Research & Instruction
We are located in Norlin's second floor Research Services area.
- Mission
- Services
- Collections
- Research & Instruction Department meets the information needs of the campus community and visitors by providing general and specialized research services and collections in the social sciences and humanities; collaborating with teaching faculty in the provision of information literacy instruction to students; and orienting individuals to the University Libraries.
- We are organized into three areas, based on the pillars of our mission: Reference Services, Instruction Services, and Collection Services.
- Reference Services: This unit is in charge of reference and related services to patrons, including signs, patron feedback, Question Tracker, Instant Messaging (IM), and day-to-day management of the Research Desk. Running of the Norlin Commons, Norlin Commons Desk training and student supervision also falls mainly to this team. Question Tracker is the software we've developed in partnership with Libraries Information Technology (LIT) and the other departments to track all of the questions that we get at the desks. Several branch libraries are participating now in using Question Tracker and in IM reference.
- Instruction Services: This unit is in charge of our extremely busy instruction program. We teach between 200 and 300 instruction sessions in our department every semester, about half of them for the Program for Writing and Rhetoric (PWR). We work closely with PWR on the information literacy components of that course, in addition to providing leadership on the various instruction initiatives in the department, and being in charge of our classrooms.
- Collection Services: This unit is in charge of collections related projects in Research & Instruction Department. We handle development and management of the reference collection, address collection-related service questions, and handle large projects such as the reference reduction and the ongoing microfilm review projects.
