6 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 301 2020 Redefining Student Success in the Academic Library: Building a Critically Engaged Undergraduate Engagement Program Teresa Helena Moreno, Undergraduate Engagement Coordinator and Black Studies Liaison, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago Jennifer M. Jackson, Undergraduate Engagement Coordinator, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago Many academic libraries recognize the importance of reaching out to undergraduate populations and providing them with various forms of support systems to help them throughout their undergraduate careers. Undergraduate engagement librarians, first-year experience programs, and other such initiatives are designed to increase undergraduate students’ use of the library and its services in order to deepen undergraduates’ relationships with the use of information. In 2012 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) a campus-wide directive was issued from university leadership to examine student support services and their interactivity with one another and with the students they serve, leading the UIC Library to institute a permanent Student Success task force.1 Two librarians at that time shared a core responsibility for realizing the Task Force’s recommendations by focusing on undergraduate student engagement. As time progressed, these roles morphed into our two undergraduate engagement librarian positions as they exist today, and we were tasked with the project of reimagining student-centric student success pathways in the library, while also acknowledging UIC’s unique student population and building programming and supports specifically aimed at this particularly diverse cadre of students. We undertook a large-scale reexamination of the UIC Library’s undergraduate support systems in fall 2018, ultimately leading to the formation of a new, streamlined system of support, the Undergraduate
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