A Virtual Reference Shelf for Nursing Students and Faculty

SUMMARY

A virtual shelf for nursing that closely mirrors what previously was found on a physical reference shelf is now a reasonable goal. Advantages of doing this for nursing students and faculty in an academic setting are enumerated. Overviews of relevant vendor and publisher interfaces and models are included. The authors present a selected list of appropriate electronic reference sources that demonstrate how e-books and Internet sites can be combined to build a virtual reference shelf in this subject area.     

Academic Library Service to Physically Disabled Students and Faculty

No abstract available for this article.     

Emotional Labor in the Academic Library: When Being Friendly Feels Like Work

Although the Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Services Providers recommend that librarians “welcome the patrons and place them at ease … [and] make the patrons feel comfortable in a situation which may be perceived as intimidating, risky, confusing or overwhelming” (Reference and User Services Association, 2004 Reference and User Services Association.2004Guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information services providers. http://http://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/guidelinesbehavioral (http://http://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/guidelinesbehavioral)  [Google Scholar]), our literature provides little exploration of welcoming behavior. To fill this gap, we introduce the concept of emotional labor to the library context, presenting a qualitative analysis of librarians' experiences. In addition, we offer recommendations to help librarians manage the emotional aspects of work and discuss implications of librarianship's changing emotional demands.     

How Students Research: Implications for the Library and Faculty

This paper presents qualitative findings about the search behaviors and research habits of students interviewed at six college and university campuses in the US. Our findings suggest that students’ strategies are influenced by both their non-academic search experiences as well as the broader academic context of their research tasks. Their behaviors suggest an on-going negotiation of these influences, evidenced by the ways they incorporate Google into their research strategy while still closely adhering to faculty instruction for using library resources. Students bring a strong sense of self-reliance to the research process, yet they still experience many barriers and pain points accessing library resources. We have included recommendations for librarians and faculty who, by better understanding the journey of an academic researcher, can work in concert to reduce the barriers and increase the success of students’ research efforts.     

Collaborating With Faculty to Assess Research Consultations for Graduate Students

Due to the time commitment on the part of the librarian to schedule, prepare, and execute effective research consultations, it is important to continue to evaluate how these consultations impact student learning. The purpose of this investigation was to assess graduate students' perceptions of their learning as a result of working individually with a librarian in a research consultation. A librarian and a member of the teaching faculty collaborated to embed required research consultations with the librarian in two graduate classes. Research journals and a focus group were used to assess the impact the consultations had on student learning.     

A New Learning Commons Connection with Art Students and Their Faculty

Many learning commons environments espouse goals of being student centered and facilitating academic achievement, often by way of partnerships with others. We have been fortunate in the learning commons of Syracuse University to have had a successful and satisfying collaboration with art faculty that has benefitted all players and allowed us to operationalize our own stated goals of being student driven. Our unique art program provided meaningful and real-life experiences for students, expanded the teaching moments for their faculty, and generated a host of interesting learning experiences for library staff and managers. It also added beauty and intrigue to an environment traveled and used by many.     

Globetrotting Students and Faculty: Adapting Library Instruction to Global Sites

ABSTRACT

As e-resources become more ubiquitous, and the technologies available to access them more sophisticated, libraries have greater opportunities to reach out to global users. However, this same distance means that some users never even set foot in a physical library. This case study will describe how one large academic library started a business, economics, and marketing library online instruction pilot for global users in an effort to replicate library instruction offered at the home institution. Librarians assessed global library use and research needs; prepared unique lesson plans for each global site; and created digital learning objects using synchronous and asynchronous methods to establish an instruction strategy for Business and Economics courses. The goal was to test instruction practices and develop an online instruction template that would be replicable and sustainable for library instruction in other subject areas in New York University Libraries and other institutions.     

How Law Schools Benefit When Librarians Publish,Teach, and Hold Faculty Status

Many nondirector academic law librarians publish and teach legal research classes. Some hold faculty status as well. Law librarians have expertise in the development and delivery of legal research instruction methodologies and are developing a body of literature documenting their efforts to create and share a pedagogy of legal research instruction. Principles of shared faculty governance entitle library faculty to contribute to the development and delivery of a curriculum of legal research instruction. Encouraging law librarian participation in the shared governance of law schools should lead to increasing opportunities for the successful reform of legal education curricula with respect to legal research instruction.     

Perceptions of Faculty about Information Literacy Skills of Postgraduate Engineering Students

Purpose: This study identifies perceptions of faculty about the current level of information literacy (IL) skills of engineering students in higher education in Pakistan. It may help to design better IL programs for the tertiary level students. Methodology: The study used ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Science and Engineering/Technology as the basis to assess these perceptions. Teachers of the National University of Science & Technology (NUST), who were teaching engineering students of postgraduate level, were selected as population. A structured questionnaire was sent to 113 faculty members and the response remained 80 percent. Paired samples t-test was used for data analysis through Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Findings: Research indicates that faculty perceived IL skills of their PhD level students higher than those of MS level students. Originality: The term “Information literacy” is yet new on the Pakistani library scene. Regarding perceptions of faculty about information literacy skills of their students so far no study has been carried out in Pakistan. This study will help to identify existing IL skills of Pakistani students of university level, their requirements and how these requirements can be best fulfilled.     

Teaching International Students How to Avoid Plagiarism: Librarians and Faculty in Collaboration

This paper presents how a plagiarism component has been integrated in a Research Methodology course for Engineering Master students at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. The plagiarism issue was approached from an educational perspective, rather than a punitive. The course director and librarians developed this part of the course in close collaboration. One part of the course is dedicated to how to cite, paraphrase and reference, while another part stresses the legal and ethical aspects of research. Currently, the majority of the students are international, which means there are intercultural and language aspects to consider. In order to evaluate our approach to teaching about plagiarism, we conducted a survey. The results of the survey indicate a need for education on how to cite and reference properly in order to avoid plagiarism, a result which is also supported by students' assignment results. Some suggestions are given for future development of the course.     

Learning for All: Teaching Students,Faculty, and Staff with Screencasting

Three academic librarians from different departments at the Auraria Library—instruction, systems, and technical services—share a common methodology to teach students, academic faculty, and colleagues. These librarians use screencasting as an essential and creative technique to instruct all users. Patrons receive greater value when the authors sacrifice perfection and respond immediately to on-campus and distance learners' needs with short and rapidly-produced online tutorials. This article presents guidance and rationale for creating, evaluating, and publicizing similar tutorials.     

Faculty

Abstract

Teaching faculty are a key resource for reference librarians. This paper includes a discussion of major forces affecting reference service as well as suggestions on ways for librarians to become better acquainted with teaching faculty. One benefit of making these connections is that when faculty know and have confidence in librarians, they are more likely to urge their students to get help at the desk, to schedule course-related instruction sessions, and to let librarians know if they have a particularly difficult or complex assignment. Another benefit is that such connections often lead to increased opportunities, from participation in campus-wide initiatives to the development of collaborative projects and other scholarly work. As a librarian relatively new to the profession, I know that such connections with teaching faculty have enriched my own career.     

Building Community: Partnering with Students and Faculty to Design a Library Exhibition Space

ABSTRACT

An academic library's space has traditionally operated as a repository, but with the proliferation of new media and interactive technologies, libraries now also serve as incubators of ideas. Architecture students at Auburn University recently took part in renovating the design library. With the librarian acting as client, they were asked to investigate diverse materials and design methods to create a dynamic and interactive exhibition wall which would showcase the creation of new knowledge and facilitate the dissemination of new information. This article discusses how the plug-in wall acted as a catalyst for the school's renewed communal investment in the library.     

Just the Facts: An Examination of E-Book Usage by Business Students and Faculty

Business students and faculty expect the electronic delivery of content within their multiple disciplinary subject areas. The speed of acceptance and the rate of migration from print to electronic sources within the various business disciplines outpaces the acceptance rates in the humanities and other social sciences. Business students and faculty exhibit information-seeking behaviors that are unique to the practice-oriented nature of a business education. Electronic resources re-enforce this information-seeking behavior. The technology utilized in the creation of e-books enables business students and faculty to successfully locate specific data, both textual and numeric within the resource, further reinforcing their behaviors and accelerating the demand for additional e-books. Business students and faculty use e-books as reference books.     

“When I Grow Up I'd Like to Work in a Place Like This”: Museum Professionals' Narratives of Early Interest in Museums

As part of an exploratory research study, museum professionals were asked to share their stories about pivotal learning experiences in museums. Several offered personal narratives of how they first became interested in museums and started down the path toward careers in museum work, or had their imaginations opened to the possibility of broader life horizons. This group of stories seemed to be grounded in particularly vivid memories and frequently elicited strong emotions in the telling. The narratives are evidence of the impact of early museum experiences on people who later found their way into museum careers, and suggest avenues for further study of the roots of museum careers as well as other ways museums profoundly affect people's lives. The stories can also reveal to the teller, as well as to researchers and others, what stands out in their memories and the importance they assign to those memories. By attending to the thematic and emotional content of these narratives, both narrator and colleagues can find clues about where their beliefs and values really lie and, therefore, where their and the profession's time and resources might be most productively invested.     

Faculty Status

No abstract available for this article.     

Faculty Outreach

Abstract

Librarians at Northwest Vista College, a new community college, speculated that keeping faculty members informed about the library and its various resources would result in more instructors sending students to the library for library instruction and, ultimately, it would result in more students who were familiar with and comfortable using the library. This paper describes the librarians' comprehensive faculty outreach effort, which involved putting on special workshops for faculty, creating online forms, and Web links on the library Web page, and taking every opportunity to increase contact and collaboration between librarians and Other faculty and Staff.