Introduction

As companies try to expand into new markets beyond their own borders, their level of expertise about a new country’s culture, business practices, and government regulations may be somewhat limited. In such cases, cross border collaborations can build upon the strengths of both partners to meet the needs of the globalized business world. While cross border librarian collaborations may have occurred in the past, a cursory literature review only surfaced a handful of citations, including a collaboration between two libraries in two countries (Alleyne & Rodrigues, 2011). Other articles referred to collaborations between faculty and librarians, or between librarians at different institutions within the same geographic region.

Business librarians from four institutions in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States were given an opportunity to provide panel presentations to the graduate students in the Americas MBA (Executive MBA Americas) Program. The faculty coordinators from four business schools–Fundação Instituto de Administração (FIA Business School); ; Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM; Simon Fraser University (SFU); and Vanderbilt University–requested this panel due to the quality of sources that were being cited by the students. Despite never having met before, the librarians were excited about the opportunity to work collaboratively. The student teams worked on real issues posed by their client companies, requiring them to become familiar with business research sources to find information on companies, industries, markets, and countries.

In 2022, the librarians gave two panel presentations to the students via Zoom (February and August). However, in 2023, the faculty chose to have librarians present only to the students at their own institution. Although the collaborative presentations stopped, the librarians decided to continue meeting at regular intervals to share ideas and observations about resources. Librarians also reminded students about the collaborative library team and encouraged students to take advantage of the unique resources available at all four libraries.

Background

The Americas MBA (EMBA/AMBA Americas - the names vary slightly) is a program that seeks to understand the business environment and practices prevailing in the four largest economies of the Americas: Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This program is an alliance among four leading business schools:

• FIA Business School, Fundação Instituto de Administração, São Paulo, Brazil,

• ITAM, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Mexico City, Mexico,

• Simon Fraser University, Beedie School of Business, Vancouver, Canada,

• Vanderbilt University, Owen Graduate School of Management, Nashville, USA

In this program, students have the opportunity to gain international experience through eight courses; a strategic consulting project where they work in teams with students from the four countries; and visits to each of the host institutions. Each team engages with a client to provide “strategic analysis” of business issues, and this serves as their capstone project.

The average age, years of work, and managerial experience of the latest cohort of students at each of the institutions has been summarized in the figure below. Please note that not every piece of data was readily available for each institution.

Figure 1.

Data gathered in the Spring of 2024 from internal documentation at each institution.

Library Instruction at Partner Institutions

The size, collections, and staffing vary among the libraries of collaborating institutions. This means different levels of library support is provided to students in the different EMBA/AMBA programs. By working in partnerships, however, the students can benefit from the availability of resources among all partners.

Generally, when the teams are together, the working language is English. Workshops for students at a particular institution are conducted in the predominant language of that institution’s country. At Vanderbilt and SFU, instruction is conducted in English; at ITAM, instruction is conducted in Spanish. Although most of the resources are in English, it is helpful to know Spanish and Portuguese when looking for government and other information originating in Mexico and Brazil. Some Mexican and Brazilian information sources offer English translations of their websites and resources.

Librarian Collaboration

In their initial request, the faculty coordinators for the EMBA/AMBA Americas program expressed frustration with students relying just on Google to do the research; they envisioned that a librarians’ panel could “open their [students] eyes to the possibilities”. This panel would provide information about the librarians’ “go to” sources. The first panel was scheduled for February 2022, with a duration of one hour.

Prior to the first panel the librarians set up a series of virtual meetings to discuss resources and finalize the content and order of presentation. Two documents were created within Google: a notes document and a slide presentation (Chavarria, et al., 2022) Faculty provided the descriptions of the capstone projects assigned to the students, including the country of operation, the industry, and the issues to solve. This was helpful for preparing the presentation which included some examples specific to their projects.

During our collaboration process, several decisions were made:

• to eliminate interactive components (breakout rooms, polls) due to limited time available;

• to start the presentation with an introduction to the research process and business information in general;

• to highlight a resource from different types of business information sources;

• to emphasize unique resources at each school; and

• to remind students to work together as a team to access all materials to support their capstone project; access at each institution is limited to only its own students because of license agreements for resources.

Panels (February 2022 and August 2022)

Each cohort of EMBA/AMBA had approximately 40-45 students, with four faculty coordinators and additional staff present. Panel 1 was held with students together at Vanderbilt while they were in their last semester, while Panel 2 was held at Simon Fraser during their first semester of the 2-year Americas program. In both cases, the librarians participated through individual logons to Zoom (Chavarria et al., 2022), while the students and faculty watched the panel presentation as a group.

Planning, Implementation, and Technical Issues

Panel 1 exceeded the scheduled time by about 4-5 minutes, indicating a need for some adjustments. For the second panel, the team planned to do the following:

• present slides instead of live demonstrations to save time and avoid potential internet connection issues;

• utilize Zoom’s capability to transition from one presenter to the next; and

• use WhatsApp for internal communication in order to stay within our time limit.

After Panel 1, links to the documents (slide presentation and notes about the databases) were provided for distribution to students.

During the preparation for Panel 2, a librarian noticed that some images for a database disappeared from the slide presentation. In addition, the working document with notes about databases triggered warnings from Google, deeming it to be suspicious and malicious. Two librarians independently emailed Google, explaining the international nature of the document, but neither one received a response. The “disappeared” images were re-added to the Google Slides presentation and a backup PowerPoint was also created to avoid potential difficulties.

During the presentation for Panel 2, what we had feared happened: the images disappeared again from the Google Slides and the PowerPoint backup had to be used. Other than that, there were no other technical issues.

After Panel 2, faculty coordinators were provided with a link to a newly created, shared web research guide that listed resources available through the partner institutions (Lalli, 2023). As of the writing of this article, the guide has had 370 hits over the duration of 17 months.

During the second post-panel debriefing, librarians shared the following observations:

• The session took less time, and everything went more smoothly, except for the issue with a portion of Google slides.

• Positive feedback was received from faculty even while the presentation was going on; they really appreciated the shared library research guide. During the presentation, a student contacted a librarian to set up a meeting for their team.

Discussion

Before the librarians’ initial meeting, we were not aware of resources held by the other libraries. As part of our collaboration, we made an effort to become more familiar with sources available through our partners. We can now more confidently make referrals.

One of the ethical questions that we explored was the nature of our own collaboration, i.e., how much should we share among ourselves about a student’s particular question. While sharing and discussing questions, resources, and approaches to providing an answer to a question are routine among librarians from a single institution, we generally don’t share details about patron queries with other institutions. The consensus we reached was to give the other partner librarians a “heads up”, that is, to share the question from a student, but not copy or forward our responses. This seemed to be the best way to walk the "fine line" between confidentiality, sharing, and allowing students to take the initiative to seek assistance.

Another issue that we discussed related to licensing, copyright, and access concerning resources held by an institution. We informed the students that, while they were welcome to share resources amongst the teams, they could not share them with their clients. The best practice is to provide the companies with citations and let them purchase the resources on their own.

One challenge that we faced was that the institutions are physically located in three different time zones. This meant that some people had to work very early while some others may have had to work late. Fortunately, we were excited about our collaboration, and everyone was accommodating. Additionally, the colleagues from Mexico and Brazil were fluent in English and they graciously made English the “working language” for the group. Cultural constraints were not experienced because individuals were mindful while speaking and listening to ideas from others and everyone willingly accepted the given tasks.

Feedback

Having systematic feedback from students would have been helpful; however, we did not have direct access to them since the students were not logged into the Zoom meetings on an individual basis. In addition, limited time was available for the librarians’ panel. We sought feedback from faculty, who indicated that the presentations were found to be useful. Some anecdotal comments are provided below:

• “In my mind, the slides you all shared last year were perfect.”

• “The website with school specific resources is phenomenal! Y’all brought your A-game!”

• “Everyone agrees it is very important content.”

• “I hope we can count on you for future panels.”

• “I hope the students call you all very often!”

• “Sharing your insights with us will undoubtedly give us an edge in providing a solid product to our clients and an exceptional project.”

In 2023, the faculty changed the format so that librarians presented only to students from their own institutions and delivered the workshop later in the term. After all the individual school workshops had been completed, the librarian team requested additional feedback from faculty coordinators (see Appendix for the list of questions).

We have summarized the responses from faculty below:

• Faculty indicated that each student from each team does research for their own section of the project. For this reason, they suspect that resources from all institutions are being used.

• Faculty noted that “the students do much higher quality work”, with one faculty coordinator noticing that “the two best deliverables he received were from the past two years – i.e., after we initiated the librarian session.”

• Faculty mentioned that “knowing how to find good information in an ‘information overload’ age is priceless… The students are often ‘amazed’ by how much rich information is available in the school resources.” In addition, they indicated that librarians are “amazing - smart, helpful, supportive. We are so grateful you are on the team!”

• Faculty also observed that the two panel presentations were a bit challenging for students because:

  • Information was presented too early (in the first days of the term); the students had not thought about their case studies or met with their clients.

  • A presentation via Zoom was not easy to follow because it was a large group (40+ people). Students would have preferred an in-person session, as well as learning only about resources that they could access.

• Faculty members indicated that going forward, they would remind the students to contact the librarians for support and that they would “share teams’ submitted assignments (with proprietary client information taken out) with the librarians.”

Reimagining Future Contact with Student Teams

A collaborative panel at the beginning of their program introduces the students to their librarian team and is also an extension of their international experience. A joint presentation would let them know about the variety of resources, as well as unique ones, available through all partners. If the students could log on individually into the librarians’ panel meeting, interactive components (breakout rooms, polls) could be built into the presentation. To facilitate this, it would be helpful to meet for more than one hour.

The panel presentation would be followed up by a more in-depth workshop where each librarian would meet with their own students and focus on resources available through their institution.

After a few weeks, once the students have met their clients and are more aware of their information needs, meeting(s) could be arranged with one or more librarians, depending on the focus of their case studies. For example, if a capstone company is looking to expand from Canada into Mexico, the team would meet librarians from both SFU and ITAM. In addition, it would be advisable for student teams to tap into resources available through all partners.

Conclusion

If collaborative work is being considered, we recommend leaving enough time for several librarian meetings (pre for planning and post for debriefing) and creating a shared web guide with links to resources available through all partners. Such a guide provides the resources at a single spot and helps the students avoid becoming overwhelmed. An introductory workshop delivered at the right time produces better results for research projects.

Although the librarians no longer do panel presentations, the collaboration continues through regular Zoom meetings and emails. The quality of the workshops and support for students has improved because of our own increased awareness about the resources available through all partners.

The librarians and faculty collaboration of the four institutions has been an enriching experience, reminding us that teamwork crosses borders when it comes to business and making students aware of all the possibilities in the world of information.