students

Working With Undergraduate Student Employees: An Appreciation

At my library we are celebrating “student appreciation week” this week, and it’s got me thinking about the wonderful students I work with, and all of the ways that my own position has evolved and adapted to meet the challenges of supervising them.

I am the junior member of a two-woman librarian staff in my library unit. My job description includes hiring, training and supervising the 5-6 person undergraduate staff that works for us. So I assumed that when I was hired, I would act as a kind of “bad-cop” or “vice-principal”; that is, that my job would involve a lot of nagging people to do their job, and taking corrective action if/when they did not. I know it sounds strange, but I didn’t really think about the upsides!

I’m happy to report that supervising students is quite different than I expected. Our crew is a self-selected bunch of high achievers, who applied for jobs with us because they are constantly studying in the Research Commons anyway. In addition to taking great pride in their work for the library, they are also a deeply hilarious, bright, and inquisitive group of people. I really enjoy conducting interviews, managing trainings, and writing recommendations, and I find that these activities offer unexpected rewards in the form of opportunities to reflect on my work, notice issues in the workflow, or discover new ways to articulate our mission.

As is common in many libraries today, the Research Commons Help Desk is staffed by student employees the majority of the time. We rely on our students completely to be our public face. This makes sense in an area like the Research Commons, where we do not have a print collection, and reference interactions are limited. Help Desk interactions typically consist of equipment checkout and directional questions. However, the Research Commons is very busy, particularly now, as winter quarter draws to a close. The traffic doesn’t slow down on weekends and evenings, when most of the librarians go home. It is therefore essential that our student staff be prepared to exercise sound judgement in a variety of situations.

As their supervisor, I find that modeling, encouraging, and rewarding the behavior that is expected of our students is a big job. For example, a student that I supervise was recently called upon to assist emergency personnel in a crisis situation that occurred in our facility during our evening hours. It was a tremendous relief to realize that the student was prepared to act appropriately in that situation. Coping with the trauma of that event and supporting that student and the rest of the team thought the uncertainty that it caused has been difficult, but it has also provided an opportunity for our staff to come together as a group.

Ultimately, I am very grateful for the contributions of our student staff. Incredibly, a couple of them have even expressed an interest in librarianship as a profession. Does that make me a role-model?! It’s an identity that feels weird to me, but I’m starting to get used to it.

The Trouble With Books

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a conversation with faculty in the library and in other academic departments about undergraduate research assignments. We discussed some of the stumbling blocks that our students seem to face, especially as they search for sources for their papers. It’s hard for us to put ourselves back into the novice mindset that our students have, particularly in their first and second year at college, in which they’re not (yet) familiar with the disciplines. We don’t want them to use Wikipedia or other encyclopedias (which may become increasingly scarce?) as research sources, though for background information they’re great. But many students are just not ready to tackle the scholarly research articles that they’ll find when they search JSTOR or even Academic Search Complete.

More and more often I’m convinced that our beginning undergraduates need to use books for their research assignments. Books can bridge that gap between very general and very scholarly that is difficult to find in a journal article. They often cover a broad subject in smaller chunks (i.e., chapters), and can provide a good model for narrowing a topic into one that’s manageable for a short research assignments. Books can also help students exercise the muscles that they need for better internet and database searching as they mine chapter titles and the index for keywords. I’ve begun to push books much more vocally in my instruction sessions for these very reasons.

However, books come with stumbling blocks, too. Ideally students could search our library catalog and find the books they need for their assignments right on our shelves. We have a collection that serves our students’ needs well, I think, especially in the degree programs. But we are a physically small library, and it’s difficult for us to build a book collection to serve the general needs students have in English Composition I courses, for example. While some of those sections focus on New York City or Brooklyn in their reading and research, in other sections students can choose their own topic, or the faculty member picks a topic of interest which may change from semester to semester. It’s difficult to keep up with these changing topics and, though all of those classes come to the library for an instruction session, we often don’t know which topics students select unless they stop by the Reference Desk to ask for help with their research.

My college is part of a university in which all of the libraries circulate books in common, as do many academic and public library systems. Students (and faculty/staff) can have books delivered between the colleges in just a few days, and we encourage students to take advantage of this service when they’re hunting for sources on their research topics. But sometimes students aren’t doing their research far enough in advance to accommodate the time required to have a book delivered, and, while they can also visit the other colleges’ libraries in libraries in person, they may not have the time for that, either.

What about ebooks? Ebooks can help bridge the just-in-time gap, though they are not without their own issues: subscriptions to ebook packages that may shift the titles available over time, confusing requirements for reading or downloading on mobile devices, variable rules about what can or cannot be printed, etc. And while all of the ebooks we offer in our library can be read on a desktop computer, of course we can’t always accommodate all students who want to use a computer in the library.

So I’m left wondering: how can we get more (and more relevant) books into the hands of our beginning students? And, barring that, are there other resources that cover that middle ground between the general knowledge of encyclopedic sources and the specific, often too advanced, scholarly research of journal articles?

Clickers, or Does Technology Really Cure What Ails You?

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Cori Strickler, Information Literacy Librarian at Bridgewater College.

During idle times at the reference desk, or when the students are gone for a break, I find myself creating instruction “wish lists” of tools or gadgets that I’d love to have for my sessions. One item that has been on my list for a few years now is clickers, or student response systems as they are officially called. In academic classrooms they are used for attendance, quiz taking, or other more informal assessments. For me, I saw clickers as a way to solve one of my basic and most frustrating problems: getting students to be engaged during the sessions. Students have little desire to participate in library sessions and trying to get them to comment on their library experience is like pulling teeth, except that the process is a lot more painful for me than it is for the students.

For those of you who haven’t heard of clickers before, they are little remote control like devices that allow the students to answer multiple choice questions by sending their responses to the computer for real time analysis. They are sort of like the devices they use on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to poll the audience.

My library doesn’t have the budget for clickers, but this semester through a chance discussion with the director of the health services department, I learned that the college received a grant for 100 TurningPoint clickers and the necessary software. The director rarely needed all of the clickers at the same time, so she offered about fifty for me to use during my instruction sessions.

So, I now have access to a tool that I had coveted for many years, but that was only the easy part. I still have to figure out how to meaningfully integrate this technology into my sessions.

My overall goals are relatively simple. I want to encourage student involvement in any way possible so I would not have to lecture for fifty minutes straight. My voice just can’t handle the pressure. To be successful, though, I need to be purposeful with my inclusion. I can’t just stick a clicker quiz at the beginning of a session and assume that the students will suddenly be overwhelmed with a desire to learn everything there is about the library. Most faculty who schedule a library instruction session have a particular purpose in mind, so I also need to be sure that I fulfill their expectations as well.

After much consideration, I decided not to add the clickers to all my sessions. Instead, I decided to focus on first year students, who hopefully aren’t quite as jaded as the upper classmen, and haven’t already decided that they know everything about research.

For my first clicker experiment, I used them with a quiz to help me gauge the classes’ knowledge of the library. I also decided to use them as an alternative way to administer our session evaluation survey. Ultimately, I had mixed results with the clickers. The students did respond better than before, but I did not get full participation. While this isn’t a big issue with the quiz, this lack of participation was an issue when they were asked to complete the evaluation survey. For most survey questions I lacked responses from five or six students, which was a larger number than when I used the paper surveys and could potentially affect my survey results.

Their lack of participation could be due to a number of reasons. The students claimed they were familiar with the clickers, but they did not seem to be as adept as they claimed. Also, due to my inexperience with the clickers there might have been a malfunction with the devices themselves. Or, maybe the students just didn’t want to engage, especially since there was still no incentive to participate. When I looked back through the survey results, they did not seem to indicate any greater amount of satisfaction regarding the sessions.

This first experience with the clickers left me a bit skeptical, but I decided to try them again. This time, I created brief quizzes related to brainstorming keywords and types of plagiarism. My second class was smaller than the first, and I seemed to receive better engagement. The clickers also seemed to allow them to be more honest with the surveys and they seem more comfortable indicating their disinterest in the information presented, though the results also indicated that they saw the overall value in the information.

I have used the clickers in about twelve sessions this semester, and overall they were well received by the students. However, I am not completely sure that it adds significantly to the engagement. I also have not seen any indication in the surveys that my sessions are better or worse with their inclusion. I have discovered though that there may be some sessions, and topics, that are better suited for clickers than others. Upper level classes where I am trying to show specific resources do not lend themselves initially to clickers, and the time may be better spent with other activities or instruction.

I am still in the process of learning how clickers will fit into my classes, but I would generally call them a success, if only for the fact that is makes the survey process easier. Though, they aren’t the panacea for student engagement for which I had hoped. Activity type and student familiarity are essential variables that appear to affect clicker success.

Unfortunately, the overall nature of one shot instruction seems to be the greatest contributor to student disengagement. Student and faculty buy-in is the necessary component for library instruction success, whether it includes clickers or not.

Publishing Fat Cats, Collection Curation, and Serving Today’s Patron

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Heidi Steiner, Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University.

The greatest reflection I find myself having following this year’s LJ/SLJ Ebook Summit is only vaguely about ebooks. Instead my mind is circling around balance. I tuned in to the “Marketing Ebooks to Students” panel ready for ideas about how I can get the online students I work with even more sold on ebooks to fill their immediate needs. I greatly enjoy Library Babel Fish and was excited to hear Barbara Fister’s perspective, which turned out to be: “I’m not quite ready to market ebooks to my students yet.” Barbara raised many questions we should all be thinking about. Her probing questions touched on patron privacy, censorship, preservation, sharing, putting money into yet more temporary licensed bundles, the long-term ramifications of providing patron driven acquisitions for last-minute needs, curating collections for the future, and talking to our patrons, both students and faculty, about what they really want. As a result, my brain is now in a seemingly inescapable conundrum.

While Barbara was speaking, I found myself focusing on her mentions of patron driven acquisitions (PDA) and trying to rectify her well-argued thoughts with my personal mental framework around PDA. Most people probably think of patron driven acquisitions in the most traditional sense: patrons initiating purchases of books for the physical collection. This may be in place via request buttons in the library catalog or some other mechanism. With ebooks in the fold, there are also plenty of libraries experimenting with patron driven ebook acquisitions. In my mind, I go directly to the model of PDA we use at my library, which is built around on-demand ebook rentals. Herein lies where my internal struggle begins. How do we balance standing up to the man, curating collections for the future, and serving the patrons we have now?

At Norwich University we serve an array of unique populations, including corps of cadets and civilian on-campus undergraduates and entirely online students in the School of Graduate and Continuing Studies. Our online students are on a tight course schedule with most in 6-credit hour, 11-week graduate courses, many with steady research requirements. At the library, we are constantly looking for ways to make necessary resources available quickly and seamlessly for all our patrons, but the online students pose the greatest challenge. This is notably important considering the impossibilities of physical interlibrary loan for books when students are around the globe. Collection and content curation can only take a small library so far, especially in serving such a diverse group of patrons. For us, patron driven acquisitions, specifically ebook rentals facilitated with Ebook Library (EBL), are a stop gap in the hole of needs and expectations. We choose what of the EBL catalog to make visible in our collection, patrons can see five minute previews of any given ebook and then request a loan. Ebook rentals default to a week and we pay a percentage of the ebook’s retail price with each rental instance. A purchase trigger goes off after the third rental to stay cost-effective. In my mind, our model of PDA at Norwich is more easily equated with interlibrary loan than collection development.

I often cannot help but ask myself why we are throwing money at publishers to buy books with roughly a 30-40% chance of circulating, when we can provide students with on-demand rentals thus guaranteeing use. What are we giving up by feeding the fat cat publishers and using collection development policies to make a best guess at what might get used one day? It’s a double-edged sword. We are feeding an industry that restricts knowledge to only those with access, while still curating a collection for the future, but may not be providing the resources our patrons need now; it is impossible to predict each possible need. On the flipside, what are we giving up with PDA in any of its possible incarnations? Depending on the scenario, it could be a lot or a little. PDA could mean sacrificing the integrity of our future collection, but it can also mean a satisfy patron today and knowing money spent was actually used for something. Fister’s short yet very powerful talk definitely provides some further clues to both answers, but it seems to me that nothing is that cut and dry.

We are maintaining balance through a combination of traditional, liaison program based collection development and patron driven ebook rentals at Norwich, but I cannot honestly say we are doing much to fight the fat cats…yet. In her talk, Fister argued we should be reinventing the academic monograph, as we are already spending money on books and just might posses the expertise to make it happen. This is an awesome thought and worthy quest, but where do small libraries fall in scholarly content creation? Certainly we can load open access ebook records into our catalogs, as Fister suggests. We can also work towards open access awareness, encourage and push publication in open access journals with our faculty and practice it ourselves, but what role can small college and university and libraries legitimately play in production?

I want to cultivate services that are right for our patrons now, but also desire building a library that is sustainable into the future. How are your libraries reacting as publishers keep an iron fist and ebooks proliferate, all while patron driven acquisitions meet immediate needs? Where do you find balance?

If You Give a Student an iPad…

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Veronica A. Wells, Access Services/Music Librarian at University of the Pacific. You can find her online at Euterpean Librarian.

If you give a student an iPad…she will ask for Angry Birds. This is one of the many lessons I learned when I handed four students each an iPad at a recent library workshop.

Thanks to a grant awarded to two of my colleagues, my library has had the opportunity to purchase and experiment with iPads for reference and instruction. It was quite entertaining to see the students’ reactions when I told them they would be using the iPads. It was even more entertaining to watch as they effortlessly used the requisite apps and navigated the device.

I attended ACRL’s Immersion Teacher Track Program last summer and I saw several librarians with iPads. I asked them if they were using them for reference and instruction. Most said they weren’t quite sure yet, but that they had been encouraged to experiment. To me, this is a very exciting time. There is no Best Practices with iPads…yet. Right now we are free to make up the rules, fail, and hopefully learn about ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this new technology. And that’s exactly what we’re doing at my library.

Earlier this month the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article discussing several iPad project presentations held at the annual Educause conference in Philadelphia, entitled Colleges Take Varied Approaches to iPad Experiments, With Mixed Results. None of these projects come from academic libraries, but I am really interested in the ways in which higher education institutions are experimenting with tablets and to see if they might have some advice for academic librarians. For example, Pepperdine University is comparing a group of students using iPads for their coursework to a group using printed books or laptops. According to the researchers, preliminary data shows that the iPad-using students appear to be more engaged with the course material. Perhaps this means that students might be “more engaged” in a library instruction session or a reference interaction when given the opportunity to use a tablet. For more details, check out the Pepperdine iPad Project website.

In my library workshop, we used the iPads with the help of QR Codes (or Quick Response Codes) to get students moving around the library in order to find books, sound recordings, musical scores, Billboard magazine, and the Multimedia Studio. In general, the class was relatively successful and I can’t wait to try it again with a larger group. While students were able to seamlessly and effectively use the iPads and apps, a couple of them struggled when it came to looking up something by call number and finding the music reference area. This fascinated me. Why is it that students can figure out an iPad without much effort, but not the physical library? Are they or is the library to blame? But I wonder if there might be a way for us to rethink our physical space of the library so that it “makes sense” to our digital natives like a tablet or cell phone does. It’s at least making think that I need to relocate the music reference section.

Have you experimented with tablets at your library? How have students reacted?