Abundance

We have an abundance of riches here in Instruction & Outreach this semester – four field experience students from UNC SILS. Jake Vaccaro and Alex Gallin are back for another semester. Jake will be concentrating on teaching library instruction as well as helping Emily with projects supporting her work as the Education program liaison. Alex is working with two other graduate students to create and implement a process for harvesting faculty publications for the campus open access institutional repository, with a focus on Global Health faculty publications.

This semester, they are joined by Nicole Kendrot and Julie Greenberg. Nicole was part of a library assessment course to which I gave a presentation in the fall. She came to library school from Bucknell University where she majored in art history, and is in her last semester at SILS. Julie was the designer of a web tutorial on academic integrity that was created as a collaborative project among TRLN libraries. I was fortunate to work with her on that project. She too is in her final semester at UNC SILS, having received her BA and MAT from the University of Iowa.

Both Julie and Nicole manage to fit their Duke field experience into very busy schedules, working at libraries at UNC, taking classes, and writing their masters papers. How do they do it?  I get tired just thinking about their lives!

Emily and I have more than enough projects for all four of the students to work on. In particular, Nicole and Julie will be exploring new technologies that may be useful to library instruction (Prezi, Panopto, Dropbox and WordPress to start), helping us frame an instructional improvement program, updating library tutorials and rethinking how they are placed on our web pages, and helping plan this year’s instruction retreat. Wow, if they could only finish all that in one semester.

I’ve blogged before about the wonderful UNC SILS field experience program. In this pitiful library job market, it’s more important than ever that students get real world experience. That’s the “win” for them. The “win” for us is that we are able to tap the energy that Nicole, Julie, Alex and Jake bring to the library each week. Abundance and delight!