Serving Notice on the One-Shot: Changing Roles for Instruction Librarians

Column Editor's Notes

This column examines advances in public services internal and external to libraries. The focus is on how public services, such as instruction and education, programming, research consulting, and circulation, evolve and impact users. The strength of the column is its broad, international focus and contributors are encouraged to explore issues and recent advances in public services relevant to their geographical region, as well as the larger, global audience. Interested contributors should contact the column editor at [email protected].

ABSTRACT

As with any library service that emerges at the demand of faculty and students, rather than through strategic and evidence-based planning, library instruction has had many iterations since its early days in academic libraries. Through this evolution, library instruction inspired librarians to embrace their roles as educators and influenced a profession-wide movement known as information literacy. With internal evaluations that point to student and faculty satisfaction as well as external studies that point to at least some impact on student success, it is no surprise that statistics for the primary instructional method of many librarians, the one-shot instruction session, have increased over time. The popularity of this method has overwhelmed public services to the extent that many instruction programs cannot meet the demand for requests, nor can they escape the inevitable burnout from repetitive content and limited reach that go hand-in-hand with one-shots. At its best, the one-shot instruction session is a way for librarians to support student researchers within the context of a course. At its worst, the one-shot marginalizes the pedagogical expertise of librarians whose efforts could result in more sustainable and influential educational initiatives given the space, time, and support to move toward new roles.

KEYWORDS:

• Public services
• academic libraries
• instruction
• information literacy
• consultation
• instructional design