Relationships Between Teaching Faculty and Teaching Librarians

Every librarian who teaches in an academic library setting understands the complexities involved in partnering with teaching faculty. Relationships Between Teaching Faculty and Teaching Librarians recounts the efforts of librarians and faculty working together in disciplines across the board to create and sustain connections crucial to the success of library instruction. This unique collection of essays examines various types of partnerships between librarians and faculty (networking, coordination, and collaboration) and addresses the big issues involved, including teaching within an academic discipline, the intricacies of assigning grades, faculty perceptions of library instruction, and the changing role of the reference librarian.

Education is the main focus of reference service in today's academic libraries and librarians teach a variety of single-session, course-related, course-integrated, or credit-bearing courses in nearly every discipline. Relationships Between Teaching Faculty and Teaching Librarians reflects the experiences of librarians, teaching faculty, and library directors, whose perspectives range from cynicism to cautious optimism to idealism when it comes to working with teaching faculty. The book includes case studies, surveys, sample questionnaires, statistics, and a toolkit for establishing an effective library liaison program, and examines the teaching and learning environment, course growth and maintenance, and the professor librarian model.

Relationships Between Teaching Faculty and Teaching Librarians presents lessons learned from seeking a common ground including:

• a successful faculty/librarian collaboration for educational psychology and counseling
• a library research project for freshman engineering students
• a semester-by-semester look at a collaboratively taught graduate research and writing course
• a survey that determines how librarians and library directors feel about teaching outside the library
• an analysis of librarians’ attitudes toward faculty
• an analysis of attitudes that influence faculty collaboration in library instruction
• a look at innovative methods of increasing the teaching roles of librarians
• and much more!

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSA/CHE) has mandated that information literacy be included as part of a general education requirement. If your faculty wasn't calling for library instruction before the mandate, it probably is now. Relationships Between Teaching Faculty and Teaching Librarians will help librarians establish communication with faculty that provides a solid foundation for coursework in all disciplines.