Relationship Building: Deliberate and Happenstance Approaches to Outreach

Terrence Edwards is the librarian for Ridgewater College at both Willmar and Hutchinson campuses. He is the only librarian for 5,500 students and travels the fifty miles between campuses regularly to oversee both libraries. Terrence supports a large course-load for both campuses including English, History, Biology, any research-driven class and, while he did not have formal training in this area, nursing and the health sciences curriculum.

Terrence was hired in the Fall of 2015, one year after the Nursing program lost accreditation based on available currency of library material. He had plenty of work waiting for him to rebuild the collection to meet the requirements. However, it also gave him the opportunity to get quite familiar with the program and faculty. As he dove in to the collection he focused a major portion of the library budget on nursing. With no increase in money, he had to strategize in order to bring the collection back up to standards while other areas had to be put on hold for a little longer. Having the ELM databases became essential and was core to the electronic offerings.

Now that the urgency of the Nursing program has subsided, Terrence is able to put his attention to other areas. One area he is looking at now is bridging the gap from K12 to college. Credo Reference has been a great tool to help with that as well as some of ELM’s databases.  He has also shared the collection of prep tests available in LearningExpress Library with the college’s testing center which has been a good fit for students. Media is another area of concentration. In past, he has found there has been some purchasing duplication by faculty of some videos. He would like to centralize the purchasing of videos and film for faculty to help reduce overall costs.  

Terrence makes an effort to make the library as visible as possible to faculty, students and the community. He does as many instruction sessions as he can, he attends faculty member meetings, and has joined the curriculum committee through his union. This has helped not only make himself known to faculty but has given him more awareness of what is going on. He participated in Career Day where he was interviewed by high schoolers about his profession. He has worked closely with Willmar Public Library doing work with the college’s distance programs to help raise awareness of the resources available to students via the college and the library. One out-of-the-ordinary way he has reached out to faculty has been by carpooling with them between the two campuses. Spending 40 minutes in a car together has given him the opportunity to promote his library offerings where he might not otherwise get the time to talk with them.

Terrence has been with Ridgewater College for almost 1 ½ years now. He hit the ground running and hasn’t shown signs of slowing down yet. He is always finding new ways to reach out to groups. This year, he even joined his community’s Christmas party planning committee and sees this as another way to promote the library at Ridgewater.