may05b.indd


creativity and leadership 
Susan Fliss 

Collaborative creativity 
Supporting teaching and learning on campus 

We have so many questions about the future and not many answers. Earlier 
in this essay series, Shelley Phipps asks, “What 
will our mission or core purpose be?” and iden­
tifies the key questions with which libraries are 
grappling. Among the most important ques­
tions Phipps raises is, “Can we collaborate, 
truly?”1 My answer is a resounding, “Yes!” 

Librarians need to collaborate creatively 
with other partners to better support teaching 
and learning on campus. “Find it, understand 
it, use it” is not just the information maxim 
for librarians. Information literacy skills are 
taught not only by librarians, but by student 
support services and faculty as well, even 
though these educators may not be familiar 
with the term information literacy. 

Finding academic quality resources, un­
derstanding the perils of plagiarism, creating 
an MLA­style annotated bibliography, verify­
ing the credentials of an author, respecting 
the copyright rules for using images and 
quotations, and experiencing the benefi ts of 
browsing the physical stacks and the full­text 
online databases are being discussed in many 
venues around campus. 

The academic work being done by faculty 
and students is changing. Students are creat­
ing videos as term papers, collaborating on 
research projects that will take the shape of 
Web pages, and composing research papers 
that incorporate images, music, or video fi les. 
Student needs are complicated in this fantastic 
age of information and their support needs 
can no longer be met by a single academic 
department or student service. 

Library programs are reaching out to 
other student support offices on campuses. 

While traditionally, librarians have sought 
to collaborate with faculty, we now look 
to collaborate with others groups, working 
increasingly with colleagues from academic 
computing, the writing program, international 
office, academic skills center, women in sci­
ence, residential life, athletics, career services, 
and many others. 

Collaborate across campus 
Dartmouth College recently created a new 
student center for Research, Writing and 
Information Technology (RWIT). An initia­
tive between the writing program, academic 
computing, and the library, RWIT provides 
peer­to­peer support in composition, re­
search, and technology in Baker­Berry Li­
brary.2 The center, now in its second year 
and still in development, is a collaboration 
among three units, each with its own philos­
ophy and own mode of working. Running 
the peer tutoring center requires constant 
communication and attention to planning, 
funding, and assessment by professional 
staff from each of the three departments. 
The success of the center depends on the 
ability of the involved staff to communicate, 
to solve problems, and to develop and sup­
port a shared vision for RWIT. 

The idea for RWIT came about when staff 
from academic computing and the composi­
tion center were talking about the need for 
multimedia composition support for students. 

Susan Fliss is director of education and outreach 
a t  D a r t m o u t h  C o l l e g e  L i b r a r y,  e - m a i l :  S u s a n .  
Fliss@Dartmouth.Edu 
© 2005 Susan Fliss 

378C&RL News May 2005

mailto:Fliss@Dartmouth.Edu


Simultaneously, the library approached the 
composition center to discuss the need for 
composition tutors to be skilled in informa­
tion literacy practices and to know how to do 
research using the library. Similar ideas are 
percolating across academic libraries; these 
ideas are a natural next step after learning 
commons. 

In addition to the RWIT team, I’m fortunate 
to work with a group of librarians who can 
be collaboratively creative. Being creative 
in a group is difficult to do. Upon hearing a 
new idea, one’s initial impulse is to break it 
down rather than continue to develop it. It 
takes time to develop the skills of meeting as 
a group, brainstorming ideas, letting an idea 
float and be encouraged, making suggestions 
(some practical, some wacky), and watching 
thoughts morph into a workable idea with 
a very different shape from what was fi rst 
suggested. With a group the shape is usually 
more creative and firmly based in solving a 
problem or meeting a need than if a single 
person or two had worked on it. 

When a new person participates in a 
brainstorming session, he or she has to learn 
to control the impulse to immediately critique 
the idea. This is hard enough to do among li­
brarians who share a common understanding 
of their role and work, but how is this done 
with other constituents on campus? 

Courage and marketing 
In approaching potential collaborators, there’s 
always the fear that they won’t see the value 
in working with us—we’ve seen that look on 
faces across campus before when we’ve made 
suggestions. The “look” can surely bring 
about a tight knot in the pit of one’s stomach, 
but it can mean many things: the other party 
feels there is not enough time in her schedule 
to collaborate, or he’s tried something like 
that before and it didn’t work, or she doesn’t 
quite understand why the library wants to 
partner with her group—the library does all 
right on its own, doesn’t it? 

Don’t assume people from other student 
support services have been keeping up with 
the changes in libraries and how librarians 

work with students and faculty. Do you know 
what changes have been going on in their 
areas? We may have to market librarians and 
libraries to other constituent groups on cam­
pus, as we do to new students and faculty. 

Investigating new ways of working with 
faculty is a good approach to take when col­
laborating with other departments on campus. 
If we want to increase our partnerships with 
faculty for the future, we must learn about 
the teaching techniques and new technologies 
faculty use in order to be able to work with 
them in the classroom. In doing so, we are 
better poised to approach faculty to integrate 
student development of information literacy 
skills into the curriculum. 

This means devising strategies to become 
involved with the Center for Teaching on 
campus, for example. Are librarians welcome 
to attend their training programs? Can librar­
ians lead a session sponsored by the center 
on designing assignments to develop research 
skills? Will librarians attend conferences in the 
disciplines to keep current in teaching and 
research trends in the disciplines we liaise 
with? For that matter, what about attending 
a conference on teaching and computing, or 
the Conference on College Composition and 
Communication, the American Chemical So­
ciety, or the American Historical Association 
annual meetings? 

Approaching faculty in your department 
and asking to have a conversation about their 
teaching is daunting; they are receptive to 
hearing about new services and library Web 
site features, but talking about teaching is 
another matter entirely. So, ask one or two 
members from a department to come to talk 
with librarians about teaching in their disci­
pline and invite them to work with librarians 
to devise more options for supporting them 
in their teaching and in student learning. 
Teaching and learning will go both ways at 
that meeting. 

Librarians also need to identify and make 
connections with other players who support 
faculty in their teaching and students in their 
learning. For example, partner with academic 
computing to integrate librarian resources and 

May 2005  379 C&RL News 



librarian participation into course manage­
ment systems; collaborate with the writing 
program, academic skills center, and English 
Department in first­year information literacy 
or writing intensive courses; work with resi­
dential life in devising a role for librarians 
in activities planned in the residence halls; 
create a My Librarian program with the in­
ternational office, athletics department, or 
graduate studies offi ce. 

How will the librarian’s role in teaching 
and learning change in the future? Time 
will tell, and I can’t wait to see! During this 
transition, the librarian’s role will become 
stronger, firmly accepted, and more integrated 
into teaching and learning, if we continue 
to develop collaborative relationships and 
projects with faculty and with other depart­
ments on campus. 

Lessons learned 
• First, don’t assume anyone knows what 

librarians do. 
• Make contact with potential collabo­

rators and talk about new developments 
in the library or with library services. In 
conversation, find the common challenges 
and—among those challenges—the ones that 
are also common priorities. 

• Who else needs to be in the conversa­
tion? Expand to include other groups. 

As needs and solutions come about, a 
group of interested players will emerge. Some 
will withdraw because the identifi ed project 
is not a priority, or there is not enough staff 
or not enough interest among staff. That’s 
okay. Remember to keep them informed of 
how the group progresses. Later, they will 
be an ally. 

In working with the interested group, the 
process may well develop bumps along the 
way because the group will be made up of 
people coming from different points of view 
and points of service, and it takes time to 
develop a shared vision of that collaborative 
project. Be patient on days when the meet­
ings just don’t go well. Give ideas time to gel; 
it can take several meetings, months, even 
longer, for ideas to come to fruition. 

If you’re not sure where the project or idea 
should go next, consult with students. It’s for 
them, after all. What are they experiencing? 
What do they need? Better yet, involve stu­
dents in the conversation from the beginning. 
Hmm, yes, this is how collaboration should 
begin—with the students! 

(continued on page 407) 

380C&RL News May 2005



(“Collaborative creativity” continued from 
page 380) 

Ruth A. Pagell, in the January issue of this 
series, ended her article with the advice, “The 
key is to embrace change as opportunity.”3 

We need to start collaborating creatively 
now because we’re only going to have more 
“opportunities” in the future. 

Notes 
1. Shelley Phipps, “Rafting the rapids,” 

C&RL News 66, 2 (February 2005): 116, 117. 
2. For more information, consult www. 

dartmouth.edu/~rwit/. 
3. Ruth A. Pagell, “The more things 

change...: The past as a signpost for the future,” 
C&RL News 66, 1 (January 2005) 35. 

May 2005  381 C&RL News