February 9, 2004 Meeting of User Education Committee

1. Meeting Schedule for 2004 Meetings (Action: None)

• March 8, 10-11
• April 12, 10-11
• May 10, 10-11
• June 14, 10-11
• July 12, 10-11
• August 9, 10-11

2. Old Business

First-Year Student Fall Festival

Lisa announced that she has hired Kate Freding into an hourly Graduate Assistant position to perform much of the planning for the festival. Kate will with the festival planning committee.

Lisa confirmed that the Education and Social Sciences Library, along with the ILL-Borrowing have agreed to participate in the festival program and the Education will be the first stop on the tour. The Commerce Library will close its doors in order to attenuate the noise generated by incoming students but will post a “Please Come In” sign to encourage students to explore that library.

Lyn Jones of the Development Office requested additional information on the festival in order to consider it for funding from the Library Friends program. Lisa will supply her with the requisite information as the festival plan takes shape.

A planning working group will oversee the details of the festival implementation and will include several members if the User Education Committee. Kate Freding, while planning much of the festival, will report back to the committee for review. Cindy volunteered to participate on the working group and Lisa will ask Joe Straw if he would like to do so as well. For the moment, it appears that the festival will take place on September 9th from 11:00-3:00. The planning group will announce the official time and date once they have been set.

Statistics Form – What does # of learners mean?

It appears that further clarification is needed in order to develop a consistent policy for counting learners within instructional sessions. Lisa will contact the CIC Instruction Librarian’s Group in order to get a sense of what other institutions are doing and report back to the committee with her findings.

3. New Business

University 101

Lisa announced that university administrators have begun to discuss the possibility of implementing an “introduction to university” course via campus colleges in the fall of 2005. Having met with Ruth Watkins, Associate Provost, Lisa indicated that the library system would play a major role in any such initiative, potentially handling general issues such as instruction on copyright, plagiarism and general bibliography instruction. Each college could, in theory, be responsible for their own versions of the course, which may result in the larger colleges pushing the initiative down to the departmental level. If such a program were to take place, departmental libraries would most likely instruct students from their affiliated departments. Some planning and care would need to take place in order to handle the numerous students who enter the university without a declared major.

Each fall roughly 6,700 first-year students enter the university, presenting serious questions as to which methods of instruction could be employed for such a population. There was some discussion as to the possibility of a web-based instructional tool to help with the considerable increase in volume of learners within the library instructional system, but other ideas were raised as well, including making more of an effort to involve new librarians in instructional programs. The concern here was that the library attempt to cater to the various learning styles presented by the student population while also developing an approach that could realistically meet the needs of such a large group.

Lisa will attend the next meeting of the campus committee that has been charged with investigating the possibility of implementing the new course and will present information from her experiences working on a similar program at Illinois State University, along with information about programs in other research libraries. Cindy will work with Lisa to develop a survey tool to assess how Composition I Teaching Assistants rate the effectiveness of bibliography instruction as it pertains to student performance.

Orientation to UIUC Information Literacy and Instruction for Newly Hired Librarians (new topic for general discussion)

The committee began to discuss ways in which to improve the process of orienting newly hired libraries to the library instruction program. Orientation manuals, such as those given to graduate assistants, may be useful tools for librarians. Lisa will check with Beth Woodard, Coordinator for Staff Development and Training about the status of the project to create a new employee orientation.

Strategic Planning – User Education

Lisa encouraged members who did not attend the recent strategic planning meetings to submit their ideas via email to the Strategic Planning Committee.

Respectfully submitted,
Chad M. Fennell
User Education GA