Outreach for Librarians: Library Student Group

Philosophy on how to run a student group

There are a couple of different philosophies on this topic depending on the goals of your group, but two of them are:

• Student groups should be student run, and students should dictate the direction of the group.
• The librarian decides the direction of the group, and the librarian and students work together to achieve certain goals.

I proscribe to the second philosophy because as the librarian, I understand libraries, their function and goals, and why things are the way they are, and students don’t realize what they don’t know.  They don’t have the necessary skills to execute outreach events, must be taught and allowed to experience the event with those special insights, and given time to develop necessary skills.  If you allow students to run the group, you will have fewer events because students don’t have the skills to plan and roll out events as quickly as a seasoned professional. 

One of the things that I do is to start the academic year by having students learn what library events look like, how they are planned, and then what they look as they take place with the knowledge that they will plan and execute some of the events in the Spring semester.  Usually, this means that they will plan an event for February – often a Valentine’s Day themed event - and something else in April. 

Calendars and Schedules

• Ask them to give you a copy of their class and work schedules so that you know when they’re available to help with events.  I have them do this while we are in one of our first meetings.
• In June and July, take a year-long calendar and plan out as many events as possible.
• Give students a packet of blank calendar months – August through May, and have them mark on their calendars all the different events.  Explain to them why certain events are on certain days (i.e. Gaming in the Library is always the 4^th Thursday of the month) and have them help you fill in the blanks for events you haven’t scheduled yet.

It's interesting to see what happens when you step back and let students make the decisions. I asked them to come with ideas for an activity for Finals Stress Relief. After shooting down all the ones that might get us sued, we settled on SLIME. We are going to have students make slime to take home, and I think we may call it "I got SLIMED in the Library!"  

~ Alexa Azzopardi, Facebook post, April 25, 2017

Library Student Group

How To:

• Apply through Student Life to become a student group, and every year you will have to renew your group.
• Decide what to name your group.  At HCC, there are a few library student groups scattered across the district with various names:
  • SLAC – Student Library Advisory Council – Central
  • SLAC – Student Library Advisory Club – Katy
  • Rotaract Club – Spring Branch
  • TLC – The Library Connection – Stafford
• Decide what day and time you’ll meet.  TLC meets every other Wednesday from 2:30 – 4:00.
• Publicize your group and recruit members.  (Recruiting members is easier once you have some, because if students like being in your group, they will bring their friends.)
• Feed them!  College students love free food, and I’ve found this can be another way of exposing students to food/treats they may not have tried before – especially international students.  For instance, I’ve discovered that international students tend to like caramel and apples but don’t like pumpkin pie or anything else “pumpkin spice” flavored.

Benefits of having a student group: 

• Planning, budgeting and executing events are skills learned by students.
• They also learn leadership skills, and TLC officer positions become something they can put on applications to four year universities and resumes.
• Students develop friendships that last after their time at HCC.
• Everybody is welcome - VAST students, Honor students and everybody in between!
• Students who get involved in their campus and student life have proven to preserver at higher rates and stay in school.
• As a faculty member, you get a unique opportunity to mentor a small group of students in a way not available in a classroom situation.
• Student groups have access to funds for their events through CAB.
• Sometimes Student Life and SGA will promote your events through their communication channels.
• Group members will help and (sometimes) even run the various outreach events.
• The librarian can quickly get a student’s viewpoint and opinion on something in the library and take that information under advisement.

Drawbacks of having a student group: 

• Sometimes it’s faster to do it yourself instead of having students help you, but part of having a student group is teaching them which takes time. 
• There are hoops to jump through with Student Life to even have a student group to say nothing of the hoops to request money in a CAB request for funds. 

Service Projects

Early on, my student group did two service projects – a charity bake sale for someone in the HCC community and a gently used book drive for the Stafford MISD teacher’s libraries. 

While I like the idea of service projects, after some thought, I have pulled back on these for the following reasons:

• First and foremost, the student group is already serving the student body through the work that they do to put on events.
• Charity bake sales require physical money and responsible handling.  We also discovered that many of our students don’t carry physical money!
• Even asking for gently used books, people brought items that either weren’t gently used or were so outdated that they couldn’t be used.

Officers

While I want students to step up and volunteer for positions, I also keep some other factors in mind:

• President - You will work closest with the president of the group, and you want them to have previous experience with your group, to have shown themselves to be a reliable worker and who consistently show up for meetings and events.  I’m always looking to see who might be the next president of TLC and have sometimes decided by the end of the Spring semester who will be the president next fall.  I privately talk with that person to see if they are coming back and want the position.  Then I will take that discussion to the group to see if they agree with that decision.  The other officers can be decided on in the fall.
• Other Officers - Are they new to the group?  While I don’t mind if new members take some of the other officer positions, the president should have previous experience with TLC.

HCC says that you have to have five officers, but you can be flexible with their titles and job functions.  The four positions normally chosen are president, vice president, secretary and treasurer.  Some groups have parliamentarian or historian as the fifth officer.

Communication

• My students do not check their e-mail, and because of HCC policy, the only e-mail I can use is their school e-mail.  On the other hand, students are always on their phone, and they love texting, so I recommend that you use Remind. 
• As the faculty advisor, you go out to their website and create an account.
• Remind will give you a phone number and code for students to text to join your group, or they can download the Remind app and get your messages.
• One of the functions of Remind is that students can respond to you, but the reply only comes back to you as the “teacher”.  Sometimes I’ve realized that more people probably have that question, so I will send out a second message addressing the issue.
• Because of the way Remind functions, students can’t talk among themselves, and sometimes they need to discuss something and then come back to me with an answer.  Consequently, they have set up their own chat group that I’m not a member of.

Student Groups