“I Felt Belonged”: Telling the Story of Our Impact on Faculty Through Ripple Effects Mapping

Engaging with faculty across campus is deeply relational work and takes a significant amount of time, energy, and effort. Librarians attend department meetings and advertise library services, share news and events with potentially interested faculty, and show up to campus activities in the hopes that these efforts may, in some unknown future, result in faculty supporting the library and utilizing its services and resources. The effects and impact of this labor are difficult to parse given the long-term nature of faculty relationships and the effort it takes to nurture and sustain them. Successful faculty scholarship and teaching rely on services and support from many campus units, which interconnect and collaborate with each other and faculty themselves. To better understand the impact and value of faculty collaborations, a team of librarians and faculty development staff at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) partnered with the faculty development and research units to identify key moments in the trajectories of successful faculty members. Through the lens of slow librarianship and ripple effects mapping (REM), we analyzed the journeys taken by engaged faculty members who relied on services offered by the library and other faculty support units to tell the story of the impact, value, and importance of relational work done by faculty and staff in these units. We found that qualitative and narrative storytelling is an effective and meaningful means of demonstrating the impact of building and nurturing long-term relationships with faculty.