The Now: August 23, 2023

Welcome to Wednesday during the first week of classes. I have answered an untold number of questions about where to get textbooks, how to access course materials, and where the bathroom is located. Typical first week stuff. It's all easy, but the flow is constant. I think I walked nearly a mile during my shift yesterday simply showing people to classrooms and troubleshooting printing issues.

Here's what else I've got going on:

1. Welcome Marketing: This is my game time for student outreach. I've been writing and sending emails; posting to the blog; updating social media; and, generally, insinuating the library into anything I can access. Students have energy and excitement at the start of the semester and I want to harness that.
2. Research Assignment Design Article: For the past few weeks, we've been brain dumping into our article draft document. The pages were a riot of colors, bullets, and comments. Today, we started going through the chaos as a team. Now that we've resolved many issues, it's actually starting to look like an article. We still need to do the back half, but we've made a lot more progress than I thought.
3. Embedded Librarian: We've always offered embedded librarians at our library but, this semester, we made it opt-out for the writing courses in our general education program. In this program we librarians create a discussion board in our course management system. On that board we share material related to the course work. Students can ask us questions or, generally, just get to know that the library exists as a support service for them. This week, I focused on introducing myself and making notes for future content. At the moment, I've got nine classes to stay on top of. Usually I can reuse existing library material, but I'm preparing for the courses where I might need to make a new video or two.

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