Objective – What do students need and want from library subject guides? Options such as Web 2.0 enhancement are now available to librarians creating subject-specific web pages. Librarians may be eager to implement these new tools, but are such add-ons a priority for students? This paper aims to start a dialogue on this issue by presenting the findings of the University of British Columbia (UBC) Library’s Subject Guides Working Group (SGWG), which was tasked with assessing current library subject guides in order to make recommendations for the update and future development of UBC Library subject guides. Methods – The working group solicited feedback through a questionnaire that was distributed to undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines at UBC. The questionnaire included an evaluation of UBC subject guides, as well as guides from other academic libraries that used various platforms such as LibGuides and SubjectsPlus. Results – Respondents to the student questionnaire indicated that a simple and clean layout was of primary importance. Students also desired succinct annotations to resources and limited page scrolling. Meanwhile, few students identified Web 2.0 features such as rating systems and discussion forums as being important for their needs. The working group used the questionnaire data to create a “Top Ten” list of student recommendations. Conclusions – The “Top Ten” list of student recommendations was combined with stakeholder feedback from faculty, liaison librarians and Library Systems and Information Technology representatives to create the SGWG’s final recommendation for subject guide revision and enhancement. For the SGWG these findings called into question the necessity of Web 2.0 technologies within subject guide pages and highlighted the need for further research on the topic of subject guide usability and effectiveness.

This panel argues that information professionals and literacy educators play an important bridging role between universities and community groups and stakeholders. We describe the context of universitycommunity knowledge exchange, which is increasingly expected, but remains under-supported and under-theorised, and consider new opportunities that exist to support and build capacity in researchers and communities to co-create, share, and use information. We focus on the training and professional development needed to position information professionals and literacy educators as knowledge brokers, and innovative projects that demonstrate their value and potential in this role.

Recently community engagement has emerged as a priority among universities, offering new opportunities for their libraries. A literature scan of community-centred work in libraries reveals diverse examples but a lack of conceptual definitions or frameworks to  help practitioners advance their work for social impact.  We present a case study using the Carnegie Foundation definition of community engagement and apply two conceptual frameworks: living lab constructs  and boundary spanning theory. The living lab constructs provide a framework to describe an innovation process that addresses a social challenge, experiments with specific actions for change, and defines specific returns or social impact. Boundary spanning theory provides a framework to help university leaders conceptualize linkages to community in ways that account for institutional complexity and foster reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationships with community partners. We use these two frameworks to describe the Making Research Accessible initiative which has three goals: i) increase the accessibility and impact of research done in the community; ii) increase the availability to researchers of community-generated research;  iii) create opportunities for  community and  university members to share information and learn from each other. From the  case study, we summarize  what we have learned about community engagement to be of general relevance to library practitioners.

No abstract

No abstract