Marketing First Impressions: Library Weeks of Welcome - ‘WOW’ correlations at Orientation of Wayamba University Libraries

Abstract

“WOW” (Weeks Of Welcome) is a great way to engage students with library staff and to originate memories linked to positive feelings of accessible services and friendly people in the library. Orientation week is an exciting and high energy time of millennial generation born in between 1980 – 2000. They bring new challenges for todays’ librarians (Wheeler and Harris, 2006), they have and share their opinions rapidly via modern technologies. According to the Collins Concise Dictionary (Collins English Dictionary, 2017) “Orientation” means the adjustment or alignment of oneself of one’s ideas to surroundings or circumstances. At the beginning of the academic year of the freshers, the faculty coordinators of the orientation programmes lead activities which based on simplicity, relax, confidence and fulfillment. However these programmes provide opportunities for freshers to approach the campus with a very good first impression. The major role of the library is to make aware of the users of the use of existing resources and services. Further the library leads them to get the utmost benefit during this Library Orientation Programme (LOP). These Programmes improve the Information Literacy (IL) of the students too. The UNESCO says that the Orientation Programmes of the library supports to its users in various ways in enabling individuals to achieve his or her goals, develop knowledge and potential and participate fully in community and wider society (UNESCO, 2005). Through the Orientation Programme the user fulfills his or her information gaps when is needed and it enables users to master content and extend their investigations, become far more self-directed, assume greater control over their own learning. (Association of Collage and Research Libraries, 2000). The academic library becomes a market – oriented organism and they become hybrid libraries to familiarize the academic learning environment in e-information era. According to the Cal Poly Pomona experience (2015), one of their mission statements of orientation services is “preparing students for lifelong learning” with the goal of connecting students to valuable support resources. Hence the Orientation programmes are designed to help students adjust to university life and ultimately improve retention rates, graduation rates and grade point averages. In 2005, (Wheeler and Harris, 2006) Swarthmore College developed a winning freshman orientation programme and they continue to date. They assess freshman orientation and conclude with best practices for developing dynamic orientation programmes that provide millennial with a positive first impression of the academic library. Librarians are searching for ways to effectively market and promote library resources and services. Rhoades and Hartsell (2008) discussed in their research paper that being a part of the orientation programme allows librarians to reach students they might not be able to reach in any other context. Based on the views as part of the new students’ orientation, scheduled to showcase the Library services, spaces and collections of Wayamba University of Sri Lanka (WUSL) while having a lot of fun (Thusithakumari and Jayawardana, 2017) University libraries are given opportunities to tempt first year students to the library and its services. Often having one chance to ‘WOW’ the new comers, the librarians of the Wayamba University Library Network (WULN) have discovered a way of achieving a victorious extension and advanced programme for first year students. Dramatically over the past few years the research based on “Study on Orientation as a strategy for making great first impression of the academic library: Library Orientation ideas of Wayamba University of Sri Lanka” (Thusithakumari and Jayawardana, 2014) and it was advanced including different ideas with the new orientation programmes. These programmes are set to suit with the interest and expectations of the users. Therefore, WULN looks to provide a comfortable and productive learning environment for their patrons addressing the concept of “Library anxiety”. Library anxiety is the feeling of un-comfortableness within a library setting that has repercussion on a cognitive and behavioral level (Jiao & Onwuegbuzie, 1995).