Engaged Students
Get Started
Our annual Get Started campaign introduces Library Services to new and returning students. In 2022, our Get Started offer included an on-campus fair, a Textbook Rescue giveaway event, a Get Started stand within the Main Library, Library roving support, School presentations, online drop-ins and virtual asynchronous support.
For the first time we also offered guided tours of Main Library for pre-sessional students during July and August, seeing 486 students in total.
The Library partnered with the University’s Student Services Team to make the Main Library a student card collection site. This led to a 56% increase in footfall to the Main Library from 2021/22 establishing the Library as an integral starting point for students’ introduction to the University.
We delivered over 40 Get Started presentations at School and Programme level and embedded Get Started online materials within their curriculum. Our openly available online Get Started resource proved popular.
Exam and assessment support
During the January and May exam periods, the Library provided students with additional support for assessment. We partnered with the University’s Counselling and Wellbeing Teams to deliver 40 workshops and drop-in support sessions to over 200 students – double the amount we delivered in 2021/22. Topics included the popular Calm your Brain session in addition to sessions focused on revising and preparing for exams.
Our Library support for assessment resource, openly accessible from the Library website, had a significant number of views and was embedded to online teaching platforms. The Library’s Exam and Assessment Support offer is highly regarded by our academic colleagues.
We offered extended opening at Main Library and an additional 186 study spaces at Prospects House building.
Digital Society
In 2022/23 the Digital Society University College of Interdisciplinary Learning (UCIL) course included over 100 undergraduate students. Topics include:
- Online ethical behaviour
- Critical analysis
- Smart cities
- Digital engagement in marketing
- Relationship between the individual and the state
For the first time the course included Library Student Team co-created content focusing on the questions raised by The Rise of Simulated Spaces.
Digital Society focuses on developing the critical skills of the cohort, ensuring the assessment is authentic and incorporating the student voice into the course materials.
Artificial Intelligence
The Library is one of the University’s lead partners for reflecting on, supporting and integrating AI tools into teaching and learning at Manchester.
The Library’s FAQs for the use and referencing outputs of AI tools was the primary guidance available for the University for the majority of the academic year.
Library staff, including the Library Student Team, played a key role in developing the wider Manchester approach to using AI tools in teaching, in addition to chairing a cross-University working group on the knowledge and skills students and staff need to effectively use AI tools for learning.
Inclusive learning
The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre (the RACE Centre) won the Race, Roots and Resistance R3 award for Outstanding Contributions to the Promotion of Inclusive Learning Environments. The RACE Centre was acknowledged for its vital contributions to the curation of inclusive and transformative learning experiences for students on and off campus.
An example of this is our ongoing relationship with the PGCE History course at the University. In 2023 the RACE Centre delivered a talk on representative and anti-racist education, followed by a workshop at the RACE Centre. Trainee teachers explored our unique primary sources and considered how teachers could build their teaching based on these resources.
"As educators, our lives and work have been greatly enriched by our collaborations with the AIU RACE Centre who are a constant source of wisdom and expertise in the arena of anti-racist education and heritage sector work."
"I cannot overstate this, but the work that the AIU RACE Centre are doing is integral to our collective efforts to create pipelines that support the development of a new generation of diverse historians and heritage sector workers capable of challenging the erasures, silences and omissions of the field of modern British history as well as global antiracist histories. Because that work can itself often feel invisible and under-supported, we would like to take this opportunity to recognise the AIU RACE Centre’s critical interventions as a nationally recognised and leading institution for the advancement of antiracist heritage and learning."
Founders and Funders
We developed the Founders and Funders exhibition which launched at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library in September 2023. The exhibition explores how profits from slave trading, ownership of enslaved people, and manufacturing with slave-grown cotton funded the cultural and educational development of Manchester.
Founders and Funders is the first student-led exhibition at the Rylands with involvement from the students at every stage from object selection to writing interpretation. The curatorial team included postgraduate students, academics, Rylands staff and external researchers. Core to the exhibition is research conducted by students who undertook the Race, Migration & Humanitarianism: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism in the Modern World module as part of their History MA. The students’ research can be explored in detail in the Founders and Funders blog series which outlines how Special Collections were an important part of their research process.
Key to the project was that we provided students with paid opportunities to develop their historical research and curatorial skills with the aim of strengthening pipelines for underrepresented and Global Majority students to participate in academic and heritage work.
The exhibition runs until 23 March 2024.
Postgraduate students visit the John Rylands Research Institute and Library as part of the Emerging Scholars Programme.
Postgraduate students visit the John Rylands Research Institute and Library as part of the Emerging Scholars Programme.
MA Library and Archive Studies
Throughout 2022/23, many Library staff were involved in the development of a ground-breaking new MA in Library and Archive Studies within the University’s Institute for Cultural Practices. The MA is unique in being fully embedded in a major university library, with Library staff contributing to the development and delivery of the course. Students benefit from their vast experience and expertise across a wide range of topics, including the management of special collections and library leadership.
Dr Benjamin Wiggins was appointed as Senior Lecturer of History and Library & Archive Studies, joining us from the University of Minnesota. We worked closely with Ben in the development of the programme.
A promotional video was co-created with colleagues in the Faculty of Humanities and the School of Arts Languages and Cultures (SALC).
These efforts have been rewarded with the recruitment of over thirty students in the first year, including nine Library staff who have been awarded bursaries to study part-time alongside their existing roles.
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