This poster will provide specific details about how to develop weekly bulletins that engage student assistants! The weekly bulletin is an inclusive method of sharing timely updates to student workers, celebrating student successes, and providing ongoing training opportunities throughout the school year. This poster will provide tips on how to solicit content from all areas of the library as well as introduce MyEmma as one platform for creating the bulletins.
College is stressful. And in addition to all the traditional pressures of higher education, student employees also have to navigate a job and the workplace, often for the very first time in their lives. The User Services Unit in the Hesburgh Libraries has embodied the ethics of care in our policies and culture by adopting the mindset of Cura Personalis (Latin for Care for the Whole Person). In this context, we think of it as care for the whole student employee: mind, body, and spirit. This poster will exhibit some of the ways in which our patron-facing Unit has embodied care in our practices with student workers, including study break events, mental health training, professional development sessions, social activities, and flex shifts. Our goal is to not only lessen the students’ overall stress, but demonstrate our support and care for their wellbeing both in and out of the library workplace.
The UNC Greensboro University Libraries (UL) participate in several programs fighting food insecurity, a serious issue affecting our campus community. Inspired by these public facing programs, library student supervisors identified a significant gap in the UL’s efforts: our own student workers. In fall 2023, supervisors and library administration developed a student worker snack pantry. Since then, we have provided over $800 worth of shelf-stable food, such as granola bars, trail mix, nuts, crackers, and fruit snacks. Students can visit the pantry and staff can pick up items to keep in their departments for easier student access. This poster will use the ethics of care as a framework to outline the project from idea to implementation.
The Learning Lab internship at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Center employs a student-centered approach that provides the basis for students discovering their true academic selves through primary source research. The cohort of approximately 10 interns form a team environment that, at turns, encourages, inspires, and motivates the team. A contributing element to this ethics of care is the application of "rose and thorn" at the beginning of every weekly meeting. This very simple exercise that asks the question of what has gone well this week (the rose) and what has not gone as well (the thorn) has clearly impacted students since its employment during the pandemic. It has been so successful that it is still used today in the internship program. This presentation will explore the genesis of this experiment and observations on why it works so well to quickly form relationships, understanding, and compassion.
We pioneered the idea of “compliment cards” to boost morale, encourage, and demonstrate caring to our student employees, faculty, and staff. Small, postcard-sized decorated cards are stocked at our service desk and available for anyone to use. Student employees have taken the lead on designing them with different themes and sayings such as “I love our chats!” or “We appreciate you!” Compliments given range from big appreciative statements to things like “Your outfit is amazing!” The cards are small ways to show we care, in a tangible form that can be looked back on (several students keep theirs pasted into books or hanging on their apartment walls). They provide opportunities for students to form bonds and appreciate one another. Faculty and staff also use them to show how we value students holistically, not only for their contributions to workplace tasks.
Using data collected from my phenomenological dissertation project, I will share the findings from twelve interviews with faculty librarians who supervise student employees in the library. The participant sample largely consisted of individuals who attended the first SEAL symposium in 2022. The study is guided by Donald Super’s theories of career roles and development, focusing on self-concept, adaptability, job satisfaction, and understanding of job roles. This presentation will demonstrate the various ways in which supervisors engage in practices that are tied directly to the ethics of care when working together with their student employees. The evidence found in my study demonstrates that these individuals care very deeply for their student employees not just in their work performance but also in their academic success and life interests and goals outside their educational and work lives.
The original GROW (Guided Reflection on Work) program developed at the University of Iowa has served as a valuable model for supporting student employees nationwide. However, to better align with the unique needs of student employees at East Carolina University’s Academic Library Services (ALS), we are redesigning the GROW program to adopt a holistic approach that supports the whole person, encompassing mental and physical health while emphasizing career readiness. By addressing these aspects, we expect to see increased engagement and job satisfaction among our student employees. Our objective is to create a comprehensive program that not only prepares student employees for their future careers but also ensures their well-being during their tenure at the library. The new GROW program will integrate resources and services from various university departments, including Career Services, Financial Wellness, and the Counseling Center. This new program is currently in its initial stages and will be gradually implemented this fall semester, with thorough evaluation and assessment to determine the next steps.
At St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN, we have two libraries that jointly employ around 40 student workers, a main academic library and a music library. Two years ago we switched from having these libraries work independently of each other to training the student workers to work at both libraries. This has helped ease the burden of finding substitutes for shifts, which has lessened students' anxieties around having to drop a shift. The larger worker pool means that the odds of a shift being picked up is much higher, particularly for music students, as many of them are in rehearsals or other music-related events at the same time. This also means that workers are also able to meet students they may not have interacted with before, which has helped us build a stronger overall community.