Previous: Biography
As a faculty librarian, my primary teaching opportunities revolve around reference desk interactions, library instruction requests from faculty in my assigned subjects and archival access appointments. As the Collections Management Librarian and Archivist, I have a number of additional duties which are primarily concerned with the overall care of the library collection and archives.
My teaching responsibilities have, at times, expanded to include standing guest lectures in AFR, summer lectures for College Now’s architecture program for high school students, and in a first for a City Tech librarian, a credit bearing course.
At the reference desk, utilizing reference-interviewing skills honed at both public and academic libraries as I question students to tease out their specific needs from the broad questions they typically approach the desk with.
Meeting students in the classroom provides more time to work with them, answering questions that they have thought of while we discuss research and writing as a group. I like to include time to search the internet, visit popular non-academic sources like Instagram and Pinterest, and then working backwards to prove or disprove the claims we find there. These longer contact periods have led to one-on-one interactions with students who connect with me via email or in person to work more closely on their specific research ideas.
In the archives, I frequently work with other faculty to locate items relevant to their research or departmental assignments. Faculty may also use the classroom connected to our archives space. These sessions include an introduction and tour of the archives with a focus on our featured Science Fiction collection that students are encouraged to use in their research. The students themselves may request archival access, these requests are often made in order to view our collection of course catalogs that may help them to receive credit for previous coursework.
