In January 2024, librarians from the Digital Library of Georgia and the University of Georgia worked in concert with members of the Firefly Homeschool Community, and delivered an in-person workshop to a small middle and high school co-op research and writing class.

Following up on our 2023's "Hosting a Homeschool Happening" outreach session, we have continued to redesign our outreach efforts towards homeschooling parents, students, and instructors across the state to connect authentically with this emerging and difficult-to-reach community. 

This session was an improvement on 2023's hybrid event, a bibliographic instruction (BI) session that gave a bird's eye view of resources available in the Digital Library of Georgia/GALILEO/GPLS ecospheres. It introduced people to the DLG and GALILEO, but it did not target specific class assignments. 

In 2024, we decided to meet Firefly students WITH active research needs and class assignments, and target specific resources for them to use. 

With this outreach model, we were showing K-12 students (really grades 8-12) how to use search, advanced search, and faceting functions of the database, help them connect to their resource paths in real time, and let them know which resources looked good and which did not.

Walking students through these steps of analyzing the quality of their resources as they worked was important. More work like this helps them build confidence in "real" vs. "fake" resources.

This same set of students that met together in January presented research displays to a larger community at a co-op regional STEM+R Fair in March, and made a second wave of meaningful connections as a part of this large resource fair. 

It was important to meet the community where they were already planning together (at a specific date and time of an event with a captive audience), which effectively reintroduced people to our January workshop.

But the important thing to realize from an OUTREACH perspective is that more people are likely to be participating in their child's contest/presentation, etc. It is a GREAT time to be at a table with swag at one of these events! 

Students are presenting, their parents and other families are attending the event, and they are happy to look into free resources, distribute educational posters, bookmarks and handouts, and to make certain this group is made aware of the variety of databases (including DLG, DPLA, GALILEO, and National History Day resources for K-12). 

Takeaways include: 

Reflecting on the lessons we have learned about how to build successful community outreach mechanisms by being responsive to our community's respective user groups

Considering the importance of enacting review and reassessment of our efforts -at each pass- so that we can better target user needs when providing support to the K-12 homeschool community. 

Sharing and assessing our data from our 2023 and 2024 outreach efforts to demonstrate how we have learned to better connect and interact with a Georgia K-12 secular homeschool user group.

Working with our most recent outreach results to develop future outreach efforts that are even more effective to connect to the right users in meaningful and authentic ways.

We will close with an open discussion that invites the audience to share ideas about ways we can develop more engaging and rigorous educational programming for K-12 Georgia homeschoolers using DLG and GALILEO resources.