High-touch,low-tech: Investigating the value of an in-person library orientation game

Since 2011, the Kraemer Family Library at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) has offered Scrabble Scramble, an in-person, student-centered library orientation game, to incoming first-year students. This article describes our journey of developing, assessing, and refining Scrabble Scramble, which focuses on introducing first-year students to the basic services and resources of an academic library. Through analysis of student and library staff feedback survey results, this article reflects on the value of offering a student-centered, impactful, and personal orientation in an environment of rising student enrollment, steady staff numbers, and a trend to move orientation activities online.     

Play It,Learn It,Make It Last: Developing an Online Game to Create Self-Sufficient Library Information Users

ABSTRACT

Library orientation at an academic health sciences library consisted of a five-minute overview within new student orientation. Past experience indicated this brief presentation was insufficient for students to learn about library resources. In 2014, an effort was made to supplement orientation by developing an online game aimed at enabling students to become self-sufficient through hands-on learning. A gaming model was chosen with expectations that competition and rewards would motivate students. Although the pilots suffered from low participation rates, the experience merits further research into the potential of a broader model of online library instruction in the health sciences environment.     

Creating a HIP in the library: A high-impact practice case study

Abstract

High-impact practices (HIPs) have been adopted on college campuses to enhance student learning. The academic library provides services and space contributing to learning at its institution. Librarians conduct space research to learn how the library building can better serve its users. Library space assessment is one way for librarians to engage with faculty and students to create an HIP in the library. This article is a case study of a collaboration between a librarian and a sociology professor to design an observational study. It demonstrates how librarians can contribute to HIPs at their institution by involving students in meaningful research.     

Beyond the Library's Walls: Using Library 2.0 Tools to Reach Out to All Users

ABSTRACT

The Library 2.0 movement emerged as a response to the technologies and concepts in the Web 2.0 movement and has been taking the library world by storm. Web 2.0 takes the stagnant Web 1.0 and makes it more user-driven, collaborative, participatory, and personalized. Library 2.0 takes the tools of Web 2.0 and moves them into a library setting with libraries that are user-centered, networking faculty, students, and librarians to create a vital and evolving organization designed to meet the needs of the current information culture. Library 2.0 is especially relevant to institutions providing services to off-campus students. Many students taking courses remotely have full-time jobs and busy lives beyond their coursework. Providing those students with a customizable, personalized, and collaborative library assists in their success as a student. Using Web 2.0 technologies and other social networking tools in the library setting brings the library to our users, making them more relevant in today's information society.     

A qualitative study of the academic,social, and cultural factors that influence students’ library use in a rural Ugandan village

The Kitengesa Community Library in rural Uganda is unique in that provides tailored collections and services for the community. This library, which was built in 2002, serves a small but diverse population including a large number of secondary school students who live in the area. Previous research on the impact of this library on the surrounding community revealed that the library influences reading habits, reading culture development, and the availability of locally relevant information. This is especially true for young adults, who represent Uganda's fastest growing population. Only 18 percent of girls and 20 percent of boys are enrolled in secondary school, rendering this group of students (ages 13–17) particularly vulnerable to a wide range of social and economic challenges. School libraries in Uganda are rare, and in this case, the Kitengesa Community Library serves as a de facto school library. Previous research by Dent and Yannotta (2005) revealed that secondary school students are among the heaviest users of the Kitengesa Community Library, and this qualitative study represents an attempt to characterize students' library use experiences across academic, social, and cultural domains. Findings suggest that the student experience consists of five factors – personal improvement, reading culture development, academic support, learning independence, and reducing isolation. There is a growing network of rural village libraries in Africa and the findings from this study will be used to inform development of additional library services and resources to better support student learning and interpersonal growth.     

Crowdsourcing as an Approach to Customer Relationship Building in Academic Libraries

Library initiatives to first-year students not only present an opportunity to offer information literacy instruction for student advancement, but they also serve a key marketing function by communicating the library's ongoing value and building customer relationships. Library orientation tours are an example of how to effectively market to first-year students. Combining peer-to-peer learning and user-generated content via social media known as crowdsourcing, Newman Library sponsored a contest challenging first-year students to create a video sharing a useful library tip. The contributions and benefits of this cocreation approach to fostering relationships are examined, and the implications to strengthening other library-user bonds are explored.     

No more tours: how library tours of the past become today's celebrations

In 1999, Northwestern University's Galter Health Sciences Library redesigned the library orientation program for first-year medical students. Surveys indicated tours were ineffective and students retained little of the information presented. Furthermore, the tour was not related to the student's curriculum and did not reinforce their learning objectives. As a replacement, the library staff developed a self-directed two-hour library open house. Stations throughout the library showcased the library staff, services, and resources, focusing on the first-year student curriculum. A follow-up survey found this redesign more useful and relevant to the students' course work, indicating libraries should be creating more interactive tours for students allowing them to learn actively.     

Locating Learning Development in a University Library: Promoting Effective Academic Help Seeking

The Centre for Learning and Study Support at De Montfort University relocated to the Department of Library Services in September 2006. During that academic year student use of study support tutorials increased by over 100%. This article considers the factors that led to this increase, using as a starting point, the experiences and opinions of students who have needed help for academic study. It analyzes student responses to a short survey. Many students do not ask for help and the survey findings suggest that this is more a response to ambivalence about the acceptability of needing help in higher education (HE) and less a positive decision about an individual's learning. The article goes on to identify the conditions that encourage appropriate help-seeking behavior and to suggest that these can be successfully created in the academic environment of a library. The article acknowledges the potential impact of social learning spaces on students’ approaches to learning and suggests that the integration of learning development activities facilitates an overtly positive learning environment.     

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.     

Use of a pre-assessment tool to start a meaningful dialogue: new paradigms in library instruction

In 2009, the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library started a library instruction dialogue with the medical students and faculty from the Emory School of Medicine. These discussions exposed a gap among faculty, students, and librarians in their perceptions of information processing. Follow-ups with the Associate Deans for Student Affairs and Medical Education led to the decision to administer an online assessment of the incoming student body and a complete redesign of the library orientation program. The aim of using self-assessment methodology in the framework of an orientation program was to set the students' foundation for self-discovery and introduce them to self-learning.     

高校图书馆利用与学生学习结果关系的实证研究——基于“2017年首都大学生就读经验调查”

[目的/意义]高校图书馆利用状况及其对学生学习结果的影响是图书馆成效评估的重要方面之一，高校如何提升图书馆对学生学习活动的支持水平，学生自身又怎样提高利用图书馆的能力是本研究之价值意义所在。[方法/过程]基于"2017年首都大学生就读经验调查"，研究采用t检验、单因素方差分析、相关分析以及回归分析等方法分析高校图书馆利用现状及其对学生学习结果的影响。[结果/结论]结果显示，不同学生群体对图书馆利用程度存在差异，图书馆利用与学生学业成绩、在校满意度、学习收获呈显著正相关关系，且图书馆利用影响学生学习结果。基于此，建议高校加强对低年级、农村学生等图书馆利用情况较差学生群体的引导；图书馆自身提升综合实力，提升信息化服务质量，加强图书馆学习空间、专业馆员队伍、学生信息素养教育等资源建设；大学生自身要提升利用图书馆资源的意识与能力。     

分报告三：耶鲁大学图书馆考察报告

文章从战略规划、信息服务和员工发展三个角度剖析耶鲁大学图书馆在运行管理方面的实践经验。在战略规划方面,指出耶鲁大学图书馆强调参与教学和学习、注意加强对特殊材料和特殊藏品的收藏、激发研究和学习的环境;在信息服务方面,阐述耶鲁大学图书馆重视学科化服务、开展个性化服务、注重将新技术嵌入到图书馆的信息服务、注意挖掘基于特色资源的服务;在员工发展方面,概括出耶鲁大学图书馆具有明确的在岗人员基本素质要求、合理的等级岗位聘任制度、清晰的图书馆岗位绩效考核制度以及多方位的人才引进策略。在此基础上,指出耶鲁大学图书馆的运行管理可为我国图书馆的发展带来三方面的启示：合理可行的战略规划是图书馆可持续发展的行动指南;服务至上的理念是图书馆体现自身核心价值的亮点;馆员及馆内相关工作人员的科学管理和职业发展空间的可预期是图书馆发展的重要保障。     

Use of a Pre-Assessment Tool to Start a Meaningful Dialogue: New Paradigms in Library Instruction

In 2009, the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library started a library instruction dialogue with the medical students and faculty from the Emory School of Medicine. These discussions exposed a gap among faculty, students, and librarians in their perceptions of information processing. Follow-ups with the Associate Deans for Student Affairs and Medical Education led to the decision to administer an online assessment of the incoming student body and a complete redesign of the library orientation program. The aim of using self-assessment methodology in the framework of an orientation program was to set the students' foundation for self-discovery and introduce them to self-learning.     

Basic training: A library orientation designed for student veterans

Colleges and universities across the country have been developing robust programs and services to support student veterans, including veteran-specific orientations. The Texas A&M University Libraries received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to pilot a veteran-specific library orientation inspired by the in-processing checklist, a common military method for orienting service members to their new military installations. This article describes the development of the Orienting Student Veterans to the Library project, details the structure and content of the library orientation, and shares the challenges and lessons learned from implementing the orientation. Assessment of the orientation revealed impact, especially in student veterans' self-reported likelihood of recommending library resources to fellow student veterans.     

Flipping the Business Information Literacy Classroom: Redesign,Implementation, and Assessment of a Case Study

A team of librarians at Purdue University transformed a business information literacy course from a traditional lecture, 40-student class into multiple sections of a flipped, 70-student classroom to meet the request that the successful course be required for all 500 undergraduate students. Scaling up required the adoption of flipped learning techniques for better utilization of library teaching resources. This case study provides key insights for others implementing credit classes or integrating similar content into one-shots or embedded work. It also describes the assessed results determined through student feedback (focus groups) and student performance (pre/post-tests).     

Academic library use and student retention: A quantitative analysis

A key component of Vincent Tinto's model of retention is the importance of student integration in the academic institution. Library use can be regarded as a form of integration within such institutions. A quantitative approach was applied to demonstrate how institutional data can be combined to examine library use and retention at a single institution. Undergraduate student and library use data were analyzed to identify results that suggested associations between library use and student retention. Library use was measured by log-ins to electronic resources, as well as borrowing from the library. The undergraduate students enrolled for the first time in 2010 comprised the population, Sub-group student characteristics, age and socioeconomic status, underwent further analysis. The findings show retained students log-in to authenticated resources and borrow from the library at higher rates than withdrawn students. Mature age students withdraw from the university at higher rates than younger students. Log-ins to authenticated resources increase as students progress over time through their university programs. No notable associations were found among socioeconomic background, library use, and retention. For the institution, these findings can inform the development of library services to target specific student groups on the basis that higher library use may lead to improved integration and retention. In addition, the study describes a research design that is replicable in other institutions and contributes to library use and retention literature.     

A Kaleidoscope of Learning Styles

Abstract

Our library intends to create a tutorial to assist students in library research. In preparation, we need to understand the diverse learning needs of students. Some students seem to thrive in the online environment while others feel at a loss. A review of learning styles literature reveals that many adult learners require personalized, interactive learning environments. The author reviewed library tutorials to identify models of library instruction that meet the needs of such students. This paper serves as background and literature review for an interactive workshop on learning styles and the Internet, which was presented at the conference.     

Teaching in the Information Age:

As students grapple with new and often confusing information technologies, librarians must be able to adapt their teaching methods to address student anxieties, while simultaneously enhancing student learning. The development of activities which allow students to both confront and think critically about new material and concepts is one way to accomplish this. This article considers student apprehension when encountering new information technologies (CD-ROM technology in particular) and proposes a variety of active learning exercises within the framework of four questions that Abigail Loumis and Deborah Fink ("Instruction: Gateway to the Virtual Library," in The Virtual Library: Visions and Realities, ed. Laverna M. Saunders, Westport, CT: Meckler, 1993, p. 48) suggest researchers in the virtual library should be taught when learning how to search electronic sources: (1) Where am I? (2) How do I do it? (3) What am I trying to do? (4) What do I do with it? The use of student journals as an effective tool for gauging student learning and encouraging critical thinking is also detailed.     

Extreme Makeover: Library Orientation for Postgraduate Dental Residents

Bibby Library at the University of Rochester provides a library orientation to new post-graduate dental students. The original class utilized a lecture format and included content that was no longer relevant. Students were bored and did not retain the information. This article describes the design and implementation of a new orientation class. The class includes a series of exercises designed to familiarize students with pertinent resources. Student response to the class and implications for the library are discussed.