Student Learning Outcome Four

This learning outcome asks the student to reflect on a vital part of librarianship – connecting with and bettering one's community. Librarians do this largely through programming; creating workshops, spaces, mini-communities, and other tools that help users connect with one another and the services or materials they need.

Through this program, I have focused on two groups of users – academic users and digital users. Often, the two groups intersect, especially when taking into consideration my own existence as a digital academic through UNCG's online degree for library science. By completing my program through this route, I believe I have gained special insight into the needs and frustrations of the digital scholar. More importantly, I have learned how to access and manipulate various tools to help the digital scholar in furthering their own education and getting the most out of their own programs.

In their 2005 article on students' preferences in receiving help through distance learning environments, Kitsantas and Chow ¹⁾, the following was found:

The factors that encourage or discourage college students in seeking help in the classroom have been examined thoroughly in the literature during the last decade (Karabenick, 1998). It has been shown that the act of help seeking is a complex phenomenon, highly dependent upon the (a) classroom focus, (b) students perceptions and beliefs, and © a teachers instructional approach and openness and flexibility.

Additionally, it was found that students had marked preferences over how they received help for their academic needs:

Specifically, students enrolled in traditional environments of instruction felt more threatened in receiving help than students enrolled in distributed and distance learning settings. These findings show that distributed and distance learning environments provide less threatening opportunities to seek help than traditional learning environments.

With these factors in mind, I approached this learning outcome from a place of wishing to show how I have taken my own experiences as a distance learning student and applied it to my future as an academic librarian – what are the problems I would want to solve? What are the issues I see being faced by digital academics?

The two projects I have chosen to highlight this work together to solve a problem and seek information on how to solve a problem. The first comes from my LIS674 Issues in the Virtual Community, while the second comes from my LIS691 Practicum with Duke University.

As expansive as our current resources are in social media, there are few that cater specifically to the academic crowd. This project, completed for LIS674 Issues in the Virtual Community, was an attempt at designing a new virtual community specifically tailored for students within the academic library.

From the original project:

As mobile technologies become more affordable and accessible, mobility will be the key. Ideally, libraries would be able to use one singular app to maintain and manage the virtual community it wants to provide for its students. By keeping all of the community's needs in one place, libraries can easily manage users, while also providing users will all their library needs.

You can read the full write-up of the project on its permanent home within this webiste. The below slideshow provides a graphic representation of what this app could look like on mobile devices.

For my LIS691 Practicum, I chose to take on a part-time job with Duke University's AUX ²⁾ department. A large portion of my duties there was helping to design usability tests to gauge how well the library was doing at helping Duke's students. One such usability test was based on the library's Ask a Librarian page, a landing site for contact information with the library. Through tests with students, literature reviews, and extensive research of other academic library's own versions of the contact page, I was able to assist in creating a strong plan for what the Ask a Librarian page should do as well as what it should look like.

You can visit the report's permanent home on Duke's Institutional Repository, or view the report itself below.