Day 2 - Friday, March 23rd

As I enter my fourth year as a graduate librarian (and my 10^th year of academic librarianship and my 29^th year of teaching), I’m struck by how my approach to graduate students continues to shift. To my surprise, every academic year has brought a new revelation concerning what our students don’t know and do need, which necessitates a corresponding revision of service on my part. Although “competence” is a relative term, I feel strongly that the needs of our graduate students—and the skills necessary for us as providers to fulfill these requirements—are similar to those at other institutions and would like to share some of these findings with my fellow graduate librarians.

Points for discussion will be: getting to know student needs (for real); empathy and perspective; problem-based and lifelong learning; partnerships. I will provide examples of how these shifts in perspective have manifested with regard to explanatory content for students, particularly with literature review and the writing process overall. I will also discuss the search for internal versus external sources, which I expect will foster input and dialogue from participants.

Graduate school is a transformative time for many students. It is also a time when they are part of an elite community of learners. For some students, this is an exciting adventure that allows them to explore new ideas and more fully express themselves. However, many graduate students also experience feelings of anxiety, frustration, and exclusion because they don’t feel like they really belong to this academic community. Graduate students sometimes struggle with how to navigate the new social norms, hierarchies, and structures built on many years of accumulated, implicit knowledge. These socially-based struggles frequently lead to lower levels of retention among graduate students.

Because librarians typically work outside of departmental or graduate school hierarchies, we often strive to act as neutral and safe information brokers for graduate students. However, researchers have found that in order to fit into small, specialized communities, instead of asking for help, people avoid doing anything that would make them look like they weren’t a “normal,” fully-functioning part of the community. So how can librarians create a trust-based relationship where students are willing to ask for help when few of us are part of graduate students’ immediate social community?

In this workshop, we will explore theories such as Social Capital and Information Poverty to provide a lens for examining graduate students’ existing social networks. We will provide a grounding in past research on social capital and information acquisition to help participants better understand the context of graduate students’ information seeking behaviors. We will create personal social capital maps together to illustrate the principles of social capital, and then we will also build social capital maps based on graduate student scenarios. Using an assumptions inventory exercise, we will develop a better understanding of the connection between our beliefs about graduate students’ information needs and our perceptions of how those needs are provided.

We will also explore the unique social capital perceptions and needs of historically underrepresented and underserved students. Drawing upon recent literature on the difficulties historically underrepresented students face, we will share findings that can help participants recognize ways that they can reach reach out to these students without threatening their standing in their academic communities. Using activities such as the critical incident questionnaire, we will ask participants to reflect on how their role as librarians can lead to increased engagement with these students.

Recognizing that librarians’ interactions with graduate students vary based on a range of institutional factors, we will share our own experiences with graduate students at two different libraries - one small branch library and one large, main campus library. Through the use of individual reflection and small group discussions, we will guide participants through ways that they might use their own social capital within their own context to improve interactions with graduate students. Ultimately, we look forward to transforming our own and other librarians’ awareness of graduate students’ affective and information needs so that we can provide appropriate and meaningful assistance.

Recent efforts within academia increasingly focus on developing programs to transform professional development and career planning within humanities Ph.D. programs. Scholarly associations such as the American Historical Association (AHA) and Modern Language Association (MLA) took initiatives to help students build skill-sets that meet the demands of various job markets not traditionally associated with humanities PhDs. The 2013 AHA report, The Many Careers of History PhDs: A Study of the Job Outcomes, Spring 2013, stated that history PhDs worked in wide range of professions including law firms, government offices, publishing houses, libraries, etc. [https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-diversity-for-historians/career-diversity-resources/the-many-careers-of-history-phds]. Granting institutions have likewise committed resources to transforming graduate education and making the Ph.D. more versatile with the “Mellon Humanities PhD Interventions Project” [http://news.emory.edu/stories/2017/02/er_mellon_humanities_phd_grant/campus.html]. Besides this new project, the Laney Graduate School funds the long-standing Woodruff Library Fellowship program. This program helps PhDs gain practical work experience related to their areas of interest and subject expertise within the Woodruff Library, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and Rose Library. Often subject librarians and, in general, the libraries, are overlooked as potential partners in this crucial conversation. This panel explores how the fellowship program and a pilot initiative by two history subject librarians support graduate students on the job market. The fellowship program helped advanced graduate students gain a wide variety of skills suitable for non-traditional job markets. With the launching of the new initiative in January 2017, the history librarians worked closely with graduate students helping them in diversifying their skill-sets to succeed academically as well as professionally. Their outreach efforts included conducting professionalization workshops, meeting individually with graduate students to brainstorm potential career opportunities, setting up mock interviews, and providing meaningful feedback on their professional portfolios. The end goal of this pilot initiative is to help the Ph.D. candidates apply their subject expertise and research skills in both traditional and non-traditional career settings. In the process, students identify and develop new skills that make them more competitive in the current job market. Part of this presentation will also focus on the experiences of Emory history PhDs who have benefited from the Woodruff Library Fellowship program and the pilot initiative led by Emory University’s history librarians. They will chronicle their work with librarians and archivists, the skills that they acquired through these partnerships, and the practical aspects of preparing for non-traditional careers. They will also look back on the totality of their graduate studies and identify circumstances during coursework, teaching, and dissertation writing that either expanded or narrowed their perception of career possibilities. As librarians become more involved in the professionalization of humanities PhDs, these will be ideal moments for intervention. After the panel presentation, attendees will be able to:

1. Identify similar outreach opportunities on their campus

1. Brainstorm practical ways for creating meaningful partnerships with university administrators, faculty, and graduate students
2. Initiate new programs for supporting efforts to diversify professional opportunities for humanities PhDs