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This paper aims to demonstrate the variety of ways institutions and their libraries approach student success both conceptionally and operationally.

Librarians from eight different institutions of higher education were given a series of questions about student success on their campuses and in their libraries. They responded with written essays describing their experiences and perspectives.

The contributed pieces in this second installment are collected together and a variety of ways the academic library engage with “student success” are discussed. Initiatives include high-impact practices, fostering academic rapport and creating a sense of belonging, experiential learning and creative spaces and professional development.

These examples help to observe what is happening throughout higher education and see potential paths forward at the institutions engaged in this work.

The purpose of this paper is to report on librarians’ experience creating and sustaining a workshop and webinar series for graduate students over the course of four years.

Difficulties hosting and promoting stand-alone graduate workshops and a collaborative method for planning workshop days and webinars are described in this case study. Attendance data were collected and recorded for each event, and additional quantitative data were collected via registration forms and post-event surveys.

Working collaboratively as a department eased planning and promotional responsibilities, allowing for a sustainable workshop series. Focusing on a limited number of events per semester and developing a brand identity for the series streamlined promotion and increased attendance, relative to discipline-based, stand-alone workshops.

While many libraries host workshops, the originality of the program lies in the collaborative planning and promotion process that efficiently uses librarian time and expertise to continuously offer well-attended graduate workshops and webinars. This case study could be used as an example for institutions considering to start a workshop series or those experiencing difficulties with stand-alone workshops.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of selecting “well-matched” independent and dependent variables in quantitative research to maximize the possibility of detecting impact of library services on indicators of student success. The paper introduces the concept of sensitivity, which is the extent to which a measure will detect change in the thing being measured.

To make the case, the authors use the impact of amount of library instruction received on Grade Point Average (GPA) as an example, explaining a correlational research study at their institution. However, the emphasis of the paper is on the conceptual importance of sensitivity in variable selection in quantitative studies of all types.

After finding no statistically significant relationship between the amount of library instruction received and GPA, the authors determined that GPA was not a sensitive enough variable to detect the impact of a few class sessions taught by a librarian throughout students entire undergraduate career. Based on the findings and the literature, the authors conclude that the practice of selecting “insensitive” dependent variables that are unlikely to detect impact of the independent variable is a common practice in the library assessment literature.

In an era where bigger is better when it comes to demonstrating impact of library services, this paper argues that libraries sometimes diminish their ability to illustrate their contributions to student success by choosing large scale indicators of student success as independent variables which fail to detect the impact of library services.