At the 2014 Charleston Conference, a panel of faculty members spoke on "What Faculty Want Librarians to Know." This session will continue the conversation begun by the 2014 panel, seeking to highlight ways for librarians to discover what the faculty at their home institutions wish that the library knew about their research and teaching needs. Using a case study of a liaison re-envisioning project at a large, research-intensive public university as the framework for this session, we will discuss methods for determining the curriculum and research needs of faculty across disciplinary boundaries and ways for promoting library resources and services to departments across campus. We will bring the perspectives of a business librarian and a literature/special collections librarian to the discussion to highlight how standardized, library-wide methods can address discipline-specific needs.
The objectives of this session include exploring models and methods for promoting library resources and services to our faculty partners on campus, identifying alternate routes to support faculty needs in the face of lean collections budgets, finding techniques for working around institutionally-specific challenges for gathering data, and communicating these needs to vendors.
After attending this session, participants will be able to articulate methods and processes for gauging faculty needs of the library for research and instruction across different disciplines. The session will conclude with an interactive discussion of how participants could adapt the techniques described for use at their home institutions.
