The COVID-19 pandemic, subsequent shutdown, and its aftermath have challenged how academic libraries make contact and maintain connections with their communities. Starting work as a new librarian in the summer of 2021 presented significant challenges in connecting with colleagues and students. Faculty and students were navigating returning to the classroom, and the campus was struggling to reestablish community after a period of significant disconnection. As the science and data information literacy librarian at Dickinson College, I was navigating making connections with some departments that made heavy use of the library’s instruction services and other departments that rarely requested instruction. Although I made contact with faculty who had established information literacy instruction in their courses, I still struggled to have more collegial interactions. Adding to this was a disconnect from the students and the feeling that I only interacted with them within the setting of a classroom or a research appointment. Students made appointments only when referred to me by their faculty, and I worked with them during instruction sessions, but there were few that sought me out regularly as a resource.

Thompson, Kendall Milar. Bridging the Gap: Mobile Librarian Outreach in the Wake of a Pandemic. College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News) 85, no.1 (2024). https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/26185

This is an Open Access article governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the Work non-commercially.

Kendall Thompson is the Information Literacy Librarian for Science and Data at Dickinson College.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit College & Research Libraries New's Website. https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/26185

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