Orientation is upon us

A bit of lunch time musings as we somewhat frantically prepare to welcome #umn17 to campus next week for Welcome Week (where did the summer go?). We also brought up our new discovery layer, MNCAT Article Discovery and I need to take it for a test drive so did a little search on Orientation and student success and retention and found this new article

Melissa A. Hubbard, Amber T. Loos, (2013) "Academic library participation in recruitment and retention initiatives", Reference Services Review, Vol. 41 Iss: 2, pp.157 - 181. DOI: 10.1108/00907321311326183

From my brief skim it certainly illustrations all academic libraries do in terms of recruitment and retention much of it partnering with other campus units. At the moment we have not folded the data we collect during the Libraries "big" day of events into our overall data partly as the experience between students is so variable during this 5000+ student events and party because the unit that hosts the event does gather and assess the students many times during their welcome week experience.

• How do we draw the line (is it dotted?) between the bigger university's efforts and our role in those?
• Should we be trying harder to connect those dots?