SSC College Libraries Annual Review 2021-22

Librarians have also been involved in the college's Summer Bridge program from its early stages, providing embedded librarian support to multiple courses in the program.  We firmly believe that this early connection of first term students with a librarian is a critical building block for success in a student's overall academic career.  Librarian Claire Miller reflects on her experience with Summer Bridge.

Narrative by Claire Miller, Research and Instruction Librarian, Altamonte campus                     

The Summer Bridge program at Seminole State College offers students who have just graduated high school a valuable opportunity to take two college courses at no cost to the student. Since the inception of this program in 2020, the Summer Bridge program has featured intensive academic support through embedded tutors and librarians. Serving as an embedded librarian in the Summer Bridge Program for the past two years has offered me the chance to develop productive faculty/librarian partnerships and impact students far beyond this program.  

For many of the Summer Bridge faculty, this program was their first exposure to the concept of the embedded librarian. By approaching this opportunity as a partnership, faculty and librarians could work together to develop and tweak assignments to increase student success.  

One example of this is my partnership with Professor Sam Hoekstra. Over the last two years, I've attended student presentations, co-created assignments focused on improving student research and evaluation skills, and developed new modules on research in the humanities. Indeed, Professor Hoekstra incorporated the materials, presentations, and assignments that we developed into all her classes, and I’m now a fixture in all of her Humanities 2020 courses. This type of longitudinal faculty partnership has helped me hone the modules to better support students, and Professor Hoekstra reports that the student research presentations have significantly improved in the time we have been working together.  

Beyond just one class or partnership, however, the biggest impact has been the relationships with students that the Summer Bridge program fosters. The intensive contact of Summer Bridge encourages students to form personal connections with the academic support departments at SSC, and when they hit a stumbling block, they know where to go for help. The intensive support and possibility of ongoing partnership and support is one of the true strengths of the library partnership with the Summer Bridge Program.