This week Bill talks about the student library experience with librarians from a community college, a master’s granting institution, and a university. He gets perspective on the different types of FYE programs at each institution and how the differing student bodies shape the programming—or don’t—at Pasadena City College, California State University East Bay, and California State University, Fresno.

This week Bill, Ray, Lisa, and Laura talk tactics for collaboration—who should you build bridges with? Students? Faculty? Other library departments? What if there’s not time? How does partnering with an off-campus group work? Bill finds answers to these questions and others with this week’s group of expert panelists.

This week, Bill talks with Ray, Laura, and Lisa about collaboration as a key component of first year experience programming and development, and some of the things that can complicate the library’s efforts to collaborate. They also talk about strategies for sustaining the collaborations without reinventing the wheel year after year.

In this episode Bill speaks with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Ray Pun and Laura Kohl about a study Lisa recently published in Communications in Information Literacy that examines first year student misconceptions about information literacy—how those misconceptions take root, what they are, and how librarians can help root them out. They take for an example the common misconception, “All library sources are credible” and examine how a student might arrive at that specific “successful error,” as Bill dubs it.

Learn how Bryant University integrated information literacy into its list of five things that differentiate a Bryant education, and how that led the library into developing both a summer bridge course and four courses designed to teach the differentiators. Laura Kohl, Director of Library Services, provides insight into how things got started and what it takes to keep iterating and innovating while maintaining a tight focus on the program’s goals. Lisa and Ray also provide their views on collaboration and how to foster it. Don’t miss the episode!

In this final episode about big data research, we focus on the utility of pulling data sets out of the desk drawer and making them available for wider examination and manipulation. Ian also dives into the problems that can arise when research funders don’t take into account the specialized tools researchers sometimes develop to dig into their data and how the loss of those tools can result in heterogeneous methodologies that complicate interpreting huge data sets.

In this third of our four episodes about big data research, we continue our conversation by focusing on the The University of Southern California’s library’s day-to-day work with Big Data, and how integral partnerships with researchers are to understanding the individual research questions and the tools necessary to answer them. They also discuss how prevalent big data research is at USC and some of the exciting projects that are currently in the works.

In this second of our four episodes about big data research, we continue our conversation by focusing on the library’s role with not only services and instruction, but how big data impacts collection practices and how it’s altering the relationships between libraries and vendors. Fundamentally, a library’s broader strategy for supporting big data research starts with the reference interview and grows from there.

In this final episode of our four-part series on the evolution of institutional repositories, our guests talk about how they not only sustain engagement with their IRs, but grow it as well. A key driver of success is relationships. Partnerships with faculty and students are, of course, crucial, but Illinois Wesleyan’s Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Utah State University’s Dylan Burns both describe how they target entities such as admissions and university communications to help expand the circle of repository influencers. They also put the time in for personal connections with individuals, which is also important to expanding the repository’s promotional network. Stephanie and Dylan also talk about how they’ve kept the IR mission purposefully broad in scope to accommodate a range of content types and the communities it serves.

For this series on the research methodologies around—and library support of—big data, our guests discuss the growth of big data research and how the academic library is stepping up to meet its unique service and instruction needs. In this first episode of our four-part series, we define what the term “big data” means in an academic setting and how big data research is outgrowing its science-based origins and bleeding into the humanities and social sciences.