The Logical Operator

One of my responsibilities - a responsibility shared by many of my fellow librarians - is to teach library stuff to science students. Library orientation, BI, information literacy instruction, whatever you call it, it means teaching students the 5 W’s of the Library:

• Who is this guy?
• What is that squirrel doing out there? It looks merry.
• When will this end? Oh god, this is never going to end.
• Where is the coffee shop again?
• Why is he still talking?

In all seriousness, the prospect of teaching a library instruction teaching fills me with the nervousness, because although I have done it many times, I remain acutely aware of two things:

1. Sometimes, you can’t make databases interesting, and
2. I have no real training in teaching, and I have bored students nearly to death in the past.

However, I have to say that this week has proven to be an excellent week for library instruction. I’ve done two sessions, which is actually a little ahead of the pace for the sciences (I advertise every semester, and the response rate is almost always great in the Fall, and weaker in the Spring; I generally do one session per week at most), and both have gone very well.*

I attribute it to changing the way I present the material (and to writing better jokes). Normally, I would handle the orientation session via a long PowerPoint slide show and some hands-on searching, but I think that PowerPoint knows how to cast Power Word: Stun ** - fire up PowerPoint, and the audience switches off.

The last two sessions, though, I’ve been playing with a new tool: LibGuides. The idea to do this was based on a discussion with JDupuis while we were at Science Online ‘09. He’d mentioned that he uses blog software to create pages for specific classes when he does library orientations, and I thought it was a great idea (and set about to ruthlessly borrow it. I feel no remorse). I used the LibGuides software because it’s designed to create resource pages, and I don’t figure reinventing the wheel is a good use of my time (besides, it probably violates a patent somewhere). So this is only an oblique advertisement for LibGuides (I may talk about what I think about it later, after I mess with it some more), but instead a reflection on the fact that this approach, for some reason, seemed to engage the students a little more readily than my standard spiel.

What I did for these to classes was to create a Library Guide for each class - they’re visible here and here - that tailored most of the details right to the course topic and classroom activities. Previously, I would hit the general area of study, and then jump into hands-on with the databases and journals the students would be likely to use. I also used to include information that I gradually realized was entirely uninteresting to the student. The life cycle of a scientific article may hold me in thrall like a viper, but I’m probably the only one. So instead of the normal stuff, I blazed through a verbal tour of the library and a brief discourse on our collections, and then jumped right to the library guide and how the students can use it.

And they liked it! I wonder if the idea that this guide was created for them, and them specifically, pulled them in little more deeply. Not to mention having an online tool that helps them penetrate the navigation scheme of the library home page and get right to the important stuff. This is not to say that the navigation scheme of our library home page is bad (it’s no worse than any other library, I suppose, which is damning with faint praise if I’ve ever heard it), but that a user still needs to turn on their library jargon filter to select the right path to the resources they need. The library guide, on the other hand, does away with some of the maze, and presents the things the student needs right up front. And it demonstrates that they have a librarian who cares enough to pull together the things they want in a format they can use easily, and wants to help them succeed.

Comments? Thoughts? Have you found ways to engage students? Do you use resource guides to guide your library instruction?

-Logical Operator

* They clapped. I was asked many questions. That is pretty rare.

** If there was any doubt that I’m a geek of the first water, I have dispelled it.

Logical Operator Uncategorized BI, engaging students, information literacy, libguides, library instruction