Not at your service: building genuine faculty‐librarian partnerships

Abstract

Purpose-The old relationship of librarians serving the faculty as research assistants is long gone. The purpose of this paper is to ask, how can librarians and faculty become genuine partners in student learning and move towards the common goal of getting students to think critically? The authors discuss the need for librarians to initiate more collaborative conversations with professors in order to establish true partnerships with them and go on to describe how they did this using a strikingly and alarmingly frank approach. Building on this foundation, the authors discuss the need to shift from a service orientation to a partnership in student learning. Design/methodology/approach-The authors describe their work with the New Faculty Institute, a multi-day workshop that serves as an introduction to the university, to build upon their assertions regarding the need for instruction librarians to shift from a service orientation to a partnership with professors. Findings-The paper offers an action plan to develop and implement a value system that can guide collaboration with faculty. The pieces of the plan include articulating a teaching philosophy, craft and clarify personal policies, develop and practice responses and have confidence in your expertise. Originality/value-Developing partnerships with professors may sometimes require librarians to respond differently to requests from professors that are problematic. Doing so requires a move away from a service orientation, but towards collaborative efforts to support student learning.

Envisioning the Academic Library: A Reflection on Roles, Relevancy and Relationships

“…Cunningham and Tabur 2012); • Changes in user activities which will have an impact on user behavior, that is, how people engage and interact with the library and its resources (see Nicholas et al 2008;Niu et al 2010;Smyth and Carlin 2012); • Increased competition from other information providers such as Google and Amazon and the decline in use of the OPAC (see Ross These challenges to the traditional role of the academic library mean that staff must strive to rethink and repurpose what a library is and what a library does. They need to re-imagine the new role of the library and librarians with the possibilities afforded by the internet, social media, and increased digitization (Corwin et al 2009), and articulate their role for the future and new services that can be developed, particularly by shifting from a service orientation role to one of a partner in learning (Meulemans and Carr 2013).…”

In Bed with the Library: A Critical Exploration of Embedded Librarianship at the City University of New York

“…Other studies (See: Meulemans & Carr, 2013;Meredith & Mussell, 2014) on library / faculty partnerships illustrate that calls for "collaboration" do not easily translate into seamless pedagogical transformation. Administrative marginalization of the library is not an isolated phenomenon: it both enacts and reflects a culture of systematic exclusion from certain educational spaces, namely, classrooms and online learning environments.…”

“…This problem has likely contributed to a proliferation of studies on "student and faculty perceptions of librarian efficacy," perhaps at the expense of studies that "demonstrat[e] the real effects of librarian contributions to learner understanding" (Booth et al, 2016, p. 635). In spite of the growing body of literature on perceptions of librarians, invisible labor in libraries, and library stereotypes, issues of contingency labor in higher education are often glossed over (See: Pagowsky & DeFrain, 2014;Meulemans & Carr, 2013;Eisenhower& Smith, 2009). It is unclear how issues of contingency or library faculty designation might complicate classroom power dynamics and librarian-faculty partnerships.…”

How Do Our Students Learn? An Outline of a Cognitive Psychological Model for Information Literacy Instruction

“…This is often considered problematic in the literature, since, without a problem context for the library instruction session, students may lose interest, not pay attention to the librarian, and learn little in the process on than librarians are boring. 33 However, librarians can take the opportunity to turn a "generic" instruction opportunity into a concrete narrative. This also creates a problem context for the session.…”