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Following inconsistent post-COVID-19 iterations of the former Library Student Advisory Board at Syracuse University, the group is relaunching this year as the Student Library Advisory Board with the goal of increasing its diversity and reach.

Natalie LoRusso, a user experience librarian at SU and the lead coordinator for SLAB, said she hopes the rebrand and outreach expansion will strengthen the board as a forum and show students there’s a group that wants to hear their ideas and concerns. Now, after SLAB received an SU Libraries Staff Innovation Fund grant in January, LoRusso said she feels more equipped to build the group as an outlet and a community that students are motivated to come back to.

“I love working with people directly. It feels like planning a party every time we meet,” LoRusso said. “I like how its lifespan is not too long where everybody forgets the other person, we still have that connection.”

After its initial relaunch in the fall semester, SLAB had its first official meeting of the spring semester on Feb. 3. LoRusso said she noticed the group was distanced when it had monthly meetings in the fall, so she established a schedule for the group to meet every three weeks in the spring.

Following Carnegie Library’s removal of its collections at the beginning of the semester due to structural damage, LoRusso said students on the board have focused on improving communication with students on the inaccessibility of the stacks at Carnegie. The collections were moved to Bird Library’s fourth floor and an off-site storage facility as of Feb. 6.

Though she can’t address students’ concerns directly, LoRusso said SLAB functions as a way for students to air out grievances which she can then bring to library staff in departments like IT and communications who do have the ability to address those concerns, as well as advocate for them in her day-to-day work in SU Libraries.

Now that SU Libraries have opened a line of communication to students regarding the changes in Carnegie, she said she hopes SLAB members’ perspectives contributed to the shift, and that they continue to have an impact going forward.

Rosalyn Impink, a graduate student in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and a member of SLAB, said she and LoRusso are prioritizing gaining voices to represent a broader range of student demographics at SU. She said that with the board largely being composed of graduate students, the group wants to increase longevity and scope of student experience by reaching out to undergraduate students as well.

“Everybody uses the Library, so it makes sense that we would want to get as much input and feedback from as broad a range of people as we possibly can,” Impink said. “One of the things that’s so fantastic is that the library is such a welcoming, neutral space. We call it that ‘third space’ where you don’t have to pay to get in, it’s just a space where everybody can be and can exist and work together.”

Impink said from the time the program’s first iteration launched, the design and accessibility of SU Libraries’ website has been an integral part of developing a long-term vision for the library, and for making its systems work for the campus community it’s intended to serve. She said information about search qualifications like quotation marks and word placement needs to be accessible to students who may not use SU’s library systems regularly.

“Students and people who are familiar with libraries… know how to navigate the systems and optimize our searches to sort of find the information that we’re looking for,” Impink said. “But is this really working for the student who might not be so well versed?”

One current effort is the redesign of search engine boxes, which Pavan Kumar Reddy Katsani Bali Reddy, one of LoRusso’s User Experience graduate assistants who works with SLAB, explained as “bento boxes” with different categories to search with. He pointed to useability testing of the boxes as a priority for the department, and LoRusso said their user-friendly design is one of SLAB’s current areas of exploration.

Impink has been working with SLAB, and formerly LSAB, since its pilot in 2019 when she was a first-year undergraduate at SU. She said the program waned when graduate students who made up the board began to finish their degrees. Impink was the only undergraduate involved with the board at the time.

LoRusso said the pandemic prevented the group from getting the word out until now. She said her priority moving forward is to make sure students know that the libraries are theirs too, and that through SLAB she wants to co-create new library spaces, both physically and online, with student input.

“We have people here who care about (students’) issues with the libraries. And even if I can’t change it right away, I can still advocate for the change,” LoRusso said. “I just want students to know that the libraries truly care about their experience here, and we’re advocating for them however we can.”

Reddy emphasized the importance of communicating to students that libraries are about more than just books. He said learning, educating and usability in all forms are what make a library what it is.

For Impink, functions of the library like the ones SLAB works to improve via student feedback are part of the larger academic experience. She said she hopes through SLAB and forums like it, students can begin to broaden the ways they think about and interact with the library at SU.

“People don’t think of the library as a living, moving thing. It’s really so much more of an organization that we give it credit for,” Impink said. “It’s living, it’s breathing, and the people who work there are doing such great work every day, so I hope that students will take advantage of everything that the library has to offer.”

Published on February 15, 2023 at 12:57 am

Contact Jana: jlseal@syr.edu | @JanaLoSeal