Why We Do It
The librarians at the UW Bothell/Cascadia Community College Library work with faculty to:

a.. Promote the integration of information literacy into the curricula
b.. Engage in formal and informal assessment of student learning
c.. Assess the Libraries' role in teaching and learning
d.. Provide faculty with information about library programs and initiatives
e.. Receive information about new courses/programs, faculty searches and institutional priorities

This information helps to inform our operations, and budgeting and planning at the institutional level.  As they forge close ties with program faculty, librarians also find opportunities to collaborate on articles, workshops and other professional pursuits.

Relationships Are Messy!
Collaborations are hard work and require time, patience, respect, compromise and sheer determination.  In the case of teaching partnerships, each participant is seeing the other in a very vulnerable place-teaching is a personal activity that exposes all of our anxieties and perceived weaknesses.  Sharing that space with another is an act of trust -trust that cannot be assumed to exist in the absence of a more fully developed relationship.  Such collaborations are messy, fragile and sometimes contentious.  Being open to failure is a requirement-learning from those failures is sometimes painful but always rewarding.  Even more rewarding are the successes.

New Media Teaching Circle
Amanda Hornby (Media & Technology Studies Librarian), Leslie Bussert (Ethics and Humanities Librarian), and Professor Gray Kochhar-Lindgren (UW Bothell Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences faculty) formed a Teaching Circle to discuss and share ideas around new media in higher education and instruction. They will facilitate a faculty development seminar on this topic in Fall 2007.

Cascadia English 102 Curriculum Development and Assessment
Led by Leslie Bussert, librarians worked with faculty from two sections of 'English 102: Writing from Research' to assess student information literacy learning. Librarians and English faculty gathered to read and rate the student work against the information literacy rubric created specifically for this project to assess student information literacy learning. The rubric has been shared with all English 102 faculty members and is in use in a number of courses.

Information Literacy Rubric: http://library.uwb.edu/ACRL2007/butdidtheygetit/rubric.pdf

Focus Groups
The Library's User Needs Committee, co-chaired by Amanda Hornby and Julie Planchon Wolf, conducted focus groups with Cascadia students and faculty to find out how the liaison program and Libraries' services could be improved. Comments from faculty include:

"We don't think of the library as a separate entity..we think of the library as another classroom."

"It's the librarians.  I could give up everything else."

"She's part of the community. I think what's working is when librarians embed themselves in to a learning environment or learning community with students and faculty and there's that constant interaction."

"Librarians have helped me draft information literacy standards that are now part of the whole social science curriculum."

Expanding the library liaison program has proven to be integral to the success of our communication efforts with faculty and students. These relationships and initiatives have helped to connect the library with the teaching and learning on campus in ways that have not yet been explored. Opening and encouraging these lines of communication will aid in further development and integration of library services and programs.