Getting To Know You: How Partnering With Professional Societies Can Enhance Librarians’ Profile And Impact

What information do undergraduate and graduate engineering students (and their faculty) REALLY want? If traditional interactions (reference desk, instructional sessions, faculty meetings) aren’t getting the results you want, perhaps partnering with a professional society can provide that inside track. Given the highly complex and changing information seeking behaviors of students, partnering with professional societies outside of traditional library venues can help librarians identify and satisfy incipient information needs of the university community. At the same time, working with student organizations can communicate on a personal level the value of your library’s scholarly -and human -resources. The University Partnership Program of the IEEE was developed to strengthen relationships with librarians, students and faculty at larger universities that subscribe to one of its online products and support IEEE Student Branches. In recent years, it has endeavored to foster a sense of community, of multi-disciplinary, egalitarian information sharing and outreach among partners within each university, and more ambitiously, among the schools nationwide that participate. This paper examines how involving librarians in the “everyday life” of student professional society activities can build relationships that transcend the library’s walls. By stepping into the information world of their users, librarians can develop more effective marketing, collection development and instruction sessions, and increase awareness of library resources and their relevance to life-long personal and professional learning.