“Meet the Students”: Bringing Your Library’s
Online Resources Into Your Students’ “Circle of Trust”
By Lynn D. Lampert, Chair, Reference & Instructional
Services, California State University, Northridge
You don’t have to be a retired CIA operative, like the one Robert
DeNiro portrayed in the blockbuster hit “Meet the Parents,”
to realize that students need a lot of help when it comes to selecting
resources for their research papers and projects. Despite the success
of my library’s instructional offerings and our university’s
commitment to information literacy, I often run into students—both
undergraduate and graduate—who have no idea that their institution
provides perfect electronic resources for their papers.
With many academic libraries now offering more than 100 electronic databases—replete
with full text of both secondary and primary sources—it would
seem that more students would be exploring the wide range of available
resources. But sadly many of our valuable online resources remain largely
untapped until instructional sessions or last-minute reference interventions
salvage students’ ill-conceived research methods. What can librarians
and faculty do to increase student awareness of the many subject-specific
electronic collections we have amassed? How can we better market the
value of our own services and online collections to make sure that students
go beyond search engines like Google?
While many librarians actively pursue and create effective subject-based,
departmental-liaison relationships with faculty, the fact remains that
to be truly successful the collaborative relationship must also generate
trust between students and the library. As librarians know, solid research
is seldom a one-stop shopping expedition. Therefore, we need to demonstrate
to the student body that librarians and faculty are working together
to select and provide the best resources for their research needs.
As recent research has shown, both librarians and discipline faculty
have their work cut out for them in gaining the attention and trust
of students searching for research resources. The findings of the 2005
Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources published
by OCLC, “indicate that information consumers view libraries as
places to borrow print books, but they are unaware of the rich electronic
content they can access through libraries.”[1] In fact, the findings
of this report show that 69% of the respondents feel that information
from a search engine is at the same level of trustworthiness as library
information sources. Moreover, only 22% believe that information received
from a library is more trustworthy than information retrieved from a
search engine. The report goes on to state that 9% of those surveyed
believe information from a library information source is less trustworthy
than search engines.[2]
Search engines may not be the only competition on the block for long.
Couple OCLC’s 2005 findings with the growing popularity and student
dependence on peer-to-peer published resources like Wikipedia and it
is clear that our online collections will soon be facing competition
for familiarity alongside other Web-based community resources that may
not be scholarly nor factually correct.
So what can librarians and faculty do to help guide
students toward the online resources that have been carefully selected
to fit their curricular needs? Here are a dozen suggestions for building
greater trust among students in the online resources your library offers:
1. Work with faculty to plan instructional sessions that actively ask
students to use specific online resources in their research.
2. Encourage faculty to create assignments that ask
students to present their search strategies and comparative results
while providing a list of consulted resources. At least two or three
of their libraries’ discipline-specific resources should be required.
3. Invite vendors’ own expert trainers to campus—either
virtually through interactive instructional sessions transmitted over
the Web, or via in-person presentations—to show students that
online resources have specific aims and benefits for their research
success.
4. Market your online resources beyond the library
web pages on which they are listed. Consider advertising in your student
newspapers, on student-televised programming or on campus radio broadcasts.
5. Offer Graduate Student Orientations on certain
discipline-specific tools that will help students create literature
reviews, find primary and secondary sources or search for needed research
data or statistical information.
6. Use student peer-to-peer networks, such as associated
student government channels or student clubs and organizations, to spread
the word about the discipline-specific resources your library provides.
7. Disseminate news of recent database purchases,
updates or improvements to the faculty and the departments they serve.
8. Work to enroll faculty and students in database
alert systems and RSS Feeds that will inform them of pertinent resource
information.
9. Create assignments or workshops that show students
and faculty (both full and part-time) discipline-specific database features
like thesauri, study guides, or citations-style email exportation methods
(i.e. email the selected citation in MLA, APA, Chicago etc.)
10. Promote online resources by using vendor-provided
posters and marketing giveaways such as bookmarks or handouts.
11. Partner with your institution’s writing
and tutoring centers to promote these resources and offer information
about reference and instructional outreach services.
12. Market online resources through your institution’s
integrated Learning Management Systems (LMS) like WebCT.
Your library may have tried some of these ideas, while some may be new.
The key is to try a variety of ways and methods to continually and consistently
market the specific library information sources that will aid both faculty
and the students they are teaching.
As Shelly Jeffries stated in, “The Librarian as Networker: Setting
the Standard for Higher Education,” “When you [as a librarian]
communicate with faculty by attending departmental meetings, increasing
personal contact, and building a rapport, you will be networking within
your institution—all efforts that will lead to opportunities for
sustained collaboration.”[3] The same kind of outreach efforts
can be effective in reaching out to students outside of the classroom.
Students will be pleasantly surprised to realize that librarians, faculty
and vendors are working to offer quality resources that save them time
and provide quality information.
[1] Cathy DeRosa, OCLC (2005). Perceptions of Libraries and Information
Resources: a report to the OCLC membership. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC
Online Computer Library Center. Available online at:
http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm
[2] Ibidem, Part 3, pp. 6-7.
[3] Shellie Jeffries. (2000). The Librarian as Networker: Setting the
Standard for Higher Education in Eds Dick Rasp and Dane Ward The
Collaborative Imperative: Librarians and Faculty Working Together in
the Information Universe. Chicago: Association of College and Research
Libraries a Division of the American Library Association. pp 114-129.
<
