I have had a few opportunities to teach library skills to both patrons and co-workers and I have used a lot of the resources in this class to help with our reference work at the library. The most useful thing that we have implemented is the chapter on Reader's Advisory.We now have a icon on our desktop and we use the Iowa Reader's Advisory site. It is very useful because we don't have the time to review a lot of fiction and survey different genres. With this site we can look at romance, mysteries westerns, graphic novels and other different genres all in one place. We have used it from the very first day and we use it almost every day. I have also done webinars from Booklist and ALA and CLA. Booklists are usually sponsored by publishers but the information is usually pretty good.
For this blog exercise I think I will use a real life example. We have a lot of patrons who are doing job searches at our library. We have use various tools and teaching methods to help them with their searches. I think we take this very seriously and the most satisfaction that I have felt recently is when we have a person who used to come in the library on a daily basis finally stops coming in because they have found a job. We have Career Transition on our website and we recommend that site to patrons. We advertise the site throughout the library and once in a while someone will ask us about it. We have had a workshop on how to use the site. During the two one hour sessions we use Power Point to show the patron how to create a resume and save it onto the Career Transition website. Then in the second session we teach them how to write cover letters and how to use the site to actually search and apply for jobs.
I think that if a library worker just follows the reference interview there are going to be plenty of opportunities to teach patrons how to use the library as a reference resource. As they used to say in the X- Files the answers are out there. Finally I think that it may have been a good idea for us to have more practical exercises and have a chance to work with a classmate as a real patron who could give more immediate feedback in practicing finding information. Just a thought
Monday, April 23, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
blog #7
The first thing I would consider is doing this search for a patron is to find out that kind of information that the patron wanted and what they needed the information for. I would use the reference interview to get as much background as I could before making any suggestion or even starting a search on the internet. Another important factor would be the age of the patron and whether they have already done any searching on their own.
For this hypothetical situation, let's assume a high school student looking for sources for a debate on whether texting while driving should be banned. Let's assume that we are not busy with other patrons and that we have the time to devote to a full search to help our student. He must have at least three sources to use for his position that texting while driving is no more distracting than other other activities.
I would start by explaining that we using his favorite search engine to find some studies . We could use the suggestion in the assignment, "crashes caused by texting." I would remind him that this is just a starting point and that we are not going to find everything we need just by google. I did this and it produced a study by the National Safety Commission. The material looked very promising and is certainly reliable. I then did a search using infotrac ( we don't have EBSCO or PROQuest but we would have used them if we did.This search yielded some good articles using the terms texting and driving. Finally, I used Google Scholar to see if there were any good academic studies on the subject. I found some very convincing studies from universities that showed that there is a high correlation between driving and texting. I think that this produced some good results and we made the evaluation that he had enough to look at to start his research.
I think that multiple source are a good approach if you have the time and yields the best results unless the search is relatively simple and just requires a little factual information. A good piece of advise someone gave me was if there are two sides of an issue, try to find them both. I do think that every search is unique I don't have any hard and fast rules about which sources are better that others. I wouldn't rank them because sometimes all you need is a quick google or wiki search. You can even be confident in most cases that the information is reliable if you can find a list of references. Other times the quality of the site is just as important and the content of the information
For this hypothetical situation, let's assume a high school student looking for sources for a debate on whether texting while driving should be banned. Let's assume that we are not busy with other patrons and that we have the time to devote to a full search to help our student. He must have at least three sources to use for his position that texting while driving is no more distracting than other other activities.
I would start by explaining that we using his favorite search engine to find some studies . We could use the suggestion in the assignment, "crashes caused by texting." I would remind him that this is just a starting point and that we are not going to find everything we need just by google. I did this and it produced a study by the National Safety Commission. The material looked very promising and is certainly reliable. I then did a search using infotrac ( we don't have EBSCO or PROQuest but we would have used them if we did.This search yielded some good articles using the terms texting and driving. Finally, I used Google Scholar to see if there were any good academic studies on the subject. I found some very convincing studies from universities that showed that there is a high correlation between driving and texting. I think that this produced some good results and we made the evaluation that he had enough to look at to start his research.
I think that multiple source are a good approach if you have the time and yields the best results unless the search is relatively simple and just requires a little factual information. A good piece of advise someone gave me was if there are two sides of an issue, try to find them both. I do think that every search is unique I don't have any hard and fast rules about which sources are better that others. I wouldn't rank them because sometimes all you need is a quick google or wiki search. You can even be confident in most cases that the information is reliable if you can find a list of references. Other times the quality of the site is just as important and the content of the information
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