Reference Librarians' Page

I have completed a few preliminary video guides and created a page for you to view them on.

http://staff.knox.edu/hstaffor/help.html

Please leave comments on here or email me your feedback. Thank you.

Reference Desk Observations :

• Psyc 276 (Hoffmann) seems to have a paper that requires a lot of sources, there were a lot of Interlibrary Loans for this on Friday and on Sunday night from multiple students in the class
• Ditto for JOUR 323 (Amor) - although this may have been all one student.
• Graphic Design Class - Anne spoke to the professor, who had thought that the full photoshop version was on the library lab machines, but it is not. Anne will confirm with her. If students have saved their document as a PDF, then they can open and print it on the machines here. If it is saved as a Photoshop file, then they must send the print command from the lab. She will make her students aware of this.

Interlibrary Loan - I-Share vs. Illiad and instruction page - Anne indicated that she had not sent us the page(s) she is working on to review yet, and that she will try to do that soon. Reminder from last time - She was also going to then send us a list of all the current places we have links to either Illiad or I-Share, and then an indication of her take on which of those links should go to the new page and any links that should be added that go to the new page.
T20M Topic Survey - It was decided that we would close this now. Laurie will do so, and send an email with a collation/summary of the responses received. We need to look at that and write back about what we think the next session (Jan 27) should have as a topic. Hopefully we can decide this via email rather than waiting till the next ref meeting so that whoever ends up doing it has time to prepare.

Ref Works Session

It was decided that we will have 2 sessions for students. Heather will lead one on Wednesday January 28th at 7pm in the Andrews Forum using laptops; Laurie will lead one on February 3rd at 4pm in one of the computer labs. Heather will advertise, including sending a message to the faculty/staff listserve asking faculty to announce it in their classes.

Assessment

• Heather indicated that she had read some articles and looked at the ACRL Guidelines & best practices info, and that this reading confirmed all of the ideas that we had come up with at the retreat, and did not really add anything.
• Asessment should be tailored to your own program,
• Assessment should be done at multiple levels from the program level to the specific workshop/class level
• Taking into account learning styles by having multiple/varying assessment points or tools is also important.
• Jeff pulled a number of books from the collection on educational assessment in general - assessing student learning. These are currently on the staff room table. We can leave them there for a few days - feel free to borrow. If you plan on looking at one extensively, please take it to the desk to check out. I’ll have any left go back to re-shelving on Friday.
• Jeff asked that we look at #10 on the tasks to do Winter term list - Augmenting the instruction stats we keep & collating them on a term rather than annual basis.
• He passed around an example of categories of a spread sheet that Tanna could create based on the information we put in the calendar: Term - Course no - Course title - Librarian - Instructor - # attended - location.
• Sharon expressed concern about having Tanna do the extraction from the calendar to the spread sheet because of the possibility that she would make errors in knowing which events to include.
• Anne suggested that if we had Tanna err on the side of including, and that we could then remove them later that we would probably be safe, and Sharon agreed.
• It was agreed that Tanna will then regularly (Monthly or maybe bi-weekly) transfer the data to an Excel spreadsheet with the goal of final transferal by the end of the 1st after each term is completed. Sharon will give Tanna a set of instructions with criteria of what to include.
• It was agreed that Heather would then edit / extrapolate other variables/ and create a report within 2 weeks after Tanna finishes the initial spreadsheet.
• The data elements we currently track in addition to those listed above are :
• School (Arts, Humanities, Soc. Sci, Sciences - including % of schools having instruction and % of instruction by school)
• Department (including % of departments having instruction and % of instruction done by department)
• Course level (100, 200, 300, Honors/independent study, non course related; % of instruction at each level; % course related vs non course relatedl)
• % inside vs outside the library building
• % Knox student / Knox faculty / non-Knox students / non-Knox-non-student.
• We then discussed if there were any other data elements we wanted to add. It was decided to add to each calendar entry an indication of “Assessment Yes” or “No Assessment” and that Tanna would include a column for this on the spread sheet.
• We then discussed whether there were other items on the list that we wanted to try to begin this term.
• Sharon suggested doing more with professor feedback or augmenting reference desk observation recording as possibilities
• Jeff indicated that he thought following up with professors was an important step to begin soon.
• Jeff also indicated that he would like to see us write up some kind of summary of the assessment we had done at the end of the year that also indicated what had worked well that we could distribute to faculty.
• It was decided that we would add augmenting the collection of professor feedback (i.e. feedback from professors who have had a library instruction session done for their course) in an experimental way. Everyone would try to do more of this by trying out different things - survey, email, conversation, or just recording informal feedback received. Reminder - what we want here is not feedback on if the professor “liked” the session but if the professor felt that the students learned something at it and if that learning was reflected in the assignments they turned in and/or in classroom discussion etc. And that we would share with each other what we were trying out and what was working or not working.
• Sharon asked if we also wanted to do anything towards getting a program going for collecting student papers or bibliographies to evaluate.
• Heather is going to be doing this for one course already this term (collecting bibliographies), so it was agreed that we would start with that.
• We will also look for opportunities to start conversations with faculty to bring up this idea and get their feedback on it.
• Augmenting Reference desk stats/observations was then discussed.
• Anne & Heather asked about the online packages to record this perhaps making this more do-able.
• Laurie indicated reservations about adding more data to collect without a clear sense of what we were trying to learn/do with the data and about what it was going to tell us about our instruction.
• Sharon indicated that she thought it could provide us with some knowledge about our program outcomes :
• Knowledge of instances when students had retained or not retained content from instruction sessions
• Knowledge of instances when instructions sessions led students to ask at the reference desk.
• Knowledge of instances where students were using tools or information provided at instruction sessions.
• Laurie pointed out that this information would be very spotty and would not be the kind of information that we could draw firm conclusions from or state any kind of across the board outcomes based on.
• Sharon agreed, but thought that it would still provide us with useful qualitative information about our instruction - we would still know specific outcomes for some students - we would not know % of students with an outcome.
• Heather pointed out that one difficulty would be knowing / asking if the student had been in an instruction session.
• Sharon agreed that this was a real issue, and that asking could disrupt the reference interview and have a negative effect.
• Heather suggested that we consider breaking down the categories of reference questions - for example were they ILL /I-Share based ; Finding materials on the shelves / etc. And that if we were to do that it would probably only work if we moved to one of the online tools.
• Sharon asked how knowing the breakdown like this would help us assess our instruction.
• Heather suggested that it would tell us areas where patrons were needing more or less help, and by viewing changes over time we could see if areas improved. That would not necc be directly tied to our instruction either of course, but it could show us places where we needed to increase instruction.
• Laurie agreed to look into what packages were out there and costs and to let us know about options.
• Sharon asked folks to indicate if they thought recording information on a computer would be easier. People responded that it would not necc. be easier to record it, but that it would be easier to collate it and report on it.

Here are the plans / goals we set for increasing our assessment of student learning outcomes achieved by the library at the December retreat. Much of this is in Heather’s notes - but there is a little more detail here.

REMINDER - What we want to assess is Student Learning - not our performance

First - here is the list of assessment that we were already doing.

1. Collected, and sometimes graded, Exercises from library instruction sessions for courses - eg. Education, Art, Biology, Psychology, and FP

2. Librarian observations during the hands on portions of workshops we give - also observations from reference desk inquiries we get from students who attended those workshops - we can often tell how much they did or did not retain from the session or which parts they did retain.

3. Informal feedback from professors after library instruction sessions for their courses - can be in person at the time, in person later, or via email

4. Usage statistics from databases and other online sources and tools
5. Circulation statistics - including in-house use - shows how much using resources, and can also see if using specific resources demonstrated at sessions.
6. Interlibrary loan statistics and data including both Illiad and I-Share

7. Informal feedback from students - verbal or email

8. Gate count

9. Acquisitions Data - can tell us about how well we are meeting goals of providing resources

10. Instruction Data - Data on how many sessions, what subjects, etc.

11. FYILLAA Data - We have 3 sets of data - 2 years of pre-test and 1 year of post test (after the 1st pre test)

Here is what we said we would try to start doing Winter Term

1. Continue to & increase where possible collecting exercises from instruction sessions - try to do this more deliberately, and record or summarize the data. So, even if not graded for professor, we could collect & assess & write up a summary for each and share/store this data. One issue - we often want students to keep the hands on exercises as they become their handout for future reference OR have actual results they need for their individual course projects. Possible solutions - a)we could just not collect these, but try to make observations during the session and make notes quickly afterwards so that we don’t forget b) we could collect while they were doing the one minute assessment and then copy and hand back c) we could collect, assess and then quickly return the next day.

2. Continue and increase making observations during hands on portions of workshops - We would try to do this more consciously, to make notes quickly after the session, and record/share the info.

3. Continue to receive & augment collection of feedback from professors, and try to record/store this data so that it can be added into other data and/or shared. Institute a more formal/semi formal survey or inquiry to professors who have had instruction sessions at the end of the term - did they find the session helpful, did their students have good bibliographies or whatever would be appropriate for that class.
4. Start doing a Quick immediate student survey after sessions

5. Review and collate ILL Data to ascertain connections to instruction - eg could look at things like % of requests for things we own - is it going up or down - is it different for courses with instruction and those without. Can look at # of requests for courses with or without instruction. Could look at if using SFX with/without.

6. Augment collecting info form Reference desk inquiries - do we want to count different things or keep any kind of notes. Could keep a notebook at the reference desk (or page on blog) and make notes when encounter students when it becomes clear they have been at instruction sessions. Or we could add a column to stats for if Question from student who had been at an instruction session - idea that if asking at desk learned at least something from the session & now learning more.

7. Continue to collect database and online tool usage stats, including libguides - We could figure out a more systematic way to do this and what we want to report, how often, and maybe figure out a way to divide up the task or who to assign it to.

8. Get some feedback on Moodle use - Can we get info from Vicky or a survey of professors who are linking to resources via Moodle.

9. Continue to collect and collate Instruction Data - Do this on a term by term basis rather than annually. Do we want to add anything to what we are collecting?

10 Review student papers with bibliographies - target specific classes or ask all professors in hopes of getting some? Look at both those with sessions and without or just those with sessions?
11. Create our own student exit survey - It is not clear from my notes if we meant when they graduate or at the end of each year or at the end of the term when they’ve had an instruction session

12. Pre Test / Post Test - again neither my or Heather’s notes are clear if this is per session or per entry / graduation. Could do either or both.

I also have something in my memory, but not in my notes or Heather’s, about doing something where we got names of students who had attended instruction sessions and then used that to create groups of those who had attended and those who had not and then use that to compare to other data - GPA, other surveys, ILL data etc.

So - Decisions we need to make / Action we need to take :

1. A lot of these things are adding to recording observations and informal feedback, etc. and doing it on a class by class / term by term basis.  Do we want to set a “due date” and format for reporting these things?

2. For #1 on task list - Do we want to collect hands on exercises from more sessions? Do we just want to encourage those who are doing and/or willing to do this to write up a summary for each class they do this in at the end of each term?  For #1 & #2 Do we want to establish some specific questions to address in a summary that folks would record at the end of each term.
3.  For #3 Professor Feeback - do we want to

a) Have everyone agree to ask for some feedback from professors, in whatever mode they want at the end of the term for professors they did sessions with

b) Create a survey for professors that we would each send to those we’d done sessions with at the end of each term

c) Do either a) or b) above, but just with some of our sessions instead of all

4. For #5 - do we want to set up a project for dumping and analyzing ILL data - if so when, and who and when would goal to complete be.

5. For #6   - do we want to add categories to our stats sheet and/or keep a notebook - one notebook or individually - or do we just want each person to be more conscious of these things and to write up a summary of reflections/observations as part of their instruction report at the end of each term?

6.  For #7 - do we want to define specific points of usage data that we want to collate/record regularly and if so when/who/when report

7.  For #8 - Should we ask Vicky about Moodle info - or do a survey of faculty - just sent to those using moodle (list from Vicky)

8.  For #9 - Do we want to add to what we report/record about instruction on a term by term basis

9. For #10 - how do we want to try to get access to student papers with bibliographies

10.  For #11 - do we want to do an exit survey - if so how/when/who

11.  For #12 - do we want to do pre/post tests - for sessions, for years for matriculation/graduation? or both - if so how/when/who

As mentioned at the last reference meeting, I would like to begin working on video guides/tutorials for the library website. Please post suggestions/questions/re-wording to the two areas below.

1. Topics. In this section, please add suggestions for guide topics. Here is what I’ve come up with so far, and I’ve grouped them according to what categories they might fall under. The “-” indicates where the hyperlink to the guide would be.

I was thinking the page could be titled “Help! How do I….”

Find Books?

Using the Knox Online Catalog

-Find a book when you know the Title or Author

-Find a book on a particular subject

-Advanced Searches

-Understanding Library of Congress call numbers

-Using I-Share

-Using WorldCat

Find Articles?

-Selecting a database

-General Tips for searching databases

-Find Full Text articles

-Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost

-JSTOR

-LexisNexis

-Find Journals Online?

-Find Course Reserves?

Get things the Knox Library doesn’t have?

-Articles via the ILLiad Service

-Books via I-Share

Start my Research?

-Developing a Topic

-Reference Books

-Search Strategies (synonyms, AND/OR/NOT, subject words, etc.)

Renew items I have checked out?

-Items from the Knox Library or I-Share
-Items from other libraries (ILLiad)

-Find Images?

-Find Films?

-Find Newspapers?

-Find Primary Sources?

-Use Google Scholar effectively?

-Use Google Books  to find library materials?

-Use Wikipedia effectively?

-Find images, music and videos to use for your projects?

2. Please rate which guides you think should be done first. My choices would be: Finding Books, Finding Articles and Getting things the Knox Library doesn’t have.