Principles and practices for library outreach to first-year students.

ABSTRACT

Academic libraries recognize that outreach is best undertaken as soon as students arrive on campus for their first year. Librarians have designed creative methods for engaging incoming students with the resources and services provided by the campus library. Such outreach is increasingly important as prior experience using library resources and services among incoming first-year students decreases. This paper reviews the rationale for employing several methods of outreach to first-year students and provides examples of creative means for doing so implemented successfully at American colleges and universities. Hope College's information literacy objectives and its library's outreach programs, both as initially conceived and as they have evolved in the years since, are given particular attention as examples of varied, dynamic approaches to first-year student outreach.

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When first-year college students arrive on their campus as new members of the community, they become acquainted with the academic and social cultures of the place and people. A vibrant library is part of both these aspects of collegiate life. Academic librarians have established a tradition of outreach to first-year students using creative, informative methods of raising awareness of the services and resources provided by the library. They can draw on the ideas of others to design programs that suit the culture of an individual campus and library.

A 2005 survey reported on by Audrey Williams June in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2006) found that more than half of the responding students considered the library "extremely important" or "very important" in their college selection decision. Clearly if the library is a significant part of the reason students are on our campus, we want to make them feel welcome, comfortable, and equipped to use its resources and services. Librarian Mariana Regalado places the library and information literacy in the larger context of student success, academically and socially, as "a crucial element in fostering first-year students with the competence, confidence, and connections they need for a smooth transition to college" (2003, 90).

Incoming students speak of fears about the size of the library, uncertainty about where to look for resources, and discomfort with asking library staff for help (Cahoy and Bichel 2004, 50). First-year students are expected to possess research skills more advanced than those required by typical high school curricula but most arrive underprepared for the transition to the rigors of college research. Just 39% of first-year students at four-year colleges and universities achieved the minimum score for proficiency on 2006 and 2007 Educational Testing Service assessments of basic information literacy (Tannenbaum and Katz 2008, vii). Academic librarians, administrators, and classroom faculty share an interest in educating first-year students to effectively use information resources and library services (Barefoot 2006).

When OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center, a library service and research group) surveyed college students in 2005, respondents reported heaviest use of library web sites, catalogs, online databases, and electronic journals among all of the digital resources made available to them (OCLC 2006, 2-5). These resources match those most frequently taught to first-year students, according to a survey in which more than 90% of responding librarians reported teaching first-year students how to use either the library catalog, its databases, or both (Boyd-Byrnes and McDermott 2006, 11). Methods employed by librarians to inform incoming students about these tools are as diverse and dynamic as the students themselves.