This week I interviewed Kelly Delevan at the Noreen Falcone Library at Le Moyne College for IST 605. I've been lucky in both of my librarian interviews (the first for 511) to talk to people who love their jobs, are enthusiastic about the future, and who are encouraging in terms of getting the MLS degree. I know not everyone has had great experiences with their interviews, but both have left me feeling pretty optimistic.
It was interesting to hear about what the library has done for outreach to get more students into the library. This year, they started assigning every freshman a librarian. During orientation, freshmen met with their librarians, who told them about the library's services and taught them to use the library website. The librarians are still contacts for students if they need anything during the school year. According to Kelly, the use of the school's reference services has increased significantly since this program started. I think this is a really great idea to get students more comfortable with using the library. When I was at college, I didn't use the reference services much because I knew very little about them. If I had had an assigned librarian, I would have used more of the services rather than trying to figure things out by myself. I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement the program at larger schools (Le Moyne has about 2400 undergraduate students, which I imagine makes things easier), but outreach can make a difference for academic libraries.
No comments:
Post a Comment