UGA Libraries Student Success Activity Examples
This document is not meant to be exhaustive, but to serve as a starting point for departments and individuals when the need arises to showcase how their work impacts student success.
University-wide Student Success Examples draft: https://provost.uga.edu/faculty_working_group/SSA_CategorizedExamples_7Jan2022_DRAFT.pdf
Any/all departments
- Organizing or volunteering at a Paws & Relax event
- Staffing information fairs and speaking at orientations for new graduate, international, and transfer students, as well as other student populations
- Informing students about services and events on social media channels
- Serving as an embedded librarian/archivist
- Teaching a session for a UGA student group or credit-bearing class
- Speaking about Libraries’ resources at a UGA department’s new student orientation
- Expending university and state resources to maximize student access to print and electronic materials
- Providing students with successful examples of group and collaborative work that they can model inside their classes, student activities, or jobs
- Partnering with other academic and career student support units on programming and outreach
- Creating, developing, and enhancing support services and programming for specific student groups who may have additional needs or be underrepresented
Administrative/Management
- Supervising or directing the work of a student worker or graduate assistantship
- Developing and/or supervising a student position part of the experiential learning transcript
Acquisitions & Serials
- Activating links to electronic resources to make them discoverable and available
- Spending approximately $13M materials budget
- Providing access to journals, databases, and print materials
- Gathering and making available usage statistics to inform Collection Development decisions
- Processing Rush and Notify materials in order to supply researchers with needed materials as quickly as possible
Access Services
- Managing workflows facilitating the retrieval and delivery of physical or electronic research materials
- Managing workflows to make sure student record data is up to date to facilitate easy access to physical and electronic research materials
Cataloging/Integrated Library System Management (ILSM)
- Monitoring LibAnswers queue to troubleshoot access problems with electronic resources and print materials
- Maintaining the online catalog to show accurate information about our holdings
- Providing alternate access points and cross references
- Assisting with metadata creation for other departments, including Brown Media Newsfilm Archive and Georgia Government Publications Database
- Performing work in the online catalog to repair past practices that are no longer beneficial to findability of materials
- Collaborating with staff members at the Cortona Library to ensure their materials are properly represented in the OPAC
- Working with Research and Instruction to adjust the structure and display of the online catalog according to students' needs and search strategies
- Cataloging Rush and Notify materials in order to supply researchers with needed materials as quickly as possible
- Verifying the accuracy of descriptive information for new materials added to the online catalog
Collection Development
- Selecting for purchase or subscription materials ranging from individual resources to large vendor packages
- Maintaining the collection through review, binding, repair, and replacement of materials
- Monitoring and interpreting usage and circulation statistics to determine current needs and to forecast future needs of students
- Considering and fulfilling student purchase/subscription requests when possible
- Participating in user-driven acquisitions programs that enable students to select library materials to add to the collection.
- Determining the distribution of collection materials among Libraries facilities to maximize accessibility
- Providing access to scholarly literature, which is important for students’ development of disciplinary knowledge
Digital Humanities Lab
- Providing students with opportunities to present their research
- Providing independent study opportunities and Data Office hours
- Hosting a reading group for graduate students
- Employing graduate assistant and undergraduate student workers who have the opportunity to teach DigiLab workshops for a variety of audiences
Digital Library of Georgia
- Creating and maintaining free, web-accessible historic content
- Creating and maintaining systems and data to aid print and electronic resource discovery
- Training students to work in busy digital production environments and familiarizing them with collaboration tools that facilitate that work
- Providing experiential learning and paid internships that give students experience in PR and digital marketing
- Showing students the availability of accessible primary sources online that are available for free, and educating them that librarians and archivists make these resources possible
- Teaching students about how good metadata improves the accessibility of almost everything they see online, even outside the context of libraries and archives
The Georgia Review
- Publishing literary and critical work
- Providing paid internships and pre-professional assistantships for graduate students
- Preparing graduate students for academic-adjacent jobs
- Offering affordable and free content for course adoption
- Providing an experiential learning program that introduces upperclassmen to every department of magazine publishing
- Giving talks around campus on publishing and working in the industry
Interlibrary Loan
- Providing access to print and electronic material, either not owned by or missing from our Libraries
- Maintaining awareness of and participating in resource sharing protocols among libraries and other information providers worldwide to insure timely and cost-effective acquiring of material needed by students
Map and Government Information Library (MAGIL)
- Instruction via one-on-one consultations, class presentations, topical workshops, teaching for-credit courses, and developing asynchronous instructional content such as LibGuides and tutorials
- Providing research support via reference consultation and drop-in help, as well as the description, digitization, preservation, and overall increased discoverability of content in the Libraries' collections
- Experiential learning opportunities that provide student employees the ability to explore areas of interest to them professionally
Research & Instruction
- Creating or updating web-based guides and tutorials to assist students with class assignments, techniques for searching online resources, and developing successful research strategies
- Providing research consultations with students
- Guest lecturing in a class to introduce students to Libraries’ resources and research strategies, as well as teaching for-credit courses
- Answering student questions via desk service, chat, in the stacks, etc.
- Providing research assistance online, in person, and by phone seven days a week
- Developing and updating the Libraries’ website and database menus and gathering student feedback to inform improvements to the website and OPAC
- Teaching groups and individuals technologies that support student projects, such as citation management systems, data analysis software, video editing, 3D printers, and more
- Consulting with faculty on affordable learning (course reserves, linked to UGA subscriptions, OERs)
- Promoting important information literacy skills
Special Collections
- Curating exhibits showcasing student research
- Helping coordinate the student docent program
- Providing instruction in hands-on archival courses using special collections materials
- Through the Special Collections Faculty Fellows Program, working with teaching faculty to develop course activities and assignments that offer primary source-centered active learning
- Assisting students conducting research with primary sources
- Organizing or leading tours of library facilities for UGA students
- Processing and opening archival collections that are available for student research
- Making complex archival materials (e.g., audio-visual or digital items) available and usable
- Ensuring the long-term preservation and usability of digital materials in archival collections
- Maintaining the archival management system to show accurate information about our holdings, contributing to the findability of research materials
- Creating opportunities for students in service learning classes to contribute to library projects
- Fundraising to support Experiential Learning opportunities and internships
UGA Press
- Providing a selection of open access titles and notation resources
- Serving as a resource on academic publishing
- Offering paid internships
- Maintaining the New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Publishing scholarly books