll be able to help more students than we otherwise would.
As the Art & Design subject librarian, something that I am considering is having set “office hours” in the Arts building. I will need to reach out to the department chairs of the Art and Design departments and see if they are amenable to this and have a space for me. If they are and do, my hope is that I will become more integrated into those departments, that more faculty will recognize my and the library’s value, and that the students will become familiar and comfortable with me.
All of these proposed ideas are experiments and they may not work. If they don’t, however, I still wouldn’t consider them a failure. We will have tried something and in that trying, we will have learned more about our community. That will inevitably lead to more ideas of other things we can try and eventually, something will connect and we will have a stronger hyperlinked community.