Use of Special Collections as an Opportunity for Outreach in the Academic Library

ABSTRACT

Academic special collections librarians have made great strides in making their collections discoverable and accessible to a wide audience. This article examines use of special collections departments and the many kinds of outreach librarians undertake to increase access to and knowledge of their collections, including creating electronic finding aids, digitizing material, collaborating with faculty, increasing participation in instruction and reference, and using exhibits, social media, and relationships with community partners to further the mission and goals of the library and the college or university. The article uses the University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections Department as a case study.     

Insourcing library outreach: Engaging technical services in outreach to student organizations

Abstract

In recent years, library outreach has become an increasingly important aspect of public services work. In order to expand capacity and engage patrons, libraries should consider expanding their library outreach programs to include the efforts and expertise of technical services personnel. In this article, librarians from Texas A&M University will share how public services librarians, cataloging experts, and preservation librarians collaborated to provide support for a student-led textbook lending library for student veterans. Through this collaboration, the library was able to develop new outreach opportunities that highlighted technical services expertise as well as lend support to an important campus effort to improve the affordability of college textbooks for veterans.     

Collaborative Learning

Summary

The many concerns over the costs and benefits of higher education have created an often intense dialogue across university departmental borders. In response, many departments have moved to collaborative efforts to reinforce the necessity and usefulness of the Liberal Arts curriculum for students. Academic service departments, including archives, seek to have their resources more actively used by the student base. The authors collaborated on an assignment requiring student use of primary source materials held at the Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections. The dialogue this assignment created and the projects it produced was of benefit to all involved: instructors, faculty, and students.     

Collection and Digitization of Artifacts in the University of North Texas LGBTQ Archive

Abstract

The University of North Texas Libraries has collected a large archive to document the history of the LGBTQ community in north Texas, including many significant artifacts. Artifacts in LGBTQ Archives can carry special significance as objects of memorialization, identity and protest. As digitization of archival collections continues, Special Collections staff has developed workflows for creating digital surrogates of these artifacts.     

Wayfinding: Navigating Archival Theory in Times of Technological Change

Are new technologies creating better frameworks for achieving “best practice”? What impact might tools like ArchivesSpace have on the future of the profession? Implementing ArchivesSpace at the Archives and Special Collections Department at the University of Minnesota brought internal practices in closer alignment with archival standards, and in doing so drastically changed the way we intellectually and physically manage our repositories. This article will explore whether or not these changes undermine traditional theoretical frameworks for archivists, or simply represent a realignment of professional principles.     

Accessing the Old and the New

Summary

The University of Arizona Library's tradition of outreach to the surrounding community is reflected in two examples of projects detailed here. The first project is a series of Web exhibits created by librarians and individuals from the community that explore the history of Tucson and southern Arizona. Some of the Web exhibits detail the experiences of immigrant and Native American cultures in the area while other Web exhibits deal more generally with the history of the area. The second project involves a Federal grant that will make certain parts of library's Special Collections more accessible to the community by building new facilities that are open longer hours, digitizing some of the materials and adding computer workstations for users.     

Sharing the value and impact of outreach: Taking a multifaceted approach to outreach assessment

Although outreach is a common activity in academic libraries, little has been written about strategies for assessing library outreach efforts. Assessing outreach efforts is important in order to measure the success of the outreach activity, identify areas for iterative improvement, and demonstrate the value of the outreach activity to stakeholders. This article is a case study describing the multifaceted strategies employed to assess a major outreach event, Texas A&M University Libraries annual Open House event. It details demonstrating value and programmatic improvement as the articulated goals for outreach assessment as well as the specific strategies used and the insights gleaned from each assessment strategy.     

Special collections in the classroom: embedding special collections in an undergraduate history writing class

Abstract

This article describes a 12-year collaboration between a special collections librarian and history faculty for an undergraduate history writing course at Vanderbilt University. Originally taught as a one-shot session, the final 9 years of the course embedded the class into Special Collections for 10 weeks of primary source research. This article describes the evolution of the course from a one-shot session to full embedding, the mechanics involved in managing the sessions in Special Collections, student support considerations, and tips for other librarians offering such sessions.     

COVID-19 Evidence Reviews website: a VA effort to catalog and curate COVID-19 evidence reviews

Background:The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a wave of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research that organizations around the world have been synthesizing in evidence reviews to provide high-quality evidence to support policymakers and clinicians. The urgency of these efforts opens these organizations to the risk of duplicated efforts, which could waste valuable time and resources.Case Presentation:The VA Evidence Synthesis Program (VA ESP) formed a COVID Response Team that launched an online catalog of COVID-19 evidence reviews in March 2020 (https://www.covid19reviews.org/). The goal of this website is to capture the work of evidence synthesis groups in the US and around the world to maximize their collective contributions to patients, frontline clinicians, researchers, and policymakers during the COVID-19 pandemic and avoid duplicating efforts.Conclusions:This ongoing and evolving project provides a helpful catalog of evidence reviews at various stages of production; in addition, the website provides further value with informational icons, review collections, and links to similar resources. The VA ESP will maintain this website to continue to support the needs of policymakers, clinicians, and researchers both within the VA and around the world throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Outreach

Abstract

Academic libraries have often participated in outreach to their surrounding communities. This article focuses on independent outreach efforts of academic libraries to move beyond their walls or traditional clientele. Academic libraries determine their interaction with their communities based on three factors: whether a need is expressed from outside the academy, whether they see their mission as an invitation to pursue an action on their own accord, or whether they construct a form of outreach in response to a specific problem or crisis. Most libraries, public and private, recognize outreach as part of their mission and obligation to the community. This article examines why libraries choose to initiate outreach programs.     

Enabling new interactions with library digital collections: automatic gender recognition in historical postcards via deep learning

The Walter Havighurst Special Collections from University Archives & Preservation at Miami University's King Library has a growing collection of over 600,000 historical postcards, with approximately 30,000 digitized, primarily from the Midwest during 1890–1919. This collection supports various lines of inquiry from users, such as analyzing the evolution of gender portrayal in popular media in the United States. However, manually separating the collection into postcards of males and females would take thousands of hours, which prevents the library from supporting sociological analyses at scale. After assembling an open postcard dataset, we trained deep neural networks (i.e., YOLOv5x object detection models) to automatically detect people and classify them as male or female. Our approach limited biases in favor of one outcome by balancing the number of males and females via multi-label stratified 10-fold cross-validation. We showed that this approach can accurately detect and classify females and confidently detect and label males for the library's collection of historical postcards. Our precision of 94.9 % and recall of 33.0 % from 1890 to 1919 on male gender detection exceed the performances of 94.7 % and 31 % respectively for recognition on World War I postcards in past studies. By employing our trained deep neural networks, the library can enhance its metadata within hours and support new research inquiries at scale.     

Library Social Media Needs to be Evaluated Ethically

Library literature about engagement has drawn from business marketing practices for years which has unsurprisingly influenced our approach towards social media communication. This article will evaluate how continuing this practice without a critical evaluation of the ethics behind marketing practices is contradictory to our institutional values. The principles discussed in this article may be useful for current library workers and administrators looking to engage in reflective practice in their outreach efforts. In response to the pervasiveness of marketing culture in library outreach our field has an obligation to support and encourage authentic interactions with our patrons without jeopardizing what makes us different from businesses. I will explain why a marketing perspective limits our efforts, initiate a discussion about this issue, and highlight some examples of effective engagement.     

Setting the Stage and Keeping Sane: Implementing ArchivesSpace at the University of Minnesota

As the University of Minnesota's Archives and Special Collections began the daunting task of migrating into ArchivesSpace over 5,000 finding aids from fifteen different units, a clearly defined workflow provided clarity and success. This article outlines how staff developed an implementation timeline and workflow, harnessed support from partners in IT, provided training, and what the benchmarks to success were. By sharing this well-documented and thought-out implementation workflow, it can provide guidance as others try to navigate the many moving parts of implementing new collection management technology.     

Twenty Steps to Marketing Your Library Online

ABSTRACT

Libraries are quite practiced at outreach activities in the physical world, but now, just as our services and resources have moved online, so must our outreach efforts. This article provides a list of twenty practical things libraries can do to begin to delve into the world of online outreach. Topics covered include listing your library in Wikipedia, listing library events in local community calendars, listing librarians in expert-finding directories, pushing newsletters out via RSS, being present in online game and other environments, and much more. The requirements for online outreach at libraries will always be evolving, but this starter list will provide a place for all libraries to begin their foray into online outreach and marketing.     

Special Collections and Archives Code (SPAC): Preserving Provenance in a Bibliographic Catalog

The recording of provenance is of particular importance in special collections cataloging, as knowledge of provenance lends authenticity and reliability to the materials held. A method of cataloging collection-level provenance in bibliographic records through a short mnemonic code, a Special Collections and Archives Code (SPAC), is described which enhances visibility of collections and retrieval in a catalog. A collection code not only collocates unique individual items that share a common characteristic, but can also constitute part of a linked data approach to visualizing integrated collections in the form of a “virtual bookplate.”     

A Shared Experience

Abstract

In 1989, the University of Connecticut Library created the Academic Liaison Program to promote communication between the Library and the faculty by designating a librarian as a personal point of contact for each academic program. In consultation with faculty, the liaison librarian is responsible for understanding the department's needs or collections, information services, and instruction. By 1997, the success of the Academic Liaison Program, coupled with electronic services and a resulting need for greater communication with users, resulted in further expansion of outreach efforts. At the recommendation of the Liaison Advisory Team, the concept of staff partnerships within the program was developed. We will discuss our experiences in an informal dialogue further along in the article.     

From the Library Plaza to the Golden Dome

Abstract

Creative, effective use of a committee can accomplish much toward increasing library outreach to the various constituents served. This article will address the outreach activities of the Georgia State University (GSU) Pullen Library's Communications and Public Relations Committee (C&PR), a library standing committee that has developed into a major contributor for Pullen Library public relations. The communities served by the library's C&PR are defined as GSU students, faculty and staff, and the wider metropolitan community of Atlanta, especially Georgia legislators and university and library donors. C&PR has responsibility for a variety of projects and events that serve these communities, such as Leadership Appreciation Night (the event for Georgia Legislators), Faculty Authors Exhibits, and displays for students and staff, such as Freshmen Week and Staff Information Day. This paper will also address the changing role of the committee as needs for public relations activities change in the university and     

Rediscovering an American Legacy of Service through a Free Curriculum

Abstract

This case study highlights a free curriculum created to commemorate the World War I centennial and to celebrate the future of volunteerism and global citizenship education by encouraging students to engage in local, regional, and international service. The lesson plans are aligned with Common Core and UNESCO Global Learning standards, and use primary sources to highlight the little-known efforts of Americans who volunteered in nonmilitary roles before and after the period of American neutrality. The curriculum was a result, in part, of newly accessible collections from the Archives of the American Field Service and AFS Intercultural Programs and related outreach efforts.