Morgan, Abi
morgan55
Recent Submissions
Item A non-trivial pursuit: Library Game Nights as a place to destress with campus partners. [Poster presentation]
Calabrese, Cara; Justus, Roger; Morgan, Abigail; Yarnetsky, JerryAcademic libraries work to not only provide access to information and support of scholarly pursuits, we also seek to provide a welcoming atmosphere for all campus constituents. One way MU Libraries does this is through our Library Game Night programming series. At these events, MU Libraries opens our spaces to host board game nights 3-5 times per semester. We began the series in 2017 as a way to bring students a fun and stress-relieving event, as well as a way to help them see the library as a space for them, not only to study, but also gather. Since then, our Library Game Night programming has grown to include collaborations with other campus centers and student organizations, which MU Libraries has capitalized on to expand our engagement. Student partners and attendees have brought inclusive ideas to the series, including a fundraiser for a children's hospital, a game night focused on traditional Mexican games, and the purchase of gaming accessories that accommodate users of all abilities, like card holders. Faculty and staff partnerships have allowed us to hold a Made at Miami orientation event for incoming students from underrepresented populations, and we are looking forward to hosting a game night in the future with the Myaamia Center. Student feedback from our events has emphasized how much they appreciate having a way to decompress from the pressure of school. While we have strived to make our events welcoming and inclusive, we also know that diversifying our game collection is just as important. We applied for and won an MUL DEI grant in order to expand our game collection and acquire content from BIPOC creators and games with inclusive characters such as Sparkle Kitty, One Deck Dungeon, and Jinja. For our April event, we will be working with the student group MU Meeples to showcase DEI-related games for the Universal Day of Culture. Join us to find out how we have successfully leveraged the student organizations and grant funding on our campus to enrich our programming to create an enjoyable and inclusive events series.Item When Librarians Rank Last: First-Year Student Research Readiness, Library Intimidation & High School Experiences
Morgan, Abigail; Yarnetsky, Jerry; Verdream, JanellWhat happens when high school students don't have access to librarians? In fall 2021 we conducted a survey of first-year students at two Ohio public universities. We hoped to learn about incoming first-year students' confidence in their ability to conduct college research based on their library experiences at different types of high schools and districts throughout Ohio. For example, we found that 82-88% of rural and small town students in our survey reported they never or rarely received librarian help with their research in high school. These same students reported feeling much less prepared to do college-level research. Similarly, students reporting lack of access to library instruction due to remote learning also reported feeling a similar lack of preparedness. In turn, consistent with library anxiety literature, many of our respondents also find college libraries intimidating. While the students don't report finding library staff to be intimidating, they rank librarians as the last choice for who they would ask for research help. We will share additional findings from our survey, such as our students' understanding of how college librarians can help them. We will then discuss how our findings impact librarians’ work with first-year students in reference, instruction, and web services. Learning Outcomes: Describe the differences in exposure to library instruction reported by students in Ohio high schools. Understand first-year students’ self-described knowledge of college librarians. Develop novel approaches to overcome first-year students’ library anxiety.Item Critical Consumption: Empowering Students to Evaluate Sources in a One-Shot Session on Introductory Consumer Marketing Research
Morgan, AbigailInstruction in library resources and research for the introductory marketing class is one of the most requested one-shot sessions from the business school at Miami University, a large public school in the Midwest, with around fifteen sessions taught each academic year. The one-shot session outlined here is derived from these classes. Students’ main project for the course is to create a marketing plan for a chosen consumer packaged goods product (i.e., food or household items that are repurchased regularly); the library session is designed to help them find the information they will need about consumers for the project.Item Hybrid by Design: New Student Orientations and the Value of Asynchronicity
Morgan, Abigail; Hilles, StefanieCovid changed our lives, our campuses, and how we connect with students. In-person activities were replaced with virtual ones and library events had to be reimagined digitally. With vaccinations on the rise and universities hopeful for a more in-person fall, what did we learn from online events that we can apply in the future? This poster will present our experience transitioning the library’s annual graduate student orientation from in-person to virtual and hybrid events. First, we will discuss how we moved orientation online in 2020 and the challenges we faced, including teaching staff how to use new video conferencing software to record accessible videos, collaborating with campus partners, and how to best present the event with existing learning management platforms and the library website. Next, we will detail how we incorporated these lessons into a hybrid orientation in 2021 that will continue to use asynchronous recordings on an event landing page. Finally, we will discuss the benefits of asynchronous orientation elements and compare attendance outcomes from 2019 (in-person), 2020 (virtual), and 2021 (hybrid) to determine which format produces the most student engagement, answering the question, “Should we continue asynchronous opportunities at new student orientations when in-person learning fully resumes?”Item Cyber House Rules: how to host a winning virtual game night
Morgan, Abigail; Boehme, GinnyOur institution has hosted monthly board game nights for our campus community for the last several years. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were forced to cancel our in-person events and rethink how we would deliver game nights going forward. While pivoting to a virtual event seemed like the obvious solution, we encountered numerous setbacks in our quest to make an online game night a reality. In spring 2020, we experimented with online gaming platforms in order to ascertain the feasibility of holding virtual library game nights. This included a pilot event with library staff. Throughout these experiments we ran into many challenges, including: fickle internet speeds and computing power; a steep learning curve for the online platforms we were interested in using; limitations of the software available to us at the time; and technological comfort levels of the committee members. These impediments were extreme enough to delay our second attempt until spring of 2021, after a year-long hiatus. We will discuss how we worked to overcome these challenges for our second attempt, and will give attendees the opportunity to reflect on how they can host similar outreach events in their own institutions. Links: Introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX3eJQXKUrs Interactive slides: https://www.canva.com/design/DAEqjm4fZFo/DsF2g9SHj5ZA83uBDdJ-CQ/view?utm_content=DAEqjm4fZFo&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=publishsharelinkItem Competent enough: getting first-year business students started
Morgan, AbigailThis talk will describe how two librarians collaborated with first-year cohort coordinators at the business school to develop a one-shot lesson plan that would introduce library resources and research strategies to 1,100+ first-year business students and prepare them for a major client challenge research project and how it has been adapted since the pandemic.Item Roll for Initiative: cultivating and empowering student leaders through library game nights
Morgan, Abigail; Boehme, GinnySince implementing a monthly board game night in 2017, we have shifted from an experimental event series designed to bring foot traffic into the libraries to one that actively partners with students as leaders. This has helped us foster an engaged community of library patrons who see the libraries as more than places for research and studying. Since 2018, we have created partnerships with seven total student groups. In doing so, we have given them the opportunity to take ownership of these events, and by extension, the library space, while also providing the support needed to help them succeed. They have broadened and enriched our programming with their innovative and inclusive ideas, such as running a 24-hour gaming marathon fundraiser for a children's hospital and a game night that focused on traditional Mexican games. We are purposefully stepping outside the traditional view of the library as simply a repository of information and expanding our commitment to fostering our community through supporting innovative programming and patron-driven experiences.Item Roll for initiative: Using library game nights to empower student leaders
Morgan, Abi; Boehme, GinnyAcademic libraries provide valuable programming for their campus communities. This programming often springs from collaborations with other campus centers, but we sometimes overlook the fact that student organizations can bring a level of energy and enthusiasm that faculty and staff just can't match. Our public four-year university library has capitalized on this type of collaboration with our monthly board game nights. Join us to find out how we have successfully leveraged the student organizations on our campus to enrich our programming to create an enjoyable, inclusive, and sustainable events series.Item Effects of high school location on first-year students’ research confidence and college readiness
Morgan, Abigail; Yarnetsky, JerryIn Ohio, K-12 public school funding models have been ruled unconstitutional four times due to the great discrepancies among districts from different economic and geographic areas. One of these discrepancies is often the availability of library services. In our research, we aimed to examine how these discrepancies may have altered preparedness for college-level research for incoming first-year students from various backgrounds. As the 2019-20 school year opened, we surveyed the incoming first-year class at a large public university. We received 117 responses in total from this survey. We first looked at this population as a whole, then analyzed responses by rural/urban/suburban areas. We found that students from rural districts were frequently taught how to conduct research by someone other than a school librarian. We also found significant differences in student confidence between students taught by librarians in high school and students taught by others. As students are now expected to learn remotely, at least part-time, potentially without the support from access to the library and library staff on campus, this research helps clarify the challenges students face in their home communities.