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Building Bridges with Research Guides: A Brief Story about a Faculty-Librarian Collaboration

Presented by: Amal Hussien (she/her) (amal.hussien@utoronto.ca)

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The Initial Encounter

  • Ways to meet Faculty and/or “network”
    • Mining the course catalog to find where services would be valued;
    • Networking and explicitly making connections for researchers to services available in the libraries;
    • Promoting your subject expertise and offering to share knowledge; and
    • Working to embed the yourself or library assignments into the curriculum for the program.
    • (Diaz, 277)

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Identifying the Need for a Research Guide

  • Continued conversation and information sharing
  • Understanding the specific needs of the students
  • Gaps or challenges to student’s success
  • The idea of creating a tailored research guide to address these needs

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Collaborating with Faculty Members

  • Lacking Subject Expertise
  • How we worked to develop the guide
    • Information about Course Content and Syllabus
    • Tailoring it to Subject Matter
  • Unique resources
  • Division of Labour / Project Management

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Guide Creation Process and Feedback

  • Used LibGuide Platform
  • We both curated list of items/ tools to include and discussed methods of organization
  • Input on Forthcoming works to be included
  • Connect to LMS (Quercus) for integration and easy access for students

[Black Art Research Guide Home Page]

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[Reference Materials – Dictionaries/ Encyclopedias in Black Art Research Guide]

[Exhibition Catalogs Themes in Black Art Research Guide]

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Ongoing Collaborations and Key Takeaways

  • No Future Plans
    • Update the guide each semester with new exhibits, catalogs, and forthcoming works
  • Maintain relationship 
    • One time collaboration can lead to additional projects, introductions to other instructors and Faculty members in different departments,
  • Good relationship building requires a variety of traits values and skills: 
      • Patience  
      • Knowledge  
      • Follow-through  
      • Sincerity
      • Responsiveness 

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      (Saunders and Corning,468) 

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Thank you!

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Sources:

    • Cox, J. (2018). Positioning the Academic Library within the Institution: A Literature Review. The New Review of Academic Librarianship, 24(3–4), 217–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2018.1466342

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    • Díaz, J. O., & Mandernach, M. A. (2017). Relationship Building One Step at a Time: Case Studies of Successful Faculty-Librarian Partnerships. Portal (Baltimore, Md.), 17(2), 273–282. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2017.0016

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    • Henderson, M. (2016). Successful partnerships for academic libraries. Journal of New Librarianship., 1(1), 28–54. https://doi.org/10.21173/newlibs/2016/henderson.1 

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    • Saunders, L., & Corning, S. (2020). From Cooperation to Collaboration: Toward a Framework for Deepening Library Partnerships. Journal of Library Administration, 60(5), 453–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2020.1729623