Saturday, April 21, 2007

Referring Students to the Library

Barbara was arguing this afternoon that it's important for us to connect (reconnect?) with the faculty because they refer students to the library. I'm not sure I'm too worried about this generation of faculty. Most of them are my age and did their graduate work in a library and have fond memories of the physical space, the books, the journals. It's the next generation of faculty and students that I'm thinking about. Today's graduate students (at least in the sciences) rarely use the physical library. In fact I suspect if we asked them they would say they didn't use the library at all, even though they use library resources in the form of electronic journals, every day. Will they refer their students to the library? Will they be interested in library instruction? Hmmm. Maybe I should have been an acquisitions librarian.

1 comment:

Lady said...

I'll argue that we need to have a good old fashioned PR marketing campaign to get more students in the library and using the reference librarians. We need to advertise ourselves more. If it worked for milk, it can work for us.