It can be a challenge to explain the curricular relevance of research and information literacy instruction as well as librarians’ role in higher education. Seth Allen, Online Instruction Librarian at the King University Library, has created a great-looking infographic to explain his library’s online embedded librarian program. Here’s what Seth has to say about his design:
Introducing yourself to new faculty as the Online Instruction Librarian provokes blank stares and kind but opaque replies like, “That’s nice” or “Interesting”. Our college has been developing online degrees at a breakneck pace for the past couple of years. We are finally ‘catching up’ in terms of infrastructure to support online students. My position was created in the spring of 2014 to address the online needs of our students. I was hired in the summer and I have had been busy filling in the service gaps for online students. Despite our library’s reputation for innovation, it’s hard to break the faculty stereotypes of a staid librarian who sits at the reference desk and manages print collections. I created an infographic to introduce faculty to my services and encourage them to partner with me in their online classes. I think an infographic is the best medium for communicating this info, but I did not like the online infographic generators. I could not adapt my initial sketch with a good infographic template. I used PowerPoint instead and changed the slide size to a 1X3 width-to-length ratio. I think the final product communicates the vision of my job nicely.
The PDF and original PowerPoint version of Seth’s infographic are available on the Librarian Design Share Google Drive for you adaptation (as always, an attribution to the original designer is needed). One thing to note: Seth used the Franklin Gothic font for the paragraph text (which comes standard on most computers) and Sketch Rockwell font for the titles (which doesn’t, but can be dowloaded from Urban Fonts).
If you have other questions about this infographic or King University’s online librarian program, you can email Seth directly or send him a tweet.
Librarian Design Share 
April 28, 2015 at 9:14 pm
In April 28th I left a meeting a noon where we had been critiquing posters for a poster session Monday. I sat down at my computer, which for some reason had jumped back in time to this email from 24 hours before depicting the EXACT poster we wish we had. Not only is this group talented and generous apparently there is a touch of magic involved!