Putting Service Learning to Work in an Academic Library

I am a big fan of Service Learning. I first heard of it in library school when a classmate did a presentation on it for our LIS 639: Information Literacy Pedagogy class. At the time, I did not really understand what Service Learning would really look like because I had not taken part in anything like it in my undergraduate career. It sounded a lot like organized volunteerism, which sounded like a really great way to build connections in a community and understanding by the students. I have since served on the East Carolina Faculty Senate Service Learning Committee, which has helped me fully understand the concept. From the East Carolina website, here is a definition:

"Service-learning is a pedagogy—i.e., a way of teaching and learning—in which faculty members complement students’ in-class learning either with relevant volunteer experience at a local community-based organization or with a community-based project completed on behalf of a non-profit or community group."

Service Learning is considered to be of great importance at ECU and the university is trying to strengthen it by adding more classes with a SL component. There is a specific way for professors to apply for their courses to be designated as Service Learning courses in the ECU catalog, and I was part of this rigorous approval process. Some courses still make use of Service Learning but have not applied for the designation for various reasons. This blog post is about the ways that Joyner Library has acted as a client in courses that make use of Service Learning. A future blog post will give suggestions on how to support Service Learning courses that come over for library instruction.

Here is a diagram that can better explain how Service Learning is seated within the academy:

Diagram Courtesy of Fresno State University College of Science and Mathematics Advising

The library has served as the client for a number of Service Learning projects.* An outline of each of the projects is below, followed by some tips and tricks for working with students and faculty.

EDTC 6040: Multimedia Instructional Project Development

This online Instructional Design class had to complete a large-scale online tutorial. I worked with a team of 4 students to outline a plagiarism tutorial that I then marketed in Blackboard as "for students, by students." The result can be seen here: Plagiarism | Academic Integrity

First slide of the Plagiarism Tutorial, EDTC 6040 Project

My involvement with this one was somewhat higher than the following projects, in that I had to come up with an in-depth description of what I wanted, learning objectives, etc. and meet with the students a few times in the process. The students used Articulate Storyline to create the tutorials. We have been contacted a second time to take part in this class as clients. The Teaching Resources Center (TRC) will be acting as the client for this coming semester.

COMM 4180: Public Relations Capstone

My colleague, Tamara Rhodes, served as the client for two sections of an in-person capstone course of approximately 20 students each. The students were charged with coming up with a public relations and communications plan for Joyner's DE services. Tamara was our Online Learning Librarian and she put this collaboration together completely on her own. The students were broken up into groups and were assigned a type of DE student. The types included traditional, non-traditional, military, rural, and faculty. The students surveyed DE students and conducted a presentation. Multiple librarians attended the presentation, including myself.

EDTC 6045: Human-Computer Interface Design

This was a more recent collaboration with the same faculty member as the EDTC 6040 class, but with a different topic, web and application design. This class was also online. I provided a list of second and third tier library websites that I knew were slated for redesign to the professor. Students could pick out of a listing of websites based on their interests. The students suggested options for redesigning the websites to be more user friendly. They also had to do a small-scale user test with a few users, which fit right in with our UX efforts. Two of our webpages were selected, including the Instructional Services page and the Employment Opportunities page (as of this posting, neither have been redesigned). This project was a lot more hands-off, with students conducting all of the work and then providing us with their projects at the end of the semester.

Now, some tips for setting up a collaboration with a service learning class. 

• Look out for possible collaborations with faculty by going to new faculty orientations, reading the campus news, and actively seeking out connections.
• Contact the campus Service Learning center, if one is available to you.
• Use the course catalog to determine courses that may have a SL component that could be of benefit to the library. Keep in mind that some courses have SL assignments without a designation. If a designation is not available, find out how SL courses are coded at your institution. 

Once you are part of a SL class, here are some suggestions for success:

• Determine the level of involvement that the course will need and decide if this works with your schedule. Some of the projects were low-effort with a very good yield, yet others took some work. 
• Make yourself available to the students to talk and to meet. In the case of the COMM course, it would have been nice to meet with the students more often. For the first round of working with EDTC 6040, I know through feedback that students would have liked me to be more responsive. 
• Make sure that the communications you have with the professor or students clearly set expectations--and this goes both ways. 
• Know that you might not get a fully formed project out of the deal. In the case of the EDTC 6040 class, we got a fully finished product. In the case of EDTC 6045, we only got suggestions, but we knew that going into it. Sometimes it is good to get a report and let the librarians decide what to do with the information.

Have you worked with a Service Learning class at your institution? Did you learn anything from the process? I would love to hear from you!

*A note: As I mentioned, a number of classes incorporate Service Learning without having the designation. Most of the classes for which the library served as a client were not actually designated SL classes. 

How Being a Musical Promoter Prepared Me for Librarianship

Before I moved to Greenville, NC, I was a musical promoter in Madison, WI. I had a paid day job, but my real love was being part of planning club nights, music festivals, and the big show--the annual Madison Area Music Awards (MAMAs), which is a lot like a local version of the Grammy's.

I worked for the MAMAs as the Musical Director, which included booking bands and calling the show from backstage. I was on their board of directors and helped with the cause of putting musical instruments into the hands of deserving children. In addition to the MAMAs, I also volunteered as the chairperson of the Events Committee for a local public radio station. This station put on several outdoor events per year, including a stage at a local weekend-long festival (Willy Street Festival) and also their own annual block party. We planned a birthday party for the station at a big music venue in December each year. I was part of a team that did all of the bookings, flyers, and day-of-event work for the station. In addition to these bigger events, I put on events of my own at dance clubs throughout the Madison area for the years spanning 1998-2011. For these club nights, I did nearly everything except run the DJ booth. If you asked anyone at my current job in the library about this, they likely would not know about it. Some know the broad brushstrokes, but very few know the impact this work has had on my current gig. Here are the ways that being a musical promoter prepared me for librarianship.

1. Know your audience. What good is a service if it is not needed and no one will use it? Using User Experience methods and talking to the users of a service can be so beneficial to libraries as they embark on new endeavors. Just like you would not book a country band for an industrial music night, librarians need to tailor their language and services to the audience and local conditions.

2. Have an elevator pitch. If no one can understand what you are trying to do in a brief amount of time, you will not have the buy-in that you need to get people on board. This is important whether you are promoting your latest electronic music event or your new bibliography service for faculty.

3. Look for conventional and unconventional partners. At the MAMAs, we were able to partner with Broadjam, a company that was based in Madison and was already supporting local musicians online. This allowed us to move from paper ballots for voting to the same online system that is used by the Academy of Country Music. At WORT radio station, we partnered with UW-Madison students to create a Friends of WORT group on campus. This allowed us to distribute information to the students in the dorms. In libraries, this might mean working with the Service Learning office to serve as a client for a capstone course or partnering with Student Affairs to give out free coffee at exam time.

4. Be creative and keep improving. It's not enough to simply keep up with the status quo. To keep people's attention, you have to keep upping the ante. In music promotion, this means coming up with a new theme, a new giveaway, etc. In librarianship, this means making sure our services and customer service are always under scrutiny and getting better.

5. Market yourself! Learn the basics of creating a flyer and how to grab people's interest. Even if you are not using Photoshop, figure out something that works for you and still looks professional. Flyers are not always enough. Get out in the community and meet people. They will be more likely to show up if they know you and get a personal invite.

6. Be flexible. This was a big lesson I learned when planning for outdoor shows. You simply cannot plan for everything. For instance, you can have a solid lesson plan and good presence in the classroom, but you cannot predict that the students will be engaged or even fully awake when they get there. Be willing to take a risk and trust yourself if you decide to change something up. For instance, add a short active learning exercise to get them moving.

7. If called in to do tech support, be confident and keep your cool. It is the absolute worst if the audio is not working and everyone is waiting for you, whether you are in the DJ booth at a dance club or in front of a group of 20 students in a library classroom. This is the toughest thing to master, but you have to keep your cool. Do not rush, and keep a positive and confident attitude. It is usually something simple.


8. Have fun. None of it is worth it if you are not having fun. Of course, it is not going to always be a foam party on the 4th of July, but you should love what you do. If you are not enjoying yourself, it is going to show to the patrons in the form of bad customer service.

Some other things I learned are to always dress the part (evening wear, for the win!), pay people fairly for what they do and on time, and to never give up. In addition to these more global adages that I learned as a music promoter, I also learned a whole lot about audiovisual equipment, cables, audio and video editing, making flyers, and how to talk to people.

Most of you readers have done something other than librarianship in their career. What have you done that prepared you for librarianship? How did it prepare you? Tell me in the comments!

Backstage at the MAMAs, 2011, Calling the show

MAMAs Finale, 2010, Overture Center for the Arts, Madison, WI

Ideas for Making a Graphical Impact in LibGuides

Do you ever take a look at your LibGuides and think, "whoa, that's a lot of text"? One of the things that you will often hear in lists of web design do's and don'ts are to avoid big blocks of text. Here are some ways that I have spiced up our LibGuides using graphic means.

Cartoons 

In 2013, I wrote this College and Research Libraries News article about using cartoons in our LibGuides. This is a free and easy way to break up some of the text on the page into a graphical format. Here is an example of one of the cartoons in our LibGuides.

This cartoon welcomes the student, tells them how to use the guide, and invites them to get help, all in one panel. The software I used is called ToonDoo, and it is free of charge. Read the article at the link above to learn more!

Buttons

I wrote about buttons in my previous posting about the LibGuides template. I have created buttons for students to click on to open most of our tutorials. This gives a graphical style to the page that also breaks up text. I make these in Illustrator, which is a costly product. There are other free products out there that you could use, including GIMP or Inkscape. Here are examples of some buttons.

Another simpler example of buttons can be seen below. This is a colored rectangle with text, and then I added a simple mouse pointer arrow to show that it is clickable.

Animations

Of course, you should always proceed with caution when it comes to animations (blinking and flashing can cause seizures being the first reason). Some animations can be very helpful for instruction. I have created the following animations to teach about truncation. I did this by using the timeline feature in Photoshop. It is saved as a GIF to preserve the animation.

Screenshots

I take a lot of screenshots. I realize that these can be tricky, since the website can change in an instant. I still like to use them to give a graphical indication of what I am explaining. With all of the other time-saving changes we have made to LibGuides with linking to the template guide, it is not a problem to have some items I need to update. Here is an example from my Art LibGuide, where I am showing students how to locate Creative Commons images using Google Image Search.

Creative Commons Images

The last image leads in to my next recommendation. What blog post would not be complete without talking about using images? I recommend to always use images that make sense with the subject matter, and of course, to use Creative Commons images with attribution. Here is an example of an image from my Art LibGuide with attribution and a link back to a succession of photos that show the project being made.

If you have questions about these or any of my other ideas, please reach out! I am happy to give you some pointers.

LibGuides Template

Does your library have a LibGuides template? The word template evokes the idea that when making a brand new guide, you would start with that guide. The "template guide" at Joyner Library is not really a template in that sense, but rather a repository of boxes, buttons, and APIs that I keep up to date to share with a team of librarians. Even if you are the sole librarian creating LibGuides at your institution, this could shorten the time it takes to update guides. The great part about this setup is that if something needs to be updated, for instance, a tutorial video, this is simplified. If the librarian who has borrowed the box has mapped their box to the original box in the template, they do not need to do anything. Changes take place in their guide and I do not need to worry about the currency of the video in our 300+ LibGuides. There are many reasons that people may not want to map to the original box. Consider that you cannot make any changes (text, etc.) to the box if you do not make a copy in to your guide. Most of our video tutorial LG boxes do not have text in them, but for other boxes, they may want to edit text. For the most part, people do link to the original box in the template.

So, what is on this guide, you may ask? Here is a breakdown of what I have on the template guide at our institution.

Best Practices

We have adopted a list of best practices for our LibGuides. For the sake of brevity in this post, more information will be included in a future posting, or you can visit the Joyner Library Template Guide. The best practices boil down to naming conventions, when to create a guide, and more.

Tutorial Videos, Guide on the Sides, and "Click-Throughs"

The main reason we have a template guide is to help people find the myriad of tutorial videos, Guide on the Side tutorials and Click-Throughs. Click-Throughs are PowerPoint presentations uploaded into a hosting site like Slideshare. Joyner Library also keeps up a Tutorials page on the website, which is another way for students to find the information, but grouped and formatted differently. 

Citation Guides

During my tenure as the Instructional Design Librarian, I created a Citation Guide for each of the main types of citation we see in assignments. I have created the following citation style guides: APA, MLA, ASA, AMA, CSE, ACS, APSA, and Chicago. Each of these tutorials is an active learning exercise to have students create a citation and locate information to put in the citation. The other things that are included in the guides are links to the actual style guide and Purdue OWL, as well as to citation generators, if they exist for that style. There is also a plagiarism tutorial. I have librarians map the correct tab from the template guide into their LibGuides.

Database List APIs

This may take some explaining, but the information architecture of our database list is basically a database of databases. Within this database, we have a current listing of which subscription library databases we currently subscribe. Our Application and Digital Services department helped create a single line of JQuery code for the LibGuides boxes that makes a call out to that database to tell it what the current library databases we subscribe to are for a subject. I then made boxes for each subject in LibGuides, pasted in the code, edited a small piece of the text for that subject and voila! Every time a user goes to the page, it only shows the library databases we have right now. This means that the RIS librarians do not need to keep track and make sure that the LibGuides are updated when databases are added or removed from the list. Here is what they look like:

Some drawbacks are that there is no way to point out a specific database that you would recommend as a subject specialist, unless you wanted to create another box above or below telling students which databases were best to use. This is not so much of a bother with Criminal Justice, but some of our other subject headings have many database listings.

Search Boxes (Catalog, OneSearch, etc.)

With the help of the ADS team, we have also created search boxes that take the person into a Summon search, catalog search, or Google Scholar search. I do have to check these often to make sure that nothing has broken, since they seem to go offline quite a bit more often than the others.

Career Tab Template

With the focus these days on college campuses about what students will do when they finish, the library has seen a lot of assignments that ask students to choose a topic from their field of study. We got so many questions about how to research things in their chosen career and how to come up with topics that I created a Career tab that I have people copy in to their own guide and customize. This is one place where I am not expecting people to map to the template guide. They do have to customize each page.

Get Help Tab Templates

In our best practices, I encourage people not to show their contact information on every single page. We also have a Get Help tab template that gives the RIS desk numbers and email, as well as a link to the main chat. This way, if people are on vacation or out for a conference, the person asking for help does not wait for a long time to get help. I have also created simple, graphical buttons that the student can click to reach our Writing Center, Tutoring Center, and more. (If you're wondering, I made these with Illustrator, but you could use a free product, if you wish.) Here is an example of this kind of box:

Building Maps

You may ask yourself, why would you include a building map on a website? Many times, LibGuides are used as a supplement to in-person classes. I have included building maps because it was something that I was finding myself linking to often and I could see the building maps being one of those things that may be updated or changed. Feel free to create tabs and boxes on the template guide for the things you find important to your guides!

One complaint I hear about our template guide is that it is so chock-full of stuff, it is sometimes hard to find what the librarians are looking for. It helps to have the graphical interface of the template open on one tab or window and the guide you are making on another.

So, you may be asking, what about an actual "template"? Why not make the guide something to start from when making a new guide? The template guide is, as I have mentioned, more of a repository. The look and feel of new guides is determined by the back-end of LibGuides, which is locked down for editing. Only two librarians at our institution are administrators and we have collaborated to determine the generalities of how the guides should appear. For instance, our tabs are purple and rounded and they appear at the top of the screen instead of down the left side. The box headers are also ECU purple. Everything else is determined by our best practices. At this point, we are more in a maintenance mode of keeping up existing guides, rather than creating lots of new guides.   

If you would like to see the Joyner Library Template guide or borrow anything from it, please feel free to do so.