A quick tour of the NSU-Broken Arrow Library

This post is just a brief visual tour of the NSU-Broken Arrow library. We will look more closely at the library in the coming weeks.

The library has a smaller footprint than the OU Schusterman library. There are more books, but far fewer bound journals, than Schusterman. Overall, the library has a much more traditional academic library feel to it than Schusterman, with many little study nooks, special collection areas, art displays to give it character. I think it is fair to say that this library's aesthetic reflects the greater diversity of students and programs that are available at the NSU campus.

The main entrance to the library is actually inside a large hallway that spans most of the academic buildings on the campus. The building that houses the library is actually much bigger than the library itself.

 A beautiful stairway overlooks a large study area with giant framed windows facing the East.

There are two technology resource areas, one on each floor:

Here is a rarity in an academic library: and actual children's area! It is conveniently located by the rather large collection of children's books.

 In one corner of the library is a genealogical research area. There is also a separate Native American genealogical area.

On the first floor there are a few display cases with some of the libraries collections, as well as notices for upcoming events. 

The library has a large collection of art, some of which has not been processed yet. They have done a wonderful job of integrating art into the space. While it is hard to tell from the poor quality phone images below, there is a very stunning set of biblically themed architectural sketches on the first floor.

This entire front shelving unit in the stacks consist of Native American studies and history. 

And finally, the "transitory" office used by librarians visiting from the Tahlequah campus or interns such as myself.

One final note: you may have observed the lack of students in the above pictures. That is because I took these on a Tuesday night, which just happens to be particularly slow at the library. This is a commuter campus, so the traffic in the library is very irratic. On Thursday mornings, the library tends to be pretty busy.

Observing my first B.I. 1/23/2020

Librarians love to use a lot of abbreviations and acronyms, and I was stumped when Dr. Louderback suggested that I sit in on some BI's. B.I. stands for "bibliographic instruction," and it is a big part of the NSU library's services. These are academic sessions for students that are led by librarians, providing detailed instruction in how to use library resources to do academic research and properly cite source material. Professors in various academic departments schedule the B.I.s for their classes, usually at the beginning of a semester or at the start of a large research paper.

I will be working with Karl Siewert in the near future on putting together a recorded version of a B.I., so we thought it would be a good idea for me to observe a few live sessions in action. Karl's formal title at the library is "Instruction Librarian and Subject Librarian for the College of Education."

On Thursday I attended an atypical session - atypical because it was for high school students! Broken Arrow High Schools have a program for Juniors and Seniors to take classes at NSU for college credit. They come to NSU for classes in the morning and return to their high school in the afternoon.

Karl had at least 5 back to back sessions with high school kids that morning! Nevertheless, when I observed his fourth session of the morning, his presentation was energetic and effective. I knew from a previous conversation with him that he was a high school instructor in a previous life before becoming a librarian, and I can say that background worker to his advantage.

A few observations:

1. As students were settling in, he did some pretty impressive tricks on his yo-yo (a side hobby of his). This immediately grabbed the attention of the class and I imagine built a level of trust (e.g. he's not your scary or stuffy Hollywood librarian).
2. Karl had a pretty interesting way of describing his profession. "We are people who have a passion for helping people find answers." He stressed that nothing in the world makes librarians happier than to be asked questions, and how sad it was that so few people ever took the opportunity to do so. 
3. The students were doing a research project on their on an academic program they were interested in pursuing in college, along with one scholarly article on that subject. This was an exercise to get students comfortable with using library resources. Karl guided them through the process of using databases. What could have amounted to herding cats (everyone was researching something unique), turned out to be very smooth. While some students needed more attention to others, everyone had what they needed by the end of the class.
4. The key to such a successful session, as far as I could tell, was how refined and distilled the presentation was. Since he had the kids for 50 minutes, he needed to make a good impression and use his time as effectively as possible. There was no rambling or tangents.

My biggest takeaway in regards to this observation is the importance of brevity, clarity and prior planning that goes into a successful B.I.

Learning Objectives

An academic internship is a reciprocal relationship: the student benefits by learning new skills through hands-on experience, while the institution hopefully benefits from the work of the intern.

One way that the University of Oklahoma tries to ensure that interns benefit academically from their experience is by requiring them to compose a list of learning objectives. I was required to submit these before my internship began.

Since I have some experience working as a graduate assistant at the Schusterman Library at OU/Tulsa, I wanted to be sure that my intern experience at the NS/Broken Arrow library would be new and round out my growing skill set. After speaking briefly with Dr. Louderback about various possibilities for my time there, I came up with these fairly broad objectives:


Learning Objective #1: I would like to assist with collection development/management
and weeding.

Learning Objective #2: I would like to acquire experience performing research via a survey instrument.

Learning Objective #3: I would like to acquire hands-on experience serving patrons at the
Reference and Circulation desk.

Learning Objective #4: I would like to acquire experience preparing for and participating in Library
instruction.

Learning Objective #5: I would like to develop the organizational skills required to catalog and classify special collections.


The objectives were left rather broad so that we could adapt them for a variety or tasks and projects as we saw fit.

On the first day of my internship, we worked off of these learning objectives to come up with an outline for the semester. For example, for learning objective #4, we looked at the upcoming scheduled library instructional sessions to see what sessions my schedule allowed me to sit in on. We also looked at the possibility of working with a library instructor on recording an informational session.

As I continue to blog about my internship, I will return to these objectives as guideposts.

First day! 1/14/20

With classes in session again, I was set to start my internship on Tuesday, the 14th of January. My  schedule for the year will be from 4:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. on Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Thursdays, with a few exceptions. After sitting in traffic for over an hour on the Broken Arrow expressway, I arrived at the NSU Broken Arrow campus late and out of breath - not the way I like to make a first impression. Thankfully, Dr. Louderback was very understanding; the rush hour commute from Tulsa to Broken Arrow can be unpredictable, to say the least.

Dr. Pamela Louderback

After meeting some of the library staff, I sat down with Dr. Louderback to look at a calendar and develop a long term plan for the internship. She went down the list of internship learning objectives that I put together prior to beginning the internship (I'll flesh these out in the next post). Among the activities we scheduled were sitting in on few a few instructional sessions led by the librarians, with the plan being that I could eventually assist them in preparing for and teaching these classes down the road. We looked at possible dates for me to visit and do some work with the collections at the NSU Tahlequah campus.We scheduled in some time to work the circulation desk (and associated tasks), as well as sitting in on a few staff meetings.

In addition, we talked about the possibilities of creating "Lib Guides" on various topics for students. LibGuide is an online format that allows librarians to make user friendly online tutorials. Since I will be working largely on my own on Tuesday evenings, we decided that I would start researching for a LibGuide on copyright and fair-usage. I spent the rest of the evening working on that and getting familiarized with the physical space of the library.

In the next post, I will go into greater detail about the learning objectives I set for this internship and the various tasks and projects that I will be doing at the library.