Jason Green has recently become the newest eLearning Librarian for CSN Libraries. Prior to taking his new position, he served as the CSN InterLibrary Loan Department Supervisor and as an adjunct Librarian for four years before becoming a CSN faculty member.
Jason, can you tell us about your responsibilities in your new position?
There are several responsibilities I have as the incoming eLearning Librarian here at CSN. The most important responsibility I have is maintaining the CSN electronic resource collections so that students, faculty, and staff have uninterrupted service when looking for articles, films, eBooks, and other items.
Some of my other duties include working at the reference desk answering questions, providing chat reference service, and helping with technology or whatever else a student, faculty member, or staff member may need. On any given day, I never know what may happen and that’s a very exciting aspect of my job!
Can you tell us about your eLearning Librarian position as it relates to being an “embedded librarian?”
Being an embedded librarian is a sort of concierge type service for CSN students– it’s a personalized librarian who works with professors and students to provide class-specific library curriculum, research, reference assistance, and a variety of other services in a Canvas course.
How has your experience in your former positions helped in your new position?
I’ve always worked in or around technology fields so I keep current with trends in technology for all kinds of devices and systems. I’m able to develop new systems and integrate those new systems into the online learning environment for CSN students, faculty, and staff to utilize. Having worked with faculty and students for a while now helps me focus on their needs.
What kind of degree did you have to earn to become a librarian? Beyond that degree, what other degrees or courses have been valuable in developing the skills you need for the eLearning position?
In order to become a Librarian, I had to have a Master of Science in Library & Information Science– my major was Digital Libraries. The specialized degree I obtained only required four foundational library courses required by the American Library Association and then the rest of my classes were in technology integration and development and computer science.
A study I performed in graduate school stays with me to this very day– it allowed me to observe student actions in the online setting trying to rationalize instructions or complete tasks in a digital environment. This experience helps me design class content and methods of achieving goals in a more universal way without requiring long complicated instructions.
How do you plan to improve the services to our online students?
I’ll work on improving services by upgrading the technologies I can and implementing new ones where the library has weaknesses. If you see a need for a particular technology or platform that would be useful for learning, I hope you would come to me and share your experiences so that I can provide a better user experience for everyone. Everything you can do in the physical library you can do online!
