Outreach and Instruction Librarian Provides Guidance to Students Navigating the Research Process

Outreach and Instruction Librarian Madeleine Nittmo has only been with WNMU since last January, but she has been on the path to becoming a librarian since high school. She was mentored along the way by an observant school librarian who recognized her passion when Nittmo was a high school senior. "I have always been a big reader," said Nittmo, "and the district librarian noticed that, and she came up to me and said, 'I can tell you how to become a librarian.' She told me all the steps: this is what you need to do, this is the program you need to be in. So, the minute I went to college, I had a very clear path, and I never diverted from that. I have always had my eye on it from the very beginning."

Prior to coming to WNMU, Nittmo served as the outreach librarian at Tyler Junior College in Texas. When she heard WNMU was hiring, she was eager to apply in order to be closer to her family in Arizona.

Now as Outreach and Instruction Librarian at WNMU, Nittmo is helping students, faculty, and staff to better understand the deep trove of resources available through the J. Cloyd Miller Library. She does this through the modality that works best for the situation, whether that be in person or virtually. "Professors can bring their classes here [to the library], and I can show them the resources we have. I also do it on Zoom as well," she said. She can provide instruction to a whole class or in a one-on-one session.

Some of the resources she is most excited about right now are Boundless, which is a service that provides audio books and ebooks, and Swank, which is a streaming service. She also mentioned Alexander Street, another streaming service, which includes a number of documentaries that instructors can imbed directly into their Canvas shells.

Nittmo is also responsible for the library's LibGuides, a platform that allows her to create curated guides to help students with their research. These guides are largely topic-specific, but Nittmo noted that she can create class-specific guides as well.

She is available to guide at virtually any step of the research process. "I am here to really help the faculty and the students," said Nittmo. "I am here to help students if they do not understand how to use their resources. In addition to the basic library orientation, we can talk about information literacy and digital literacy or research skills like how to form a proper research question."

This kind of instruction has become especially important as libraries have moved away from being simply physical spaces where books are stored. "Beyond our physical sources," said Nittmo, "we have so many electronic resources, especially for our online students. We have ebooks, we have electronic journals, we have subscription services. A lot of people don't know, for example, that you get a subscription to the New York Times, just for being a part of WNMU."

"People think of the library as a physical space," she said, "but we are more of an idea than a place."

One of the new projects Nittmo is working on is establishing a library presence in Deming. She plans to offer instructional sessions to nursing students at the John Arthur and Janette Smith Educational Center, and she also plans to set up a small circulating library at the Mimbres Learning Center.

While a love of reading first attracted Nittmo to librarianship, she has found that the people she works with fuel her passion for the job. "The people here are some of the nicest people I have gotten to interact with as a librarian," she said. "The staff and faculty are incredibly kind here. And also, the students-the students are so kind, and they really enjoy doing their research."

These interactions keep her motivated, she said. "I love helping everybody. I really enjoy helping someone just figure out what they need and working through their research problems."

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