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Input from students has been a valuable part of the process of continuous improvement in the library. Each
year the library conducts a survey of freshmen and senior students in order to assess the effectiveness of our
facilities, resources, and services in contributing to student success. Additionally in 2015-16, several student
focus groups provided feedback which proved helpful in exploring some of the issues identified through the
freshmen-senior surveys and how best to address them.
Library Services
The survey results highlighted the need for additional weekend library hours and the focus groups identified
the library’s unique role as the main campus provider of quiet study space, particularly on the weekends. In
response, the library will open at 3:30 PM instead of 7:30 PM on Sundays starting Fall semester 2016.
Additionally, quiet study areas will be designated on the lower level to better define the location of study
spaces for both groups and individuals, in response to many comments on the freshmen-senior survey about
noise levels in the library.
Research Support
Additional findings suggested that our research support model needed to be reviewed. The freshmen-senior
survey results indicated that students are less likely to interact with research librarians when they have a
research need. Discussions with the student focus groups suggested the reasons for that include a lack of
knowledge about what research librarians do, what kind of help they are able to provide students, and the
need for personal connection as a way of facilitating these interactions. This has led to a revision of the new
student library orientation for Fall 2016 to provide more opportunities for personal interaction between
research staff and incoming students and for learning about the research support services the library offers.
The student focus groups also were concerned about the need for more librarian-student connection points
beyond the first year of college. Through the new student library orientation and the first-year library
research instruction program, interaction occurs with nearly all incoming students. But the library’s
engagement with upper-level students in program-specific courses and capstone projects is much more
uneven. Students emphasized the importance for juniors and seniors to have individualized research support,
perhaps provided through research librarians with subject area specialties. This input supports the vision of
the library to build these kind of partnerships between librarians and academic departments. The first
attempt at doing this during 2015/16 was to hire a Health Sciences Librarian to provide direct support to
students and faculty in the health sciences programs; this has proved to be very successful model. The
current plan is to use that paradigm for the employment of additional discipline-specific research specialists.
2016 Freshman/Senior
Surveys continue to
show strong overall
satisfaction with the
library
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM STUDENTS