Open Sourcing Ideas: Sharing and Recreating a Library Instruction Program

In April 2013 at the ACRL Conference in Indianapolis, IN, Char Booth, Lia Friedman, Adrienne Lai, and Alice Whiteside presented a panel entitled, “Love your library: Building goodwill from the inside out and the outside in” in which they highlighted examples of nontraditional marketing in academic libraries at Claremont, the University of California San Diego, Mount Holyoke, and North Carolina State University. The panelists freely encouraged audience members to recreate and adapt the ideas at other institutions, saying “Here is something that worked for us. Maybe it will work for you!” One of the ideas Alice shared was a food-themed citation help event she developed with colleagues Chrissa Godbout and Kathleen Norton at Mount Holyoke. John Jackson recreated the event at Whittier College a year later. From opposite coasts, we’ve joined forces here to discuss the development of the ExCITING Food workshop, its reiterations, and the importance of sharing ideas among academic library communities.

Borrowing each others’ ideas is common in our field, and the “Love your library” panel celebrated and encouraged this practice. When we “steal” each other’s trade secrets (with proper credit, of course), everyone benefits. The advantages of “open-sourcing” instructional programming is probably obvious to readers of TechConnect. The information literacy needs of most undergraduates, especially first-year students, are roughly the same in that they come to college with little to no experience with scholarly communication practices, limited knowledge of the breadth of information resources, and feel overwhelmed by the complex requirements (i.e. format, tone, structure, citations) of their assignments. Even accounting for the idiosyncrasies of each institution, librarians can quickly adapt events that were successful at other libraries to their own unique communities, saving time, reducing the stress of preparation, and ultimately fulfilling a recognized information need for their users by sharing successful attempts at “sneaky teaching” with the professional community at large.

In our experience, everyone benefits more if the first round of sharing isn’t the end of it. We have many methods and modes of learning about “stealable” ideas: professional literature, conference presentations, the Web, and word of mouth. Databases like PRIMO and LOEX Instructional Resources, personal blogs, Slideshare, and LibGuides all facilitate this type of sharing. More rare is the ability to provide public feedback on how one programming event succeeded or failed in a different context and how it was adapted. How can we more actively create an open-source mindset around instructional development? We hope this post is a step in that direction.