Mentoring & Managing: Students in the Academic Library

摘要

Student workers are a fact of life in every academic library. They can be found in every area, from manning service desks to shelf-reading stacks to processing new items. In particular, many institutions rely heavily on the federally subsidized work-study program to complete the necessary tasks required to make a library function on a daily basis. Students in such programs can be inexperienced and unskilled. Sometimes, they are even randomly assigned to the library and so have little investment in working there. Librarians who oversee these students may also have little experience managing workers or may only see them as low-level employees. In her book, Mentoring & Managing: Students in the Academic Library, Michelle Reale advocates treating each supervisory relationship as a chance to teach and develop each employee's professional self.