Reference Librarians' Page

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.