One of my responsibilities as Education Coordination Librarian at West Texas Town University is to organize and schedule our Library Instruction* program.
I am not saying that I haven’t had anything to do in that capacity since I started my position in September, but since the semester was already in full swing when I arrived the actual organizing and scheduling I did for fall was minimal. The majority of the classes had already been scheduled and most had already been taught.
Since the fall semester ended, however, I have been spending a lot of time completing various tasks in preparation to “officially” take control of my program. I have compiled a mountain of statistics. (I am still not sure what I am going to do with them, but at least I have them!) I have read about assessment. I have created forms and documented procedure. I have done at least a dozen other things too, but I will stop there… You get the idea.
Luckily though, just as I was beginning to get rather bored with all the “busy” work, the spring semester arrived. Classes don’t officially start until tomorrow, but I wanted to start the semester off right by getting the word out that there is a new education coordination librarian in town.
I went to the beginning of semester faculty/administrative staff meeting and took a couple of minutes to introduce myself. I schmoozed networked after the meeting over coffee Coke and donuts. I passed out my business card. I sent a follow-up email.
Before I even went to lunch I began getting requests and taking reservations. In fact, the response has been such that when I left my office tonight I still had reservation forms on my desk to double check against my calendar… and it’s only Tuesday!
* Insert the buzzword of choice here: library instruction, bibliographic instruction, user education, or information literacy to name a few.