“Learning from the experts: Building workshops with vendors to enhance student business intelligence” - Nora McKenzie (Emory University)

Nora McKenzie (https://libraries.emory.edu/contact/staff-directory/nora-wood-mckenzie) (Emory University) works as part of the Goizueta Business Library team, which was well-represented at SOUCABL 2023. Her presentation (2023) focused on the Business Essentials Workshop Series offered to juniors just starting in the Business School at Emory University (1,100 FTE). Some of the workshops offered are for credit (leading to a Business Research Certificate) and others are not, and the series includes both live and asynchronous offerings. As the pandemic started, McKenzie and her team began experimenting with interactivity in Zoom and at this point also started working with external partners, specifically vendors.

Figure 4.

McKenzie at the lectern with a slide titled “Structuring workshops” in the background.

When considering potential partners, McKenzie and her team prioritized databases that aligned well with existing class projects, are often underutilized albeit highly valuable to student projects, are typically licensed by corporate clients, and do not require an additional fee to offer training. Ultimately, they partnered with Mintel, SimplyAnalytics, and Pitchbook. They currently offer a total of five workshops in which the vendor leads a demonstration, and the librarian leads an instructional activity or activities.

There’s more to facilitating the series than the instruction. Regarding logistics, McKenzie detailed several considerations including marketing and registration, in-class announcements, workshop timing, managing activities, student engagement, feedback, and attendance. McKenzie specifically mentioned having to set “ground rules” at the beginning of each workshop, telling participants that to earn credit, they must stay for the whole workshop, be engaged, and keep their camera on.

McKenzie ended her presentation with a summary of the series’ successes and challenges and shared some lessons learned. The series has increased in popularity as many workshops have over 30 student attendees. Also, McKenzie and her team have received great feedback from students attending from all over the world. Initial assessment has demonstrated student intent to use the resources in both the short- and long-term. Challenges include “level setting,” i.e. differentiating instruction for experience levels, choosing what to cover, monitoring student participation, coordinating schedules, and getting students to provide feedback. Takeaways and tips include keeping on top of planning, sharing all the content creating in order to avoid technical issues, applying a full cycle of instructional design after assessment and reflection on how students’ needs were or were not met, and offering beginner and expert-level workshops for databases in order to “level set.“

During the Q&A, attendees learned that Forrester was one of the vendors who intended to charge for training. Paige DeLoach (SAGE Publishing) asked about the process for incorporating vendor training as part of certification at the Business School, and the response was basically that it was all about good relationships. There was also interest in how the series was marketed. McKenzie shared that all the usual methods were used (newsletters, website postings, print and digital signage, etc.) and commented that they eventually started moving workshops closer to the end of the semester to help junior students still needing to meet specific requirements for entering the Business School. There was also a question about whether a “solo” business librarian could do something like this on their own. McKenzie shared that while she manages vendor workshops, other workshops are managed by her colleagues. She recommended just starting small. Finally, there was a question about how the Goizueta Business Library team determined which vendors had corporate partners, and the answer was simply to reach out and ask the vendors.

“Expanding within, to expand without: Expanding the vision of what’s relevant in business research & instruction” - Summer Krstevska and Morgan Ritche-Baum (Wake Forest University)

Summer Krstevska (https://zsr.wfu.edu/directory/summer-krstevska) (Wake Forest University) is a full-time business librarian and, since 2019, a full-time startup founder. Morgan Ritche-Baum (https://zsr.wfu.edu/directory/morgan-ritchie-baum/) was hired at Wake Forest in 2021, after working as a public business librarian, as the university was moving “back” to in-person work. It was an opportunity for each to “start over,” with a new colleague (for Krstevska) and a new professional chapter (for Ritchie-Baum).

Figure 5.

Krstevska (left) and Ritchie-Baum (right) at the lectern with a slide titled “What did this look like?” in the background; Olsen and Brittany Champion (Furman University) are pictured in the audience.

The session (2023) opened with audience engagement via PollEverywhere: “What were your COVID revelations?” Many replies centered on REST and PEOPLE/CONNECTIONS. The follow up centered our attention on instruction: “How has COVID changed how we think about or conduct instruction?” Folks mentioned group work, shorter online sessions, and taking breaks for creativity.

As Krstevska and Ritchie-Baum began to work and teach together, they recognized the themes of ambiguity and uncertainty in research and saw opportunities to create and facilitate connections amongst their students and the community. Reflecting on experiential learning, they considered these questions: What is “allowed” in the library classroom? What experiences are possible? How can we overcome teaching research as a linear process?

They put their reflections into practice by designing three business research classes. At Wake Forest, librarians teach one-credit, half-semester library classes. “Renegade Research” introduced ambiguity and uncertainty to the research process as students learned how to use non-traditional resources in a startup consulting context. “Breaking Down Bad” asked students to research and decide, is a company good or bad (what makes a company “good” or “bad”)? Finally, Krstevska pushed the question of possible experiences into designing and leading a study abroad library class to Rotterdam about entrepreneurs enacting social change. In the process of designing and teaching these classes, Ritchie-Baum and Krstevska made positive connections across their campus and in the wider community.

After doing this work, they learned a few things! First, doing business research is about making connections between information and people, communities, and culture. Second, ungrading (Krstevska 2022) is ambiguous and hard. Finally, targeted outreach, focus on non-traditional resources, and opening the courses to all academic disciplines got a more diverse group of students than is typical of library classes. After all, the entrepreneurial mindset and creativity is broadly applicable! Also helpful was making the classes more topical and using regular language rather than library-speak. The talk wrapped up with an audience reflection activity, closing the circle.

Figure 6.

Photo of a slide modeling the reflection activity completed in advance by Ritchie-Baum.

“Training the next generation of business librarians” - Nancy Lovas (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Nancy Lovas (https://library.unc.edu/about/staff/nancy-lovas) (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a business and entrepreneurship librarian but also recently became a business librarianship field experience site supervisor and instructor of a for-credit graduate course (INLS 709 Business Information). These experiences led her to reflect on the education of new librarians, and her presentation focused on ways in which current business librarians can positively affect training and professional development (PD) opportunities for those entering the profession.

Lovas started her presentation (2023) by asking attendees to think, pair, and share on their first experiences with business information and reference and what were the most useful things they learned early in their careers. Brittany Champion (Furman University) shared that her very first business reference question was intimidating, but she worked through it with the student. She felt that the experience helped the student understand that librarians aren’t “random magicians”, and that research requires their participation. Jennifer Horne (University of Kentucky) then shared that she is very upfront with students that she does not have a business background and emphasizes that she is a specialist in our field (LIS).

Emphasizing the importance of this topic, Lovas pointed out that she has counted (and collected) more than three dozen business librarian job postings on BUSLIB-L in recent years. She also commented on the small candidate pools for business-related jobs and shared her observation that LIS programs are offering fewer specialized classes that might prepare candidates for discipline-specific roles. Lovas ended this section of her presentation by asking attendees: “What, if anything, are we to do?”

Lovas then detailed her recent work with experiential learning, as a field experience site supervisor, and teaching and learning, as a library school instructor. The field experience provided opportunities for the students to teach, provide reference, develop/maintain library guides, learn about common professional development activities, e.g., networking, drafting cover letters and CVs, etc., and publish. So far, Lovas’s business librarianship field experience has led to two insightful blog posts by student authors: The Mind of a Beginner (Murphy & Lovas, 2022) and A BizLib Field Experience (Lovas & Sun, 2022). Since INLS 709 Business Information had not been offered as a three-credit course since Spring 2013, Lovas spent a lot of time redesigning it. Early on in the process, Lovas wondered how the basics of business information could be taught meaningfully and, ultimately, chose to focus on practical application of skills as they have become necessary in her career and everything she wished she had learned in library school.

Lovas ended her presentation the same way she began it: Asking attendees to reflect and contribute. Specifically, she wanted to know how library schools could do better and what current business librarians felt they could do individually or as part of their respective professional organizations. In response, SOUCABL co-founder and Board of Directors member Trip Wyckoff (Florida State University) asked how we grow diversity in business librarianship? Brittany Champion (Furman University) offered that we should partner with state-wide organizations, e.g. the North Carolina Library Association’s Roundtable on Ethnic and Minority Concerns (REMCo) (https://nclaonline.org/remco). Other attendees were interested in how we better engage interns and graduate assistants. Some suggestions were to have them do more “real work,” allow more opportunities for mentorship, invitations to casual conversations or even conferences, and working with career centers.

“Swimming with the sharks” - Chelsea Jacobs (West Virginia University)

Chelsea Jacobs (https://directory.lib.wvu.edu/employee/286) (West Virginia University) briefly presented on librarian support of Shark Tank-style pitch competitions and how information literacy instruction can positively benefit “competition scores.” Jacobs emphasized in her presentation that entrepreneurship is essential for local economic and social development and commented that pitch competitions encourage an entrepreneurial mindset amongst participants even if they do not ultimately become entrepreneurs.

During Q&A, Jacobs clarified that while the public is involved, the competition participants are primarily students who are supported by library staff. In response to a question about intellectual property searches, Jacobs explained that she relied heavily on the engineering librarian who is most efficient with that type of research. Finally, there was a question concerning funding, and Jacobs shared that the competitions were funded primarily by local entrepreneurship organizations.

“Promoting the popular business collection to the business school and beyond” - Jennifer Horne (University of Kentucky)

In the age of ebooks, Jennifer Horne (2023) (https://libraries.uky.edu/people/jennifer-horne) (University of Kentucky) addressed the question, “why provide popular business/economic/government titles?” Her reasons are twofold: first, her existing book budget must be used for books–it cannot be switched over to anything. Second, there is demand: the people want them! TV and film media based on these titles are being created.

Horne shared her multipronged approach to marketing the popular collection to library users. She maintains a Business Books (n.d.) page on her Introduction to Business Resources guide. As well, a link to this page was included in the library newsletter. Encouragingly, the LibGuides statistics show that newsletter readers engaged with the page! Finally, Horne set up a pop-up library, tabling on location with a sample of print books from the collection. At the end, audience members made many encouraging comments regarding pop-up marketing.