How an Innovative Approach to First Year Experience Transformed One Library's Image on Campus: The Authority File Live at the ACRL Conference

The Authority File

Brian Gray, and his colleagues, spearheaded innovations in the Kelvin Smith Library’s approach to First Year Experience programming at Case Western Reserve University. Originally, librarians visited classrooms in a traditional outreach campaign, but with only ten librarians and between eighty and ninety 17-student “First” seminar sections, the library staff was quickly overwhelmed. That’s what led Brian, as Team Leader for Research Services, to experiment with techniques for reaching more first-year students outside of their “First” seminars. Moving outside the seminars highlighted the soft- and non-traditional skills librarians needed to engage students and led to the development of what Brian calls the Personal Librarian. What is a Personal Librarian? How did Brian up-skill his research and outreach team? That’s what he and Ian Singer, General Manager at Credo Reference Services, discuss with Authority File host Bill Mickey live on the show floor at the 2019 ACRL conference.

Brian and Ian also tackle trends in the FYE space, how the First Year Experience and Personal Librarian Conference came about (and where it’s going), and why Case and Credo have been able to form such a fruitful partnership around FYE.

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