Start Date

3-17-2020 9:00 AM

End Date

3-17-2020 9:30 AM

Description of Proposal

As universities struggle to find ways to attract top graduate students, one strategy colleges and departments often employ is to create new graduate program offerings. These new graduate program offerings are often driven by a need to support growth in multi-disciplinary areas and the need to stay cutting edge, as well as concerns related to changes in staffing and pressures in the marketplace. As a means of supporting campus, libraries strive to develop new services to support evolving research needs. However, despite developing user driven library offerings, library users are often unaware of said services and, by extension, unaware of the value librarians can offer graduate students throughout their research journey. Likely this lack of awareness is due in large part to a language gap between librarians and users, not due to the relevance of services. In the spring of 2019, the Research & Learning department recruited faculty and conducted interviews as a means of uncovering the critical intellectual journeys of graduate students in different disciplines. These interviews allowed UAL library researchers to gather information to map the intellectual journeys of graduate students in different departments and identify how faculty describe their graduate student needs. This data is being used to guide librarians to address the language gap that exists between users and find key places within their intellectual journeys to communicate the value and relevance of library services to graduate students.

This presentation will review some top disciplinary discourse findings and a preliminary exploration of ways libraries can respond.

What takeaways will attendees learn from your session?

  • Identify student intellectual journeys for some graduate programs
  • Discover distinct disciplinary discourse practices for academic graduate programs
  • Pinpoint obstacles encountered by graduate students as described by faculty
  • Review exploratory ways libraries can respond to graduate student needs with existing library services

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Mar 17th, 9:00 AM Mar 17th, 9:30 AM

Aligning Existing Library Services to Disciplinary Discourse Practices: Mapping the Intellectual Journeys of Graduate Students

As universities struggle to find ways to attract top graduate students, one strategy colleges and departments often employ is to create new graduate program offerings. These new graduate program offerings are often driven by a need to support growth in multi-disciplinary areas and the need to stay cutting edge, as well as concerns related to changes in staffing and pressures in the marketplace. As a means of supporting campus, libraries strive to develop new services to support evolving research needs. However, despite developing user driven library offerings, library users are often unaware of said services and, by extension, unaware of the value librarians can offer graduate students throughout their research journey. Likely this lack of awareness is due in large part to a language gap between librarians and users, not due to the relevance of services. In the spring of 2019, the Research & Learning department recruited faculty and conducted interviews as a means of uncovering the critical intellectual journeys of graduate students in different disciplines. These interviews allowed UAL library researchers to gather information to map the intellectual journeys of graduate students in different departments and identify how faculty describe their graduate student needs. This data is being used to guide librarians to address the language gap that exists between users and find key places within their intellectual journeys to communicate the value and relevance of library services to graduate students.

This presentation will review some top disciplinary discourse findings and a preliminary exploration of ways libraries can respond.