New Liaison Librarians: Envisioning and Establishing Meaningful Faculty Partnerships

Background: Share strategies that worked at two separate institutions to establish relationships with faculty as librarians new to the respective institutions that can lead to integration into student curriculum of evidence-based practice and research, as well as developing the relationship into a true partnership.

Description: As mid-career librarians starting at new institutions, we were faced with the common challenge of establishing ourselves as liaisons while advocating for new integration of evidence-based practice and research into the school’s curriculum. We desired to establish these interprofessional relationships from the beginning as a partnerships, leading to true course integration rather than less meaningful one-shots.

We vocalized at committee meetings and social events regarding the needs we perceived and ways we could help fill these, rather than targeting specific courses or faculty. Faculty who self-identified as sharing our needs and values then reached out to us, including one program’s faculty and administration requesting in-person office hours within the school itself. This laid the groundwork to build collaborative partnerships leading to new yet meaningful and flexible long-term integration. We gathered feedback from our faculty partners to determine their perspectives on what led to these meaningful partnerships.

Conclusion: We evaluate faculty-librarian relationships as partnerships if faculty contacted and invited the librarian to integrate into a course, as opposed to the librarian requesting course time or faculty requesting a one-shot. We achieved a total of six such partnerships. We gathered feedback fro some of these faculty about our collaboration and will present from both the librarian and faculty perspectives what made these collaborative partnerships work.