faculty-librarian relationships

End-Semester Reflections on Librarian-Faculty Relationships

As the Spring semester wraps up over the next 4 ½ weeks, my work has shifted from formal classroom instruction to research consultations and reference interviews, sharing surveys with faculty and students, planning for the summer, and reflecting on the past four months. As I look back on the classes I taught and what further growth I need, one thing that comes to mind is my relationships with faculty.

This Spring, I tried to be more intentional about finding ways to collaborate with faculty and their classes beyond the one-shot library session. Part of this effort was motivated by my anxiety about not reaching students at multiple points of need during the semester and uncertainty around whether they would use our library again. A second motivation was my reservations about the one-shot instruction model (which I’ve written about in a previous post). I wanted to create a way to sustain engagement with the classes I teach and put into practice something I say at the start of each session: “I am here to support you during this semester and the rest of your time here.” A key to building this process was fostering closer partnerships with these classes’ instructors.

Much commentary and research has been shared, such as on this blog, about the complexities of relationship-building between instructional librarians and faculty. For example, stereotypes prevail that librarians are either warm, caring, and fully responsive or cold, strict, and unapproachable. These stereotypes have impacted how we are perceived by faculty, affected possibilities for partnership, and resulted in the misuse of our roles (Pagowsky & DeFrain, 2014). A 2022 survey of US instruction librarians found that a majority felt that faculty “minimized or misunderstood” what they did (Becksford, 2022). Other research echoes this observation, finding that misalignment of teaching goals and confusion about what instruction librarians do can hinder relationship-building. Misalignment and confusion can also cause faculty to view librarians as “service providers” – staff who only introduce students to research skills and guide them toward resources they need, rather than as teaching colleagues (Dennis & Dees, 2024). Gender stereotypes and misconceptions about instruction librarian roles thus impede productive librarian-faculty relationships.

I have often found, across the 20 or so classes I have had over the last two semesters, that while faculty are excited for me to reorient their students to our library and introduce them to critical research and information literacy skills, my engagement is usually limited to a one-shot session. While syllabus constraints typically cause this limitation, I’ve reflected that I often allow my lack of experience as an instruction librarian to elevate faculty above myself and undersell my services. However, the few occasions I did extend my collaboration with a faculty member beyond the one-shot were due to the relationship we built over time, in addition to advocating for the various ways I could support their students.

Lessons I learned for Fostering Productive Faculty Relationships

The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education encourages librarians “to work with faculty, departmental or college curriculum committees, instructional designers, staff from centers for teaching and learning, and others to design information literacy programs in a holistic way” (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2016). While I am still growing each semester as an instruction librarian, I have managed to gain some lessons along the way for creating productive relationships with faculty:

If possible, conduct outreach early

Once I scheduled the classes I would teach at the start of the semester, I reached out to faculty as soon as possible to establish expectations around what my instruction and support would be, as well as the logistics of the session (will it be in the faculty member’s class meeting location or the library? What is the date and time? Etc.). Early contact helped me feel more comfortable and better prepared to teach my classes, and also enabled me to build early rapport with the faculty member I would support. A systematic review of library-faculty relationships made a similar observation when it identified communication as an important avenue to commitment and trust by faculty (Phelps & Campbell, 2012).

Take faculty workloads into account when proposing areas of collaboration

Even as I have sought to find further areas of partnership, I have tried to keep in mind how busy faculty members are, especially if they are adjuncts or graduate students who might teach in multiple institutions or are trying to graduate. A 2016 study of faculty-librarian collaboration in a First-Year Seminar program found in interviews with faculty that they “admitted the difficulty of incorporating course content and the four liberal arts skills into their one-semester seminars” due to “pressures and time constraints” (Douglas & Rabinowitz, 2016). I often found that giving faculty the option of working together outside the one-shot without expectations brought ease to our communication and also gave them something to consider if they worked with me again in the next semester.

A Pre-session meeting (on or offline) can help with preparation and connection

Traditional faculty-librarian collaboration can often present as a librarian introducing students to a library and what services it offers them, and then the faculty instructing their students to contact the librarian for help if needed. While students will get assistance, it might feel as if their instructor and the librarian are not on the same page regarding what the students need (Colantonio-Yurko et al., 2020). A best practice in my library’s instruction team is to share teaching materials with faculty before a session so that they can provide feedback and input. I follow this practice and also propose a 10-15 minute meeting. When they do happen, I have found these meetings to be extremely productive, not only helping us confirm what the session should cover but also specific areas of focus and granular class information like accommodation needs.

By talking together outside email, faculty members and I were able to construct shared language around information literacy and research concepts that could be reinforced throughout the rest of the course (Shields, 2012). These short meetings provided an opportunity for me to communicate with a faculty member on a personal level, learn successes and pain points they are facing, and find connections in our lives outside of the classroom, helping to encourage what Colantonio-Yurko and others call “positive personalized relationships” (2020). As a result, I found that an increased level of trust could be achieved, and got faculty members thinking about other possibilities for working together.

Don’t forget post-session communication

At the end of each session I taught, I briefly met with a faculty member to thank them for inviting me to teach their class, find out how the session went, and remind them of other areas of potential collaboration. While this lesson might seem obvious, it can be easy to overlook, especially if a session went poorly or if a faculty member does not attend the session with their class. There have been multiple times over the last two semesters when a session did not go as planned, and I felt the urge to run from the classroom as soon as I finished teaching. While it was difficult on those occasions to stay behind and meet with faculty, it was a rewarding decision because of how grateful faculty members frequently were that I taught their class and how excited they were to scaffold some of the concepts I taught. Meeting in those times helped rebuild my confidence and morale, and reminded faculty of the benefits of collaboration for their students both from the session and outside it.

Looking ahead to the future

As I start planning to teach in the summer and fall, I hope to continue building on existing relationships I have made with faculty this academic year and foster new ones. It was sad to hear that a faculty member with whom I had formed a close and meaningful partnership did not plan to teach in the fall and would likely move to another institution. However, I am excited that they are taking the next step in their professional journey. I will also always appreciate the lessons I took away about what an effective collaboration could look like and look forward to applying them with other faculty members I work with.

At the same time, I want to approach future partnerships with more grace and patience, knowing that folks who teach in American higher education are navigating multiple pressures. These pressures could mean that my relationship with faculty changes each semester due to factors outside of my control. However, I think what makes any working relationship successful is knowing when to set small expectations and goals, when to aim for more, and how both will impact how I collaborate with another person. It is a delicate balance I am still beginning to learn.

References

Association of College and Research Libraries. (n.d.). Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, Appendix 1: Implementing the Framework. Retrieved April 14, 2025, from https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframeworkapps

Becksford, L. (2022). Instruction Librarians’ Perceptions of the Faculty–Librarian Relationship. Communications in Information Literacy, 16(2), 119-150. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2022.16.2.3

Christiansen, L., Stombler, M., & Thaxton, L. (2004). A Report on Librarian-Faculty Relations from a Sociological Perspective. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(2), 116–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2004.01.003

Colantonio-Yurko, K., Kalenda, P., Olmstead, K., Rath, L., & Wright, A. (2020). I never knew a librarian did that!: Exploring how faculty and librarian relationships support meaningful collaboration. Journal of New Librarianship, 5(1), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.33011/newlibs/9/2

Dennis, M., & Dees, A. S. (2024). Strategic alliances: The library as a partner for student success. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 50(6), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102964

Douglas, V. A., & Rabinowitz, C. E. (2016). Examining the Relationship between Faculty-Librarian Collaboration and First-Year Students’ Information Literacy Abilities. College & Research Libraries, 77(2), 144–163. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.77.2.144

Pagowsky, N., & DeFrain, E. (2014). Ice Ice Baby: Are Librarian Stereotypes Freezing Us out of Instruction? In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/ice-ice-baby-2/

Phelps, S. F., & Campbell, N. (2012). Commitment and Trust in Librarian–Faculty Relationships: A Systematic Review of the Literature. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 38(1), 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2011.11.003

Shields, K. (2014). Research Partners, Teaching Partners: A Collaboration between FYC Faculty and Librarians to Study Students’ Research and Writing Habits. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 19(3–4), 207–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/10875301.2014.983286

Reflecting on Open Access Week as a First-Year Academic Librarian

As an Affordability & Digital Initiatives Librarian, planning, hosting, and executing events and workshops on campus for Open Access Week is an essential part of my position. For those unfamiliar with Open Access Week, Open Access Week is a designated week, typically towards the end of October, to celebrate and spread awareness of the open access movement. This year’s theme was “Community over Commercialization.” I did not incorporate the theme into the programming primarily because I want to center our events around the university’s Affordability Initiative.

Monday

We started the week off with a celebration of affordability and open access on our campus. The purpose of the event was to highlight accomplishments made throughout the past year, such as increased use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and submissions to our Institutional Repository (IR). Next, I hosted a workshop on OER adoption, adaptation, and creation with my new faculty cohort. During the workshop, we discussed the impact OER has on equity as well as resources for finding and creating OER. New faculty were intrigued by OER and expressed interest in exploring what is available in their field. I hosted the same workshop for all faculty in the afternoon. Interestingly, this workshop sparked more of a discussion regarding Creative Commons and self-publishing.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, my colleague and I hosted two launch parties for our new sponsored affordability development opportunities, one in-person and one virtual. We were promoting the launch of the textbook affordability self-paced course we created on D2L Brightspace (our LMS). The course was designed for faculty to strengthen their knowledge about the open movement, pathways to open authoring, and research related to textbook affordability and OER. Additionally, we were promoting our new program in which faculty could apply and receive sponsorship to adopt, adapt, or create OER.

Wednesday

Wednesday was dedicated to the Institutional Repository. My colleague hosted an event regarding the role of the IR on campus. He also encouraged faculty to bring their CVs to see how they could contribute to the IR.

Thursday

On Thursday, I hosted a small panel event about the power of self-publishing your expertise. The panelists were faculty with experience creating OER and had all authored at least one textbook. The panelist offered great insight into the process of self-publishing in varying disciplines.

Friday

To conclude the week, I hosted affordability and faculty collaboration hours. These hours give faculty a chance to meet with me directly and discuss where to search for OER, how to navigate Creative Commons, how to make textbook selections for the bookstore, etc.

Reflection

Unfortunately, attendance for almost every event was lower than I had hoped. Most of the events were held in-person in the library. Next year, I would try doing more virtual events that could be recorded and sent to those interested. I also wondered if the time of day was a factor in the low attendance. We varied the times in hopes of reaching as many people as possible, but the inconsistency in time might have been a deterrent.

An idea for next year would be to incorporate events or activities for students. Our library’s student advisory board did hand out snacks to students on Wednesday and told them about our Textbooks on Reserve program and textbook donation drive; however, I think we could do more. An opportunity to connect with students and amplify their voice on the topic of textbook affordability and open access would be beneficial to our Affordability Initiative.

Lastly, not having experience coordinating a week full of campus events, I was thankful to have the support of the University Library’s Dean’s Office. They scheduled rooms, ordered refreshments, organized swag (pens, stickers, water bottles, keychains, etc.), and coordinated social media posts throughout the week advertising events, highlighting campus affordability champions, and listing resources to adopt, adapt, and create OER. I could not have survived the week without their help.

On Being a New Liaison

Please welcome our new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger Abby Flanigan, Research Librarian for Music and Performing Arts at the University of Virginia.

Last January, I joined the University of Virginia Libraries as the Research Librarian for Music and Performing Arts. This is my first professional position after graduating from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with my MSLS in May 2016, and I’ve found myself in an entirely new (to me) area of the profession: liaison librarianship. In graduate school, I heeded the advice I’ve seen echoed in every corner of the Internet about LIS programs, which is to get as much work experience as you can, and cobbled together a variety of internships in preservation, digital scholarship, cataloging, and reference services. Despite this list of jobs on my resume, I remember feeling instantly panicked when the first question in my interview was to describe my past experience as a liaison, because, of course, I didn’t have any. Luckily, I managed to collect myself and describe some other capacities in which I had worked with faculty, and ended up getting the job. Now that I’ve been here a few months I wanted to share some of my observations about what makes being a liaison both challenging and exciting as a new professional.

No two liaison positions look exactly alike. Because each academic department has different needs and histories with the library, each liaison I know works differently with their departments. Some are busy all semester teaching classes or doing research consultations with undergraduate students, while other collaborate on grants or do collection development for foreign-language sources. Similarly, liaisons are organized differently at many libraries, so it can also be difficult to directly compare positions or responsibilities with colleagues at peer institutions. At UVA, subject liaison responsibilities are decoupled from collection development, general reference, and first-year teaching responsibilities, so my day-to-day work looks very different than liaisons at other institutions whose responsibilities are split across a variety of areas. This was challenging when I first started because, not knowing exactly what I was supposed to do, my instinct was to model my strategy for engagement on my colleagues’, but it didn’t always transfer or apply.

This brings me to my second point: it takes time to be an effective liaison. Getting comfortable in any new position takes a while, of course, but the liaison model seems to benefit in particular from institutional knowledge. Part of the job is knowing faculty and students in the departments, including their research interests, information needs, and communication habits. Gathering this information can take many meetings, emails, and chance encounters; much of it is tacit knowledge that is built up over time and not necessarily passed on from a predecessor. Many liaisons also rely on the “ripple effect.” By working with a faculty member one semester, they may have more interest the next semester based on word-of-mouth between colleagues. This means that as a new liaison, I am working on laying groundwork for richer collaborations in the future. Building up relationships and projects is a longer process than I was expecting, but I think that’s a good thing because it means this is a job that I can grow into.

Finally, as I build these relationships, I’ve learned just how important communication skills are to this position. Being a liaison requires reaching out cold to people in your departments, and, more importantly, once you are meeting with them, articulating your role and value. It can be intimidating to present yourself as a resource to experts in their respective fields, especially without an advanced degree in the discipline for which you are a liaison, but over the past nine months, I’ve gotten more comfortable and confident doing so. In the beginning, I struggled to define exactly how I could help, and erred on the side of suggesting every possible way in which they might use the library’s resources. Now I try to reach out when I have a specific idea to suggest or information to communicate. After a few successful collaborations, I also have a clearer idea myself about what I bring to the table, so I’m able to more confidently offer my services.

“Liaison” is term which means very little to anyone outside of libraries (I know this from the blank stares I get from friends and family when I try to explain what I do) but can be a source of anxiety for people in them as we rethink and reorganize subject expertise in academic libraries. Being a good liaison or having a strong liaison program seems to be an ever-moving target. Stepping into a role of this nebulous nature as a new librarian can be stressful — it’s hard to know whether you’re doing it right! — but I’m learning to be more comfortable with figuring it out as I go.

Microaggressions, Faculty, and Academic Librarians: a study in intersectionality

I’ve been a follower of LISMicroaggressions on Tumblr for a while now, and even managed to pick up a zine or two in person at various library conferences. Their posts are a much needed reminder that as liberal and well-meaning as we all think/hope/claim/want our libraries to be, the day-to-day experiences of library workers can be fraught with all the -isms. There’s a strong desire, particularly in our current political climate, to make our academic library spaces welcoming and inclusive to students, faculty, and staff at our institutions. What I appreciate about LISMicroaggressions is that it is a mirror for the profession, one that–to continue this forced metaphor–provides a forum to critically reflect on our own prejudices and biases as well as the everyday (however unintended) acts of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. that occur in our workplaces among colleagues.

At the 2016 Conference on Inclusion and Diversity in Library and Information Science (CIDLIS), I learned about another microaggression project spearheaded by Joy Doan and Ahmed Alwan at California State University, Northridge: Microaggressions & Academic Libraries. Joy and Ahmed are specifically examining microaggressions against academic librarians by non-library faculty or “teaching faculty.” Their project is rooted in the widely held belief that collaboration between librarians and faculty essential to the integration of the academic library into a campus community. Yet the goal of their project is to investigate the “dissatisfaction” academic librarians feel “about mistreatment by some teaching faculty.”

Joy’s presentation at CIDLIS was, to me, oddly reassuring in the same way that I find LISMicroaggressions is a comfort. Both projects are validating. They take comments or moments in my professional practice that are so fleeting that I question what exactly just happened, and yet so present as to feel oh-so-heavy. The discrepancies in age, educational attainment, gender, and scholarly background between librarians and non-librarian faculty are real, but are rarely acknowledged in the “collaboration literature.” If we can’t honestly discuss the impact of these aspects of librarian identity on our relationships with our faculty colleagues, how can we begin to include the intersectional identities of our librarians of color or those who identify as somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and the impact those identities have on collaboration? If we want to take it a step further, why not look into the labor practices and classification of librarians in academia?

So much of practice-based LIS writing implores librarians to partner with faculty, but in doing so, puts all of the responsibility on the librarian. If we just do enough outreach, learn enough about faculty teaching and research, get that second master’s degree in a subject area, say yes to just one more class, and provide enough free snacks, then BLAMMO! COLLABORATION WILL HAPPEN! Instead of writing about the duty librarians have to fight for a seat at the faculty table (despite often being classified as faculty), we should be digging into the aspects of our identities that make our position within academic so tenuous.

That’s a large part of the reason I’m so drawn to both LISMicroaggressions and Microaggressions & Academic Libraries. I feel as though taken together, these two projects are investigating the culture of academic libraries and the prejudices that make library work so emotional-labor-intensive. I know based on her presentation at CIDLIS that Joy and Ahmed have plans to analyze the data they’ve gathered according to different demographic characteristics and identities of librarians. I’m curious to learn about how our intersectional identities as librarians impact our interactions with non-library faculty. I think our profession would be well-served by building on LIS intersectionality research like Fobazi Ettarh’s excellent article, Making a New Table: Intersectional Librarianship. If you have recommendations for additional reading–articles, blogs, websites, books–please share in the comments!