Relationship Building: Connecting Students with ELM at St. Cloud State University

Melissa Prescott, research librarian for St. Cloud State University Library, is ready for the new school year with an array of instruction sessions, course guides, new tutorials, and embedded online widgets. She connects with faculty and students in a variety of online and face-to-face encounters. Some faculty are more approachable than others. Some faculty are wonderful library advocates that will highlight library resources to students and work with librarians for in-class library sessions and encourage students to use the library. Other faculty may be harder to pin down to demonstrate the wealth of resources available.

How do she and her colleagues get the word out about their library resources and the ELM databases? They work with faculty to keep them up-to-date and provide in-class library instruction and course guides that direct students to the academic databases. They also consider campus services that could benefit from ELM resources. For example, at the reference desk they get a lot of questions from students about test preps. Having LearningExpress Library’s Career Center and Job & Career Accelerator to access has been very helpful for their students and is something that links directly with the work of the campus’s Career Services Center.

One thing Melissa pointed out was that with seniors they guide them to the ELM statewide portal, elm4you.org, to access resources for their studies. They point out that this will be available to them after they graduate and when they are working in their careers so they understand they have continual access to the same quality resources after graduation as they do as students. An example of this can be found on one of her subject guide pages.

Librarians at SCSU recently developed LIB 280: Critical Thinking and Academic Research that they are teaching online, in person, and as co-requisites with courses in English and Honors. Teaching credit-bearing courses gives the librarians direct experience with using ELM resources throughout the semester and identifying ways to incorporate database use more seamlessly.

As online course offerings continue to grow, Melissa and her colleagues are figuring out ways to connect the library’s resources to their D2L Brightspace course management system. They piloted a project to embed library widgets in online courses, such as a search box for Academic Search Premier ASAP. They’ve also begun using SoftChalk, an interactive software, to add tutorials and quizzes directly into D2L Brightspace. Melissa said the quizzing feature is really nice because they can link up to the student’s course grade.

Providing library tools and resources at students’ point of need and working with faculty to design research-based assignments are key to ensuring use of ELM. The librarians continue to explore ways that can positively affect the research process for students. Another key piece to highlight library resources is by reaching out to those faculty they have not connected with yet and to continue building relationships with faculty they have worked with in the past.