Presentation Type
Presentation (20 minutes)
Presentation Theme
Transform physical library spaces and places
Start Date
11-8-2015 10:00 AM
End Date
11-8-2015 11:00 AM
Description
To raise $33M for facility renovation, Auraria Library leaders used user-centered principles and practices to catalyze constituency engagement, create shared vision, and build stakeholder partnerships. In particular, participatory design outcomes informed and energized essential fund development activities: to create messages, further relationships, and forge alliances. These fund raising essentials distinguish the Auraria Library signature approach to fundraising.
Message building: In 2009, library staff learned to apply mixed methods to generate user-generated research results. They exercised these new proficiencies in an investigation, over several months, of student learning needs. ‘Paper and pencil’ surveys, focus group sessions, and participant observation logs generated baseline information on assignment technology requirements, café menu preferences, and collaborative learning requirements. This information established early fund raising priorities for individual donor and local foundation funding proposals.
Relationship building: In the next phase, user-generated ideas and insights were invited from professors and their students. These learning partnerships were expressed through co-investigations that used ‘the library as lab’. Students, supervised by professors in human factors, industrial design, graphic design, architecture, and landscape architecture identified problems within the Library. Over the course of the semester, librarians, planners, architects, and peers critiqued students’ evolving problem definitions, inquiry strategies, and study outcomes. End-of-the semester results were presented at library staff meetings, which advanced staff exposure to diverse disciplinary frameworks, research methods, and reporting conventions. [Architecture students, for instance, used 3-D models to express their visual design vocabulary. Landscape architecture students enlarged the boundaries of ‘the library’ to include both indoor and outdoor spaces, including the building roof.] Sustained student and faculty relationships, especially those extending over multiple semesters, produced novel innovations for staff consideration, adoption, and promotion. The student-generated nature of the recommendations, transformed into building redesign, served to further a forward thinking organizational culture, prompting staff to invent the phrase ‘the new library.’ In the fundraising realm, library leaders also used students and their work to enliven fund raising solicitations to prospective donors. Meeting beneficiaries of their philanthropy heightened donors’ enthusiasm for the emerging student-centered library vision.
Alliance building: Campus faculty and administrators were also intentionally and persistently engaged in (re)design priority setting to ensure shared vision and consistent messaging – and well as end of the year funds! Discussion on repurposing library spaces and reinventing library services was framed within the larger context of transformative changes in scholarly communication conventions and traditional pedagogical practices. Sustained communications with key decision makers and thought leaders served over time and with practice to forge political alliances. Explicit faculty support for library renovation encouraged university leaders, master planners, and facility managers to rank the Auraria Library renovation as the top campus priority for a funding request to the State legislature. Alumni serving in the legislature, in both political parties, added their support to successfully champion a multi-year appropriation of $26.8M for holistic redesign and renovation.
This inclusive and participatory approach to establishing, designing, and funding user-generated facility improvements offers considerable promise to other publically funded academic libraries interested in building messages, relationships, and alliances to enable sustained fundraising momentum.
Included in
Building Fundraising Momentum: Message, Relationship, and Alliance Essentials
To raise $33M for facility renovation, Auraria Library leaders used user-centered principles and practices to catalyze constituency engagement, create shared vision, and build stakeholder partnerships. In particular, participatory design outcomes informed and energized essential fund development activities: to create messages, further relationships, and forge alliances. These fund raising essentials distinguish the Auraria Library signature approach to fundraising.
Message building: In 2009, library staff learned to apply mixed methods to generate user-generated research results. They exercised these new proficiencies in an investigation, over several months, of student learning needs. ‘Paper and pencil’ surveys, focus group sessions, and participant observation logs generated baseline information on assignment technology requirements, café menu preferences, and collaborative learning requirements. This information established early fund raising priorities for individual donor and local foundation funding proposals.
Relationship building: In the next phase, user-generated ideas and insights were invited from professors and their students. These learning partnerships were expressed through co-investigations that used ‘the library as lab’. Students, supervised by professors in human factors, industrial design, graphic design, architecture, and landscape architecture identified problems within the Library. Over the course of the semester, librarians, planners, architects, and peers critiqued students’ evolving problem definitions, inquiry strategies, and study outcomes. End-of-the semester results were presented at library staff meetings, which advanced staff exposure to diverse disciplinary frameworks, research methods, and reporting conventions. [Architecture students, for instance, used 3-D models to express their visual design vocabulary. Landscape architecture students enlarged the boundaries of ‘the library’ to include both indoor and outdoor spaces, including the building roof.] Sustained student and faculty relationships, especially those extending over multiple semesters, produced novel innovations for staff consideration, adoption, and promotion. The student-generated nature of the recommendations, transformed into building redesign, served to further a forward thinking organizational culture, prompting staff to invent the phrase ‘the new library.’ In the fundraising realm, library leaders also used students and their work to enliven fund raising solicitations to prospective donors. Meeting beneficiaries of their philanthropy heightened donors’ enthusiasm for the emerging student-centered library vision.
Alliance building: Campus faculty and administrators were also intentionally and persistently engaged in (re)design priority setting to ensure shared vision and consistent messaging – and well as end of the year funds! Discussion on repurposing library spaces and reinventing library services was framed within the larger context of transformative changes in scholarly communication conventions and traditional pedagogical practices. Sustained communications with key decision makers and thought leaders served over time and with practice to forge political alliances. Explicit faculty support for library renovation encouraged university leaders, master planners, and facility managers to rank the Auraria Library renovation as the top campus priority for a funding request to the State legislature. Alumni serving in the legislature, in both political parties, added their support to successfully champion a multi-year appropriation of $26.8M for holistic redesign and renovation.
This inclusive and participatory approach to establishing, designing, and funding user-generated facility improvements offers considerable promise to other publically funded academic libraries interested in building messages, relationships, and alliances to enable sustained fundraising momentum.
