Dean Pattie Orr
Dean of the Libraries
Baylor University
Waco, TX
November 1, 2010
Dear Dean Orr;
In fulfillment of the Fourth Year Academic Professional Notebook requirements, please let this letter serve as an overview of my professional accomplishments as the E-Learning Librarian for the Baylor University Libraries. I have taken the opportunity to structure this letter using the bullet points from my original job description. In this letter, I hope to convey the creative ways that I have fulfilled and perhaps even exceeded the duties of the job that was set before me.
Designs and creates online instructional materials, tutorials, and other digital learning objects
One of the favorite parts of my job as a graduate assistant was working with the Instructional Design Librarian at UNC to create a few online learning objects and tutorials. Therefore I was excited when the committee informed me during the interview and hiring process that the E-Learning Librarian position was a new one and that my job would be to create an online instructional presence on the Baylor Libraries website that had previously not existed. During my almost three and a half years as the E-Learning Librarian, I have undertaken a number of projects that have significantly expanded the library’s online instructional materials.
One of the largest projects I have completed is the Introduction to Library Research tutorial. This tutorial covers topics that span the entire research process: how the libraries are organized, choosing and focusing a research topic, selecting good keywords and search strategies, finding articles, books and other resources, and citation and plagiarism. This tutorial includes visual and other interactive materials, a glossary of library and research related terms, and a quiz. The tutorial and quiz have been assigned in several classes, including BIO 1406, TED 1112, HON 3101 and many sections of ENG 1304. Sections of the tutorial, such as the “Information Timeline,” have also been used independently by the reference librarians as instructional aids during library classes.
A few other tutorials that I have created are the bread and butter of library instruction: “Popular vs. Scholarly Journals,” “Evaluating Websites,” and “How to read a Citation” to name a few. In my own research on e-learning, instructional technology, digital learning objects and new media, I have come to admire the scholarship of Henry Jenkins at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research team has defined a set of “New Media Literacies,” or the skills and competencies that today’s youth must be able to acquire to succeed in today’s participatory culture of New Media. As I continue to create online instructional tutorials, I have come to see three directions for how this work will continue.
- I will continue to create tutorials in order to complete the “basic” set of tutorials that any academic library should provide its patrons.
- I will work closely with the subject librarians in order to create high quality discipline-specific research tutorials.
- I will use the New Media Literacies as a platform to create tutorials to help Baylor students become literate in the language and skills of the participatory culture of New Media, particularly in how the new literacies relate to academic research and creative pursuits.
I am an avid user of new media tools and technologies, as are many Baylor students and faculty. Throughout my time at Baylor, I have been the driving force behind the libraries’ presence on social media networks. I created the Baylor Libraries’ Facebook page, monitor the Twitter account and use them to connect to and inform the patrons, friends and followers of the Baylor Libraries about our news, events and resources. I have also created accounts for the Libraries on several other Web 2.0 platforms, such as the photo-sharing site Flickr and the social bookmarking site called Delicious.
In addition, I have also created the Library411 blog. I serve as the editor and chief author for this group blog, which is a more informal online instructional presence. In this blog, the other librarians who write for it and I discuss “tips and tricks to make research better.” Taking our cue from popular lifestyle productivity blogs such as “Lifehacker” or “Professor Hacker,” we highlight some of the fabulous resources that the library provides as well as ways to use them more effectively in research. We also provide reviews of software, tools and other online applications that are of use to students as they research and study.
Serves as a consultant to librarians developing digital learning objects
I enjoy helping the other librarians at Baylor develop digital materials. One of the first big projects I undertook in my first year at Baylor was a partnership with Carol Schuetz to create an online Company and Industry Research tutorial. This tutorial has been used heavily by the business writing course, which is a required core course for all undergraduate business majors. The tutorial was also accepted into the ACRL Instruction Section’s PRIMO (Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online) database, and was featured as their September 2008 Site of the Month.
When the library purchased the LibGuides software, I provided training to the librarians and staff and continue to troubleshoot any problems they have creating content with it. Currently, we have published 180 guides – far beyond the number of guides we had previously in PDF form. In order to help the librarians author high quality research guides, I have created several “shared resource” guides that let them quickly reuse and repurpose content that is attractive and that is interactive.
In addition, I have also worked with Janet Sheets to create online instructional resources for the Education department, I have consulted with Sarah Freeland in creating video tutorials and I have most recently advised Eileen Bentsen in creating and using QR codes to enhance some of our library displays with mobile interactivity.
Provides reference and research assistance for clients
Providing reference and research assistance for Baylor faculty, staff and students continues to be a highlight of my job. Connecting people with the information they need is one of the main reasons I trained for the public service side of librarianship. Several faculty members in the departments for which I serve as a consultant send their students to me directly for research help and have testified to my helpfulness in meeting with their students. I serve at the information desk approximately 6 hours a week and while there successfully juggle patron requests for research and technical help in person, over the phone and over our “Ask a Librarian” online chat service.
One of the very first projects I worked on when I arrived at Baylor was to set up our suite of virtual reference services. In the fall of 2007, we launched the “IM Your BaylorLibrarian” service, which quickly caught on among students and faculty alike. With this service, patrons could use any of a number of common instant messaging clients to contact a reference librarian, as well as chat directly with a librarian via a widget on the website. In April of 2008, when the popularity of the service had become overwhelming to the reference staff monitoring it, I implemented the switch to the LibraryH3lp software. LibraryH3lp provided greater flexibility in staffing the virtual reference service, particularly in allowing easy transfers of incoming questions to other librarians and other service points, such as the Crouch Fine Arts Library. Therefore, when our chat widget moved to the front page of the library website in the fall of 2008, effectively doubling our traffic, the reference staff were able to handle the volume. I have continued improving upon our virtual reference service, adding chat widgets to the catalog, our Facebook page, the EBSCO databases, and our research guides, as well as helping the Blackboard support staff use the software to provide a chat service for their users. In the fall of 2009, we were able to use the LibraryH3lp software to begin a Text-a-Librarian service as well, which with only minimal advertisement has been used frequently by students. LibraryH3lp was created by librarians at UNC, and Baylor was one of the first university libraries to switch to the software.
Serves as a liaison to assigned academic units/ Participates in collection development for assigned academic units
Upon my arrival at Baylor, I was assigned two academic units for which I would serve as the library consultant: Modern Foreign Languages and Family and Consumer Sciences. Modern Foreign Languages has traditionally been a challenging department. It is one of the largest and most diverse departments, as it includes four divisions and eleven languages. The language programs vary from basic language classes, to language and literature classes to a graduate Spanish program. The needs for materials in the department are diverse and as many are in different languages, they can be a challenge to locate and order. However, I have tackled this challenge head-on. This year, with input from the Spanish faculty, the new department chair and the library liaison, we are beginning a Spanish language materials approval plan. Every year I have increased the number of bibliographic instruction sessions that I have taught for the department. I have been able to teach the first-year Spanish master’s students for three years in a row now, and continue contact with them as they write their master’s theses.
In my third year at Baylor the Academy for Teaching and Learning was added to my consultant duties and this past fall I asked for the responsibility of two more: Communication Studies and Journalism and Media Arts. I have already begun to advocate for increased library resources for these two historically under-served departments and am actively reaching out to the faculty to promote library services. This outreach has already reaped some benefits this semester, as I have taught library instruction sessions for Communication Studies master’s students, a Film and Digital Media class on Digital Technologies and a section of an upper level Journalism course. I am also working with a few Film and Digital Media faculty to create a more substantial film collection to support their curriculum needs.
Provides instruction on research methods and use of library resources
I have already mentioned the instruction I have provided as a part of my consultant duties, and here I would like to mention a few more initiatives. First of all, I have championed the use of the free, feature-packed citation management software called Zotero on campus. I have taught instructional sessions on Zotero to groups of faculty, graduate students, honors students, bibliographic instruction classes, and even some casual instruction at the information desk. Many of the patrons have testified to the power and ease of use of Zotero, including the School of Social Work, which has adopted it as their citation management program of choice. For the past few years, I have also taught a graduate student workshop that I have developed called “Using Technology for Personal and Academic Productivity” which helps students use tools such as Zotero, LibX, RSS feeds, the Google suite of software, browser extensions and a few other online programs to harness their online research habits and make them more effective as they study and write.
Within the reference department, I have also helped with some of the larger instructional projects. In lieu of a science librarian, I have taught bibliographic instruction classes to sections of Organic Chemistry. In the spring each year, I join the reference librarians in helping Eileen Bentsen guide the honors students through the research phase of their thesis writing. I teach a fair number of English 1304 instructional classes as well. Indeed, introducing first-year students to the resources that the library contains and teaching them the skills to navigate them is one of my favorite tasks! I try to make my sessions hands-on and engaging, and a few graduate instructors make sure to request me each semester.
My consultant duties for the Academy for Teaching and Learning has brought about some of my most challenging and fruitful instructional efforts. I have been able to blend online learning and social media tools with close faculty-librarian collaboration in support of teaching and learning. For the past two years, I have worked with Dr. Gardner Campbell in the ATL to become embedded in his first-year seminar class on new media studies. Integral to the class learning experience, Dr. Campbell wants the students in this class to do more than just examine but also to use new media technologies and applications. As such, the students are required to blog before every class, comment substantively on another classmate’s blog, contribute to the class wiki, tag links of interest using Delicious.com, and participate in a class discussion using Twitter (using a designated class hashtag). All of these elements are then aggregated into what Dr. Campbell calls “the motherblog” – the dashboard of the class’ digital participation. As the class’ librarian, I also blog and tag links in Delicious, and my offerings are included in the motherblog. While most of the day-to-day interaction I have with the students are via Twitter, sending links and resources to the class relating to the discussion for the day, I also participate with them on occasion in person, using Second Life, and via a live video feed during their final presentations. Being able to have this level of collaboration with a faculty member and interaction with a group of students, diving deeply into the curriculum and opening up a world of information resources and connections for them all via 21st century technology challenges and humbles me.
Represents Baylor at regional and national conferences and meetings
I have been a member of the American Library Association since 2005, when I was at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC, and since my arrival at Baylor, I have sought out committee appointments. For two years, I worked with the Teaching, Learning and Technology Committee of the Library Instruction Round Table and together we worked on a project to evaluate web research software products. The summary paper from this project was presented at ALA Annual 2009 as a part of their Juried Papers program.
Since 2008, I have also been a part of the Virtual Reference Services Committee (which is a committee of the Reference Services Section of the Reference and User Services Association). With this committee, I have helped to revise the “Guidelines for Implementing and Maintaining Virtual Reference Services” as well as to plan conference programs on mobile options in virtual reference (Annual 2010) and on the myths and misconceptions about virtual reference (coming up at Annual 2011). I hope at some point to become chair or co-chair of this committee, as I believe it continues to provide cutting edge resources and programs for our profession.
Beginning in the spring of 2010, I also took on the role (along with Steve Reid from Truett, David Burns from the Electronic Library and Addy Meira from the Graduate School) of one of the Baylor representatives for the New Media Consortium’s Campus Leaders Advisory Board (C-LAB). It is our goal to help Baylor University gain the full benefits of membership in the New Media Consortium as well as to increase Baylor’s visibility within new media circles in higher education.
Meets University expectations for scholarship and service
I believe that I have represented Baylor well in my scholarship. My collaboration with Dr. Campbell and the outcome of our experimentation with technology and embedded librarianship has opened up doors to allow me to present in both regional and national venues about my work. In January of 2010, Dr. Campbell, a student from our class and I presented at the Educause Learning Initiative’s Annual Conference in Austin, after which one participant blogged about my work in the class that I was “able to assist students in valuable ways, and the students’ understanding of the role of the library in their work was enhanced.”
I have since presented about our Twitter experiment at the LOEX 2010 conference in Dearborn, Michigan and the Mississippi State University Libraries’ Emerging Technology Summit. LOEX is a long-standing national conference on library instruction and the Emerging Technologies Summit is an up-and-coming regional conference on Web 2.0 technologies in libraries. At both conferences my work was well-received and recognized as innovative and important. I was also pleased to be accepted to speak at the ALA Social Software Showcase about using Twitter in teaching, where I was able to foster discussion about how libraries could use Twitter to engage and instruct their patrons.
In addition, as a direct result of my presentation at Mississippi State University, I have also been invited to present at the ALA Midwinter 2011 conference. I will be the main speaker for the Virtual Reference Discussion Group and will present my work as the embedded “Twitter Librarian” for two semesters of the class with Dr. Campbell.
Serves on library and University committees as appointed or elected.
I relish the opportunity to work on projects beyond my department, as can be seen from some of the previous projects I have mentioned in this letter. Included in that are the work that I am doing on both library and university committees. The Library Website Advisory Committee formed shortly after I arrived at Baylor, and I was able to be a part of it from its first meeting. This committee has over the years planned and implemented several iterations of a new design for the library website. The latest design, launched this past fall, sought to bring the functions of the various research tools that the library provides up to the front level of the site and to present them in a user-friendly way. During the website overhaul planning, several members of the committee (Lance Grigsby, Carl Flynn and myself) did some usability testing in order to get concrete data about how people actually used the website. After analyzing the data we collected, we proposed some recommendations to the committee and they made design decisions accordingly.
I also serve on the Teaching, Learning and Technology Committee and the Academy for Teaching and Learning Advisory Board. These groups provide me with a place to exchange information about instructional technologies and E-Learning, as well as to advise other faculty on the specific place of the libraries in the world of educational technology.
In conclusion, I would like to state how much I have enjoyed becoming integrated into the Baylor family. This job has provided me a place to love and serve students, to teach and to train in areas that I am passionate about, and to innovate and stretch myself professionally. I look forward to continuing to serve the Baylor faculty, staff and students in the unique role of the E-Learning Librarian.
Sincerely,
Ellen Hampton Filgo