RAO’s Marketplace of Ideas offered a great opportunity for members to engage in small group discussions. I heard about different tools archivists are using to capture reference statistics. These tools includes:
Deskstracker
Deskstats
LibAnalytics
Others talked about using Google Fusion and Knowledge Tracker. It seems like practitioners struggle to find a tool that captures numbers of interactions as well as types of questions and answers.
The other discussion I participated in was about faculty outreach. I shared the effort and success we’ve had at the University of Rochester with working with subject specialists to approach faculty together. We frame our instruction in terms of offering students both primary and secondary source research skills, that’s part of a complete process, as opposed to unrelated resources and processes.
Others shared ideas like “pop-up archives” where staff bring artifacts to locations around campus for a few hours to expose new audiences to collections and raise awareness. Attending faculty lectures and connecting with faculty through their research was another successful approach.
What methods do you use for doing outreach to faculty???
I'm the Head of Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. I write about leadership development in academic libraries, collaboration, and project management.
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