outreach

In Brief: How do we measure the impact of our outreach programming? While there is a lot of information about successful outreach activities in the library literature, there is far less documentation of assessment strategies. There may be numerous barriers to conducting assessment, including a lack of time, money, staff, knowledge, and administrative support. Further,…

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In Brief: the Journal of Radical Librarianship is a new open-access journal publishing scholarly work in the field of radical librarianship. The focus on critical approaches to librarianship and anti-marketisation of information is reflected not only in our subject matter but in our publishing model, our licensing model, and our organisational practices. We hope to…

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In Brief: When librarians discuss the lack of underrepresented populations in librarianship, the solutions suggested most often are recruitment and awareness. But these discussions focus on one matrix of identity, like race or class, and ignore the fact that people embody multiple, layered identities. By treating these matrices of identity and marginalization as separate entities,…

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In Brief: Why do librarians struggle so much with instruction? Part of the problem is that we have so many facets to consider: pedagogy, campus culture, relationships with faculty, and effectiveness with students. Research on student and faculty perceptions of librarians combined with sociological and psychological research on the magnitude of impression effects prompted us to…

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By Lana Mariko Wood Librarians and library school students have a lot to gain by sharing their skills with groups outside of the library, such as community organizations, social justice groups, and non-profits. By building coalitions and offering support to different groups, librarians help lend their particular expertise while simultaneously advancing the roles of these groups….

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This is the first in a two-part series on librarian collaboration with faculty. Part 1 presents a five-step program for building collaborative relationships, while Part 2, published on July 13, 2011, addresses specific examples and strategies for collaboration. by Kim Leeder Introduction Collaboration has become something of a buzzword of late, which puts us in…

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As librarians, we invest a great deal of time and effort instructing researchers on how to use our materials. This is especially true for special collections librarians, as we attempt to familiarize researchers with our unique resources and intricate collection arrangements. At the end of that instruction investment, we often wonder if we have been…

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By Emily Ford Outreach is dead. It’s time we put its body in a coffin, say our collective prayers and move on. You see, for most of the summer I undertook a long series of “outreach” trips to promote and educate the public at large about a grant-funded project I’d been working on for the past…

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