Creating an Inclusive and Empowered Graduate and Professional Student Community Through the Library

Abstract

Many academic libraries have recognized the need for outreach as part of strategic planning and are engaged directly with an increasingly diverse community of users. However, a holistic or universal definition of outreach appears elusive. Often born out of traditional public relations and marketing efforts, outreach has progressively become more specialized, directed toward unique and richly diverse communities that, in turn, require more focused and specific access to collections and services. The rising number of graduate student support services centers and units on the academic campus, whose populations range from armed service veterans to international students, has pointed to new opportunities and roles for the library. Increasingly, academic libraries are positioned at the intersection of the academic classroom and the co-curricular lives of graduate and professional students. Libraries are at a crossroads. They must not only maintain awareness and acknowledgment of these specialized communities of users but also become both advocates and partners with diverse groups in and out of the classroom. This chapter presents an exploration of the changing physical nature of the academic library, which has warranted an increased need for outreach, as well as how new partnerships and initiatives are effectively re-branding library identities and informing direct engagement efforts with our user communities. The authors will provide examples of localized outreach and engagement efforts directed toward diverse graduate and professional student populations currently underway at their institution (and nationally) to help identify key roles and new opportunities for library outreach to graduate students. Through an examination of advocacy and partnership efforts and an ongoing discussion of the changing dynamic of the twenty-first-century library (physical and virtual), the discussion will work toward defining the concept of library outreach at the crossroads—in and out of the classroom. Further discussions of awareness efforts, advocacy programming, and how the twenty-first-century academic library is perceived by diverse graduate student communities will aid in moving beyond a “we know it when we see it” understanding of library outreach. We need to work toward a bi-literal understanding of direct engagement—learning more about our graduate student users while they learn more about us—and we plan to explain how to achieve this goal.