Your Business, Management & Economics Liaisons: Library Liaison

All librarians are here for you, but your liaison has additional education and experience in business librarianship, and sets aside time specifically for Business, Management and Economics students so that you can get more focused and in-depth assistance.

During course development or revision

Your Library Liaison can work with you during course design or revision to:

• create or revise library assignments
• find the root cause of learners' difficulties with an existing assignment that uses library resources
• ensure that the reference librarians are informed and prepared to answer questions related to a particular library assignment
• develop customized instructions for using library resources to complete an assignment
• ensure that students are using the best possible information resources available for their discussions and assignments
• embed just in time library instruction appropriate to and necessary for the achievement of the course learning objectives
• integrate information literacy/metaliteracy learning objectives into your course
• find appropriate content, whether subscription library resources, free web resources or Open Educational Resources, to support your learning objectives
• create a Course Guide

Outside of the dev/rev cycle

Before a term begins, or even during the term, you can always work with your Library Liaison to:

• find the root cause of learners' difficulties with an existing assignment that uses library resources
• ensure that the reference librarians are informed and prepared to answer questions related to a particular library assignment
• develop customized instructions for using library resources to complete an assignment
• ensure that students are using the best possible information resources available for their discussions and assignments

Program Development

Your Library Liaison should be involved in program development in Business, Management & Economics to ensure that the library has or has time to grow the staff, instructional resources and information resources to support the new program.

You can always use Ask A Librarian to ask your research questions or get help. When should you contact your Library Liaison directly?

• For a question you anticipate will take more than 20 minutes to answer.
• For a question that the librarian will need to prepare and gather resources in order to answer well. 
• For any question you think would benefit from video chat or screen sharing. 
• Whenever you are looking for library resources or Open Educational Resources to fulfill the content needs of a course you're developing or revising. This process used to be called "Course Request." We're retooling the process and probably the name, but they're still happening.
• Whenever you are creating or revising a research assignment, or an assignment that uses library resources.
• Whenever you are finding that your learners are having trouble with a research assignment, or an assignment that uses library resources.
• If you want to or are curious about making your course fulfill the Information Management or Critical Thinking general education requirements.
• If you want to or are curious about integrating Information Literacy or Metaliteracy into your course.
• If you would like a Course Guide 

This page was created using a content management system called LibGuides. It's very easy to use, and we can use it to create a page and then, in some cases, give you edit access.

We call those pages Course Guides, but there are several different types and purposes:

• Multi-course Guides contain information and resources for entire groups of related courses. It's like one of our regular Subject Guides, but it's just specific a handful of courses that all address aspects of one topic, or proceed from basic to advanced in one topic.
• Course Guides are used to gather and organize links to all the online resources that students are expected to access throughout the course, as well as information needed to locate all the offline/print resources. They often contain library instruction in the form of videos or text and image instructions, to support the kinds of research assignments and activities that will take place in the course. 
• Enhanced Course Guides are like regular Course Guides, except that we give the course owner editing rights. This enables the course owner to put whatever content from or about the course in a publicly available web site so that learners can access and use it before the term starts and after they have completed the course. We have to be cautious about using copyrighted material in this environment, and your Library Liaison will advise you on this. Links, Open Educational Resources and any of your own original content that you are comfortable putting on the open web are fine for an Enhanced Course Guide.
• Section Guides are a way for the section instructor to ensure the work that they do to make the course their own persists even though the content of the course itself reverts to the default every term. With a section guide, we create a page and give the instructor editing rights. The instructor can then put their biographical information, their gloss on the course and any additional materials they'd like their learners to look at. 

Please bear in mind that a Course Guide comes with a certain amount of periodic responsibility. If you have worked with your Library Liaison to create one, you will need to check all the links and verify that all the content is still up to date on a regular basis (preferably at the start of every term, but at least once a year.) Contact the Library Liaison whenever you want to make a change. If you have editing rights to a Guide, you will be responsible for checking all the links and content and updating them yourself. 

A librarian can help you find and evaluate content (library resources, web resources and Open Educational Resources) to put in your course. 

• The faculty or faculty-developer is the Subject Matter Expert. The librarian offers consultation on how to find the materials, and can help you find the materials. We also advise on evaluating the materials. The Subject Matter Expert has to do the selection and adoption. 
• The college works on the Backward Design model. This means we start from your Course Learning Objectives to establish criteria for selecting content. Then from there to finding content that meets those criteria. 

When we first talk, I will ask you about your Course Learning Objectives and how they break down into objectives for each module. I will want to know what kinds of discussions and assignments you are planning, also broken down by module. From there we can talk about the content that the learners will engage with. If you have chosen textbooks; already have some web sites, library resources, or OER that you are planning to use or are creating original content for the course, I will need to know about that. Then we can talk about the gaps that still need to be filled in. 

Over the years, I've discovered that no matter how specific a faculty member gets about the topic, modality and format of the resource that they're looking for, we can't find the right one until we work together to pin down how it will be used and what it will be used for. 

So that is what we will talk about during our consultation. Actually, it will probably be a series of short consultations over email, phone, in person and video chat, whatever works best for us at the time. 

Sarah Morehouse, your Librarian

I got my masters in Library Science in 2006 and came to work here at Empire State College in October of that year. I was soon made the Business, Management and Economics liaison, and took additional training through the American Library Association to learn the ins and outs of business librarianship. I have taken half a dozen graduate courses in various instructional design and online learning topics. I'm also the Educational Studies liaison, the college's copyright specialist, in charge of our small interlibrary loan program, and the lead librarian for Open Educational resources. 

Set up a consultation with the Library Liaison