Not just for celebrities: collaborating with a PR representative to market library education services

Hardin Library for the Health Sciences offers an education service called Hardin House Calls. In collaboration with the University of Iowa libraries' public relations coordinator, the education team developed a marketing campaign for Hardin House Calls. Marketing strategies included designing a new logo, meeting with external relations representatives and faculty, distributing a user survey, and producing and distributing posters and advertisements. These marketing strategies greatly increased the visibility and use of Hardin House Calls. The campaign also led to a series of faculty development sessions, education collaborations with smaller health sciences departments, and collection development opportunities. Promoting an instructional service through a public relations frameworkwas found to be a highly successful strategy.     

Connecting 24/5 to Millennials: Providing Academic Support Services from a Learning Commons

This study investigates user preferences for reference and technical support, services, and facilities featured in an academic library and Learning Commons through a 23-item questionnaire distributed to building entrants during one 24-hour period on March 14, 2006. Results revealed a strong preference for face-to-face assistance (including roving), suggested enhancements, and documented user demographics.     

The News Session in Infants and Primary School Classrooms

This paper presents an analysis of the social organisation of news sessions in infants and primary classrooms. We argue that these events are essentially occasions for the initiation of pupils into aspects of school knowledge and culture, although they are ostensibly spaces in the school day where children may introduce their own topics and interests. We show, through a detailed conversational analysis of varieties of morning news events, how these activities are stage‐managed, what the nature of the children's contributions are, and how these are organised to legitimise school knowledge and to define pupil‐teacher relationships, especially the teacher as primary receiver and announcer of news. The transformation of children into pupils is seen to occur in news sessions as much as in any other classroom activity. The distinctive feature of news sessions in the first years of schooling is that these are early instruction in how the private/personal realm can be fitted to the contours of the public/official curriculum, how everyday life interests are subordinated to and appropriated by the culture of the school.