About the Personal Librarian Program

This is the information page for the University of Toronto Libraries' 2024-2025 Personal Librarian program at the University's St. George (downtown) campus.

The Personal Librarian program began as a pilot, which was first launched in the fall of 2012, and paired 1000 incoming Faculty of Arts & Science students with 10 librarians from across the downtown campus. The pilot was well-received by student participants, and their feedback was essential in planning the next step of the service.

In this second phase of the pilot program, from September 2013-April 2014, approximately 2800 first-year students enrolled at the downtown campus in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering were matched with a personal librarian. There were 28 librarians, from all areas of the library system, who were assigned 100 students each during this phase of pilot. 

The Personal Librarian program has reached one of its original goals in connecting every first-year undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and Faculty of Music with a librarian. The program also includes all incoming OISE graduate students. Starting in late-September 2024 and extending through to April 2025, personal librarians will communicate with their students around key dates in the academic year to offer advice and assistance.

The goals of the program are:

1. Provide enhanced personal support to incoming first-year students.
2. Identify key issues and questions fielded by first-year students, to inform the library's future outreach to incoming students.
3. Test effectiveness and scalability of online systems required to send and track communication between personal librarians and students, and track student assessments of the program.
4. Monitor usage of personal librarians by students in order to determine the extent of service and staffing requirements required to extend the program to all incoming first-year Faculty of Arts and Science students (for 2013-2014).

Ours is not the first implementation of a Personal Librarian program. However, it has become the largest implementations of this kind of initiative, in reaching out to approximately 6000 incoming first-year Faculty of Arts & Science, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and Faculty of Music students on the St. George campus. A significant component of the project has been building and managing the internal engines required to send and track messages and interactions between personal librarians and their students.

The University of Toronto's Personal Librarian project has drawn on best practices learned from other universities, and we are particularly indebted to our librarian colleagues at Yale University and Drexel University for their information and advice.

Reports, Presentations, and Publications

• Personal Librarians: Building relationships for student success. Libraries Unlimited, 2019. [book]
• Getting to know you: Analyzing interactions from the OISE library personal librarian program. TRY Conference, Toronto, ON, May 3, 2016.
• What are first-year students saying?: Assessing a personal librarian program. 34th Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience, Dallas, TX, February 9, 2015.
• How are we doing?: Assessing your personal librarian program. Personal Librarian & First Year Experience Library Conference, Cleveland, OH, April 8, 2014.
• Keeping it personal: Supporting collaboration, assessment, and efficiency in a large personal librarian pilot. ACRL Cyber Zed Shed presentation, April 11, 2013.
• [Preliminary report for the period September 20 - November 30 2012.] Scholars Portal Day, December 5, 2012.

Want to know more about the program? Please contact:

Devon Stolz
University of Toronto Libraries
devon.stolz@utoronto.ca

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