Denver Public Library Reference Services librarians observed that many Denver area schools are encouraging students to participate in National History Day. With its large historical serial collection and federal documents depository the Reference Services department houses a wealth of primary sources to help students produce fantastic entries for National History Day. The challenge was twofold: letting students and their teachers know about the resources; and teaching them how to use them. The appointment service allows students to book up to 60 minutes with a librarian who has learned ahead of time about their topic of interest. When they arrive at the library they are able to make good use of their time to find resources for their current project. In working one on one with a professional librarian they also have the opportunity to develop research knowledge and skills they will be able to use in future projects. National History Day sparked the idea for the service, but librarians realized students have many research projects where they can benefit from individual assistance. We now offer the appointments to any student Grade 6 and up who would like librarian help with a research project.

The new Student Appointment Service required rethinking the daily staff schedule to carve out time slots dedicated to student assistance. Once we did that we needed to work with our technology support folks to create an online request form for students to use to ask for a librarian appointment. The form allows the student to indicate a preferred time to visit, grade, and topic. In the beginning the form went to a group e-mail monitored by librarians assigned to retrieve requests and distribute them to librarians in the department. The technology team has now created an online scheduling module with Drupal that collects the request form submissions and enables individual librarians on the student appointment team to claim requests, set dates and times with the students, and send a post-appointment survey.

In 2013 we helped 145 students in 104 appointments. (Some students come in groups when they are working together on projects.) Post-appointment surveys show that the majority of students found the appointment helpful for locating materials for their projects. The surveys also show the majority of students learned something about the library’s research resources that they’ll use for future assignments. A few students have let us know their projects have won prizes at various levels of the National History Day competition. Last year one of the students we helped even went on to place at the national level. Our goal is to increase appointment attendance by at least 10% in 2014 and so far we are on pace to do this. Lessons learned: Our informal partnership with the National History Day state organizing committee has been very important in getting the word out about the service. Two librarians from the department made a presentation to a National History Day teacher workshop last year where they had the opportunity to talk about our student appointment services to about 75 teachers from across the state. Outreach to teachers in local schools is also helping to increase the appointment numbers. We promote the service when we help students with online chat, on the telephone, in tours and class visits, and in database instruction sessions. We also learned the importance of creating appointment slots at times when active students and busy parents are available – evenings and weekends.