March 9, 2015 (Monday)

Time: 2pm-3pm; 5pm-9pm (5)
Hours completed (IST): 77/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 92/150


Over the weekend Tammy sent me an email asking if I was available to solo a BI on Tuesday. She really hates saying no to a request but she was already scheduled for something at that time. I told her that I was ready to give it my best. I was a little concerned that I there would be nobody there to help if I got stuck, so we spent most of our meeting time today going over what to talk about, reviewing the basics, and Tammy gave me suggestions about setting up the sample search.


Later that day I sat down to prepare. The only information that I had about the focus of the class and their project was that they were talking about wealth and poverty. Tammy sent an email asking for more specific details but, as I've learned many times over, those communications often go unanswered. Because I had so little to go on, I found myself struggling to create a lesson that would be useful for the students. I thought a lot about why students tend not to use university resources and one think that came to mind was that students incorrectly believe that they have to know exactly what their topic is first. I decided to try and break that myth.


I decided to do two search examples: one where I started with the most general term and another where I already had a firm topic. If they learned nothing else, I figured that the students would learned that it's possible to use library resources to help "find" a topic or to begin the research process rather than use it much later (if ever) in the process. Time was going to be critical because I wanted to squeeze these two demos into the already brimming session. I was also adamant that they have time at the end to workshop, especially as the goal here was for the students to find just one additional resource for their project.


Below are the searches/plan I used for this part of the session (Done in Discovery, replicated in KentLINK):

Search Example 1

Search String: wealth (1.9 million hits; ~190,000 pages of material)

A) Discuss Research Starter---appears during broad searches, encyclopedic entry, often provides useful bibliography, can be used to both learn more about subject area and to "find" a topic

 B) Use Limiters---Use SPRJs but never use FullText [Discovery only gives fulltext to other Ebsco databases; limiting to fulltext reduces the amount of possible hits by ~50%; about 150 of our 300+ databases directly link to Discovery] (359,269 hits)

select a proper date range [For example, this search had materials from 1812-2016. Explain that "current" usually means 5-10 years. Explain why 2016.] Set beginning date to 2010 (151,878 hits, a reduction of ~90%)


C) Source Types---Clicking SPRJs still allows some other resources though [trades, magazines, etc.] this class specifically needs academic journals (138,855 hits)

D) Subject---Use to narrow focus or, if uncertain of your topic, also use to find something to write about. Discuss subject keywords and also draw their attention to the subject keywords in individual records. For example: limit to "Income Equality" (1,138 hits)

E) Language---Limit to English unless you read another language (1,093 hits)

F) Geography---Use this to limit to the area that you are studying. You probably don't need to know about income inequality in Japan in you are writing a paper about the US. Limit to United States (70 hits)

At this point I will reemphasize two things:

That I started with the broadest understanding of the assignment and was able to use library resources to both find useful material and discover a topic to write about.

Compare using the Discovery tool to Google. The amount of hits, finding good information, that in about 5 seconds the Discovery tool helped be filter out ~90% of hits that I did not need.

Search Example 2

Topic Example: I want to write about the salaries of people who work in historically low-paying jobs.

Search String: (wealth OR pay* OR saving* OR salar*) AND (retail* OR fast food) AND (employ* OR worker*)

A) Explain choosing the important words or "keywords" to use in a search

B) Explain synonyms, Boolean operators, and truncation

C) Refer back to the previous example to show how limiters also work in this situation.

D) Mention abstracts and why they are important tools.

E) Explain Discovery tools: email, folder, permalink, etc.

A Need for Assessment

Finally, I was concerned that this would be my first experience running a whole BI but my supervisor would not be there to give any sort of feedback. For that reason, I decided that now was as good a time as any to learn Qualtrics.

I located a few examples of assessment tools online (here and here) and adapted some of the questions and structure to make an assessment for the faculty member that I would be working with. I chose to ask two basic kinds of questions: how often the faculty member used librarian-led BIs and questions about the session that I did. I thought perhaps that the former would give some weight to the latter.

Here is a crude example of the questions that I asked [as the assessment was a one-off, it will expire in a few weeks, which is why I do not link to it directly]: