Student Success Librarian Serves ‘To Connect’

Initiative offers wide-ranging aid to boost progress

Maria Emerson, MS ’14 LIS, arrived on campus in 2021 to tackle a new role the University Library had just created: Student Success Librarian.

The position was a response to a University of Illinois effort dubbed the Student Success Initiative, a campuswide program that digs ever deeper to help students earn a UI degree. Launched in 2019, the endeavor looks to examine and overcome barriers that hinder student progress, such as retention, graduation rates, degree-completion time, and other factors.

“More universities and colleges [are] seeing this as an important initiative,” said Emerson, a former research and instruction librarian at Augustana College. She said she was pleased to see that the Library “was taking this so seriously and seeing it as a really important . . . role . . . to take on to assist their students at the university.”

Because the Library serves as a focal point for much of the student experience, it made sense to use it as a nexus from which to reach out to other units on campus—not just departmental libraries, but entities such as cultural houses, counseling services, and communication assistance. “The university has a lot of resources,” Emerson said. “It’s just finding ways to connect. It’s almost like a puzzle in some ways—like we have all these different pieces, how can we make it work together.”

Emerson believes the Library has always offered outstanding scholarly support, but if a student is dealing with issues such as finances, mental health, or child care, “they can’t do well academically.” She has helped establish a Family Study Room, a free Wesley Food Pantry in the Main Library, a speaking center (to assist with oral presentations), and various workshops and programs to spread the word about her role and avenues of available assistance. Future plans may involve a hangout for neurodiverse students and a social-justice zine collection.

“We view academic libraries through a very particular lens, which is academics,” Emerson said. Her role, she says, is to show “academic libraries can provide many things, and that even if [what we offer] is not strictly academic, [it] doesn’t mean that there’s not a place for it in the Library. “