Academic Library Services to Graduate Students Interest Group

Greetings ALSGS Members, 

As we head into the start of another school year, we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves and seek your feedback on the next steps for the interest group. 

Jess Hagman (Convener): I'm a Social Sciences Research Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I'm a subject liaison for Anthropology, Sociology, and Geography and work with folks doing qualitative research through consultations and workshops. All of my subject areas have grad programs and the bulk of my consults on qualitative software and research are grad students. 

Geoff Johnson (Past Convener): I'm the Graduate Teaching and Learning Librarian at the Auraria Library in Denver, Colorado. The library works with three schools, two of which have growing graduate programs. I work a lot with Social Work and Public Administration master's programs as well as a smattering of other subject areas.

Matt Ogborn (Incoming Convener): I'm a Graduate Outreach and Instruction Librarian at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. I don't focus on particular subject areas, instead trying to reach as many graduate students and programs as possible, both on our five campuses and online, to make them aware of the library's tools and resources.

During the 20-21 year, a working group from ALSGS selected the first list of Notable Works in Services for Graduate Students. 

This year, we'd like to return to hosting webinars and discussions to bring folks together to discuss how services for graduate students have been adapted or changed in light of the pandemic. We're also interested in exploring questions around the structuring of graduate student support in our institutions. 

To kick off our discussion, we'd like to ask you all to share your own introduction to yourself, as well as describing what graduate support looks like at your institution in terms of structure and staffing. Has there been any change to your systems of graduate support in recent years (COVID-related, or not)? Do you anticipate any changes? Or are there any you'd like to see, even if that's just in a world with more resources? 

Please also share any ideas you're interested in exploring this year in this thread. As a reminder, we're now using ALA Connect for communication rather than the previous email list. You can change when you receive notifications for posts in this, or any other, ALA Connect community through your Community Notifications. Posts must follow the Code of Conduct. 

My division focuses on instruction (primarily of undergraduates), while my colleagues who also support grad students are in the STEM, Humanities, and Social Sciences divisions. In the five years that I've been here, there have been 2+ reorganizations, which resulted in librarians being taken out of and then put back into divisions based on their specialties, among other things. Given ongoing understaffing and impending retirements, I anticipate that we will continue to face difficulties in supporting all of our students at the levels we'd prefer. For instance, we currently have three undergraduate instruction librarians for 70,000+ undergraduates, making us unable to instruct more than a portion of the 15,000 or so new, first-year undergrads each year. Likewise, we do not have nearly enough subject specialist librarians in some areas (particularly STEM). Our current status means that I will likely work much more with undergraduates than graduate students in the coming year.

I would very much like to see changes in how ASU funds its libraries. While the university has grown and grown, the library budget has been flat for decades. More librarians and archivists would result in more support of our students, graduate and otherwise. However, I worry that ASU is going to be a hard sell for applicants as new positions are approved because, among other reasons, we're in a region that's only going to get hotter (the Sonoran Desert) and ASU doesn't currently offer any sort of work flexibility (or mask and vaccine mandates) that might make other institutions look more desirable to librarians seeking work.

Greetings ALSGS Members, 

As we head into the start of another school year, we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves and seek your feedback on the next steps for the interest group. 

Jess Hagman (Convener): I'm a Social Sciences Research Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I'm a subject liaison for Anthropology, Sociology, and Geography and work with folks doing qualitative research through consultations and workshops. All of my subject areas have grad programs and the bulk of my consults on qualitative software and research are grad students. 

Geoff Johnson (Past Convener): I'm the Graduate Teaching and Learning Librarian at the Auraria Library in Denver, Colorado. The library works with three schools, two of which have growing graduate programs. I work a lot with Social Work and Public Administration master's programs as well as a smattering of other subject areas.

Matt Ogborn (Incoming Convener): I'm a Graduate Outreach and Instruction Librarian at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. I don't focus on particular subject areas, instead trying to reach as many graduate students and programs as possible, both on our five campuses and online, to make them aware of the library's tools and resources.

During the 20-21 year, a working group from ALSGS selected the first list of Notable Works in Services for Graduate Students. 

This year, we'd like to return to hosting webinars and discussions to bring folks together to discuss how services for graduate students have been adapted or changed in light of the pandemic. We're also interested in exploring questions around the structuring of graduate student support in our institutions. 

To kick off our discussion, we'd like to ask you all to share your own introduction to yourself, as well as describing what graduate support looks like at your institution in terms of structure and staffing. Has there been any change to your systems of graduate support in recent years (COVID-related, or not)? Do you anticipate any changes? Or are there any you'd like to see, even if that's just in a world with more resources? 

Please also share any ideas you're interested in exploring this year in this thread. As a reminder, we're now using ALA Connect for communication rather than the previous email list. You can change when you receive notifications for posts in this, or any other, ALA Connect community through your Community Notifications. Posts must follow the Code of Conduct.