Sharing Spaces and Students: Employing Students in Collaborative Partnerships

Academic libraries continue to evolve from the traditional focus on collections to an increased emphasis on community space and the inclusion of makerspaces, academic success centers, learning commons, and other areas within the physical library space. These partnerships often involve sharing student employees in multi-department positions, and these positions require unique planning, goal setting, training, and assessment.

In six chapters—The Importance of Partnerships, Annual Goals, Hiring Students, Developing Training, Assessing Success, and Moving Forward—Sharing Spaces and Students helps partners within the library bridge the gap between expectations and outcomes, and hire and train students to deliver high-quality work on behalf of all involved parties. Case studies throughout the book examine partnerships with academic departments, writing centers, career centers, cultural centers, tutoring services, technology services and information technology (IT) departments, as well as first-year experience and peer-learning departments.

As library partnerships with other campus departments become more and more common, it’s important that libraries know how to plan for these partnerships and hire, train, and assess the students who will work within them. With prompts, ideas for goal-setting, agreements, checklists, and more, Sharing Spaces and Students can help you create your plan for student workers, ensure healthy and happy library partnerships, and serve the students using these crucial services.