I came across an interesting piece of news about how some IHEs are just asking their alumni questions – and listening to the answers. The calls are not about hitting the alums up for contributions. The folks in charge of alumni offices are realizing that they need to learn much more about their instituiton’s graduates. There is particular interest in new, younger alumni because there are concerns that they have no interest in becoming active alumni. And no doubt, there’s always that nagging uncertainty about the potential young alumni have as future donors to the institution:
After hour-long phone conversations, alumni interviewers like Wong hope to be able to tell the college something about what makes graduates tick. They’ll have a pretty good idea of what alumni’s interests are, how they feel about the college and what might potentially motivate them to contribute. What the interviewers won’t ask for is a check.
I like this idea – just contacting the alumni to learn more about what they are doing and how they feel about the institution and their education. Academic libraries clearly have a different mission – and resources for this sort of thing – than the alumni office, but I feel there is much that academic librarians could learn from conversations with alumni. There are plenty of potential questions to ask about their use (or not) of the library. Did anything they heard in an instruction session stay with them, and did they learn it well enough for it to impact their research behavior? It might be helpful just to learn if they do professional research on a regular basis or if they just use search engines for personal, lifestyle research. Would they be interested in continuing to have access to the library databases they used as students (or not)?
As our profession becomes increasingly focused on assessment and documenting our contributions to student learning, it seems inevitable that we would need to engage our alumni in conversations about their library experience. It’s one thing to say the academic library contributes to lifelong learning, but only by connecting with alumni and asking them the right questions can we learn how well we succeed at our goals. If the development officers are taking the institutional lead in connecting with alumni, perhaps that is the starting point. Let’s learn more about what our colleagues in the alumni office are doing when they listen to our ex-students, and whether there is an opportunity for the academic librarian to ask a few questions as well.
This is an interesting thought, Steven. Along similar lines I’ve often wondered whether some sort of workshop on moving from using academic libraries to public libraries might be useful for graduating seniors. I’m at a commuter college so most of our students are probably not moving out of town after graduation, though — this might not work well for colleges and universities with large out of state populations.