The Sheridan Libraries has launched a marketing campaign to promote its Research Consultation Office (RCO), which is geared toward informing students of the underused research resources available to them.
The library staff started the campaign because they felt that students were unaware of the resources and information that the Milton S. Eisenhower (MSE) Library has to offer.
This is the first time that the Sheridan Libraries is creating an online guide to acquaint students with the librarians and the research resources.
The two University staff members responsible for spearheading the operation are Librarian for Education Liz Johns and Librarian for Science and Engineering Robin Sinn. According to Johns, this guide is the first of its kind and was developed with the collaboration of many affiliates connected to the Sheridan Libraries.
“I don’t think there’s been a campaign like this in the recent past,” Johns said.
Johns gave the Hopkins community a preview of the new programs she and Sinn have developed in collaboration with other members of the network of libraries in a post she wrote on The Sheridan Libraries Blog. The entry, entitled “Can’t Find It? There’s a Guide for That,” highlights the many ways in which the RCO can help students and provides readers with a link to the new guides created to ease the search for information.
Senior Jeremy Lin, who had not yet seen evidence of the newly launched campaign himself, said that he didn’t know about the help available within the MSE Library until he met with a librarian as part of a course.
“I had a class in which we used one of our meeting times to speak with one of the specialists in the library; we were told of the International Studies resources available to us [there] and online,” Lin said. “A lot of us didn’t know that the International Studies-specific guides existed before that class.”
The RCO, which is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday with more limited hours on the weekend, is not used as much as the librarians would like.
“We became librarians because we like helping students find new information,” Johns said. “We want to be busy.”
Johns said that students are doing themselves a disservice by not using the library resources that are subject-specific.
“We focus on different subjects, get to know those resources very closely. Even if you’re not taking a class and you need data, the library can help with that, too,” Johns said.
Johns said that students mostly use the RCO staff for locating books and scholarly articles and that she is dismayed when students only learn of resources as they are finishing up their papers.
“We’ve found that when students come into the Research Consultation Office needing help, they’ve been struggling and have only just heard of it,” Johns said.
Johns recalled the process by which the campaign was developed and the way that it fits in with other changes the University has been making.
“After bouncing around ideas on how to market ourselves, the librarians developed this campaign on their own, but it supports the greater mission of the University,” she said. “We are the first lines of defense in helping students do research, and Hopkins wants to produce strong researchers.”
Johns asserted that younger generations in general are largely unaware of how library resources can help them.
“Now students aren’t using school or public libraries as much, and we have to work harder and harder with the turnover every year,” Johns stated. “I think we haven’t been working hard enough until now, but we also haven’t needed to do this until recently.”
Jenna Santoro, a senior, said that the Internet is a major factor in the low number of students using library resources on the Homewood campus.
“Perhaps students think anything a librarian could help them with they could also find on a website,” Santoro said. “If I need something for a research paper, I’ll just find it myself using the library’s website.”
Johns said that although many students may ask their professors for assistance in writing assignments, it is more beneficial also to use a librarian familiar with the discipline-specific contents of MSE Library.
“It’s a good strategy to take advantage of all resources available to you — your professor and librarians,” she stated.
Senior Laura Kokotailo felt that there were specific ways the MSE Library could work to increase student use of their resources.
“The times I’ve been most likely to use library resources is when I’ve had professors who’ve had a subject-specific librarian come speak to my class,” Kokotailo said. “This made me more likely to reach out to those librarians and use those resources in my own time because they had been made clear and available to me in the class in which I specifically needed them.”
The administrators for the library’s Twitter and Facebook accounts will be using their pages to advertise the RCO’s services. The campaign also features several flyers that market the various ways in which the department can aid students, which have been distributed throughout the Homewood campus.
The librarians of the Sheridan Libraries hope that this campaign will help to bring more awareness to the RCO in the future.
“We would love to see more students talking to us, and the more students that know we’re here, the better off they will be,” Johns said.
In terms of the goals of the campaign, Johns shared that they would be recording the number of students using the RCO this spring.
“We haven’t set a numerical goal. At the end of the summer we will be comparing data collected this year to that of the last couple years to find out if there has been an increase in students coming into the RCO,” Johns said.
