Customizing Services for Millennium Generation Students

Abstract

As mobile devices and social networks are making an impact on the academic lives and learning styles of our millennium generation students, academic libraries are propelled to re-engineer services and redesign the library to accommodate the changing needs of these students. Our presentation will address these changing needs, the challenges they present for public services, and ideas and best practices for managing these new services., , 1. To ensure our vitality in the new era and to respond to the changing needs of students, public services in academic libraries have developed an array of new student-centered services. We will identify some of these newly customized services and how we've instituted them within our institution. , , 2. First Year Services and Access Services are the two front-line service departments that work with students directly. We will present how two managers can work collaboratively to meet the changing needs of the students that both departments serve., , 3. The challenge for the middle managers is filling the current needs of our users while making changes for the future. We will address this challenge and how managers can balance handling the current needs while envisioning for the future. , , 4. Unlike the students in the past, today's millennium generation students expect service to be right-now and want to get-in/get-out as they do with Google. We will provide service management practices that can help accommodate their new expectations while also meeting our core service philosophies.,