@wood

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“Where” Do Your Sources Come From?

I just read an amazing interview with the two leaders of the Citation Project, where they discussed some of their findings. One of the things that really caught my eye was the location - in terms of the page in the article - where many students are pulling their citations from.

Based on their analysis of 1,911 citations (from 174 student papers), 46% are from the first page of the source being cited. 70% come from the first two pages. The researchers argue that this is important because it suggests that students are not engaged with the full text. Instead, they may be pulling a fact from an abstract or the introduction, which is located on these first two pages, but not understanding the context associated with that fact.

I can’t say that I find any of this surprising, but it’s certainly interesting to see it backed up by a study of actual student papers. It also shows that we need to go beyond making sure that students know how to cite something properly to making sure that they really analyze the source that they are using. So much information literacy instruction to do … so little time.

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“An Information Literacy Trojan Horse”

Yesterday, I had the honor and pleasure of presenting at ACRL New England’s Annual Conference. The theme for this year’s conference was “Leading the Charge” and the goal was to highlight the different projects out there that highlight how libraries are trying to adjust to the changing educational landscape. It goes without saying that we in the field of education are starting to see the disruption of our “industry” just as so many others have. Will libraries be able to ride the wave of change or will we get swamped and wash out? I don’t know the answer to that question, but based on some of the presentations there, I’d say that we at least have a fighting chance. My talk, “Teaching Faculty to Embed Library Resources & Services into Online Classrooms,” (man, I need to work on my titles!) focused on the role that the Reference Librarians at Springfield College played in teaching our faculty how to use Moodle.

I felt good going into the talk and I think that it went over well. What I basically explained was that we saw the Moodle training as a vehicle for us to highlight various library resources and services that they could add to their online classes. Now, most of these people had heard of these things before, but we have the impression that they slip through the cracks and don’t get used. Since Moodle was going to be new for most people, that meant that they would have to reconsider their classes and how they might adapt them to the online environment. We wanted to reach out them while they were thinking about this and remind them that the library has a wealth of things that can enhance their classes. As I said, I felt that it went well, but I was surprised at the number of people who wanted hard data that would quantify our success. I couldn’t give it. We only have anecdotal evidence. I don’t blame them for asking, because I know that there are some libraries where you have to be able to measure everything in order to justify the costs involved. I’m grateful that I work for a Director who is willing to let us do stuff “just because it feels right”. I’m sure that we should be more deliberate about getting data, but right now we’re happy to just keep chipping away at faculty one at a time.

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A Quick Primer on Flipped Classrooms

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

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What Students Think About Your LibGuides

Just read a great study (Subject Guides in Academic Libraries: A User-Centred Study of Uses and Perceptions), that explored how students view and use research guides. Although the population size was a little small, the news isn’t good generally speaking. Most students don’t use guides unless faculty encourage them to do so. They would rather use the open web instead. I suspect that this isn’t a shock to most of us, but I did find the objections that they listed interesting.

Clutter
A lot of students commented that the guides are too cluttered. Clutter, to them, was a turn off and it discouraged them from exploring the guide more.

Confusing Language
Students pointed out that many of the guides use language that is unclear, confusing, and/or inconsistent. This was especially a problem when it comes to the label used in tabs.

Navigation
Many of the students claimed that the tab-navigation scheme in LibGuides is a problem because they are “programmed” to look at the left hand side for navigation clues. A few even claimed that the tab scheme looked out of date and it made them question the currency of the information in the guide.

Although the verdict on research guides in this study was a little harsh, all is not lost and the recommendations to improve our guides are actually ones that we should be following anyway: Apply good user-centered design and create guides that focus on more specific topics instead of relying on the one-guide-fits-all mentality.