We are excited to welcome our latest EDGE Team to the DePaul University Library! Representing five of the university’s colleges, the team will bring a wide variety of skills and interests to EDGE projects in the library over the course of the 2017-2018 academic year.
EDGE–the Education and Development Grant for Employability—is an award-winning program of DePaul’s Office of Student Employment. Like other teams across the university, the library’s EDGE team will focus on developing transferable professional skills while assisting staff in projects that are central to our mission.
This autumn each of our EDGE students will become a “library expert” by learning about a different department of the library before sharing their knowledge with the rest of the team. Not only does the project familiarize the team with library services and functions, workshops on professional writing, conducting informational interviews, and presentation skills will impart key professional skills while providing the tools they need to become library experts.
In each quarter we will introduce new activities that pair skills-development with authentic, mission-focused endeavors in the library. Past EDGE projects in DePaul University Library have included National Poetry Month and National Library Week events, as well as usability testing for the web and patron services. While our primary focus was on developing their professional skills, in total our 2016-2017 EDGE team members contributed over 1,000 hours to library projects and events. In return these students have gleaned important knowledge about the library and themselves, as their own observations indicate:
“Being on the library’s EDGE team taught me that there is significantly more going on…at the library than checking out books to people.”
“…the experience of organizing and putting on an event is not something that many people my age have done, and this experience is something I can take forward with me into future job applications and interviews.”
“The Library EDGE team has helped me gain and improve on skills that I will need for wherever my future takes me.”
We are looking forward to another great year with the DePaul University Library EDGE Team!