Show your Librarian some love / Todd Gillman

Many academic librarians feel unloved and underappreciated on their campuses, and the main reason is that they sense they are viewed as second-class citizens by members of the teaching faculty.

... Just as children raised in a loving environment tend to fare better in life than those from broken homes, so students trained by professors and librarians who cooperate and affirm each other's role fare better than those forced to bear the brunt of troubled relations.

... If your students didn't get enough exposure to research education before your course (and trust me, they didn't) you owe it to them to bring them in. Most undergraduates come to college having mastered only the most basic tools for research. They can use a dictionary. They can conduct a search in Google that yields results (5 million, in fact!). They may even be able to run an online search by author or title and then find the book on the shelf. But that's about it -- and that's not nearly enough.

... So if you are a teaching faculty member, why not respond to that librarian who e-mails you every fall with an offer to meet you and your students for research-education (or "information literacy") sessions at the library and take him or her up on it?

Todd Gilman is the librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.