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Getting to Know You: How Partnering with Professional Societies Can Enhance Librarians’ Profile and Impact

Abstract

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.

Introduction

The IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) dates to the 1963 merger of the AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers, formed in 1884), and the the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers, formed in 1912). Today it is the world’s largest technical society; it has more than 365,000 members, including about 68,000 student members, in over 150 countries. The IEEE sponsors more than 500 conferences and meetings each year that are attended by more than 100,000 technical professionals. It is a leading developer of international standards, with more than 900 active standards and 400 additional standards in development.

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Fitzpatrick, K. (2007, June), Getting To Know You: How Partnering With Professional Societies Can Enhance Librarians’ Profile And Impact Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2439