Time: 6pm-9pm (3)
Hours completed (IST): 82.5/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 97.5/150
I began constructing my LibGuide today. Despite the reading that I had done previously, this proved a difficult task.The interface is, well, something that is not always intuitive. Additionally, despite setting out a rough idea for pages the other day I began to feel that I needed to look at more resources (both physical and digital) to get a better sense of what I was trying to say.
Before doing more searching I did manage to get a few pages built though I did not populate much.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
March 12, 2015 (Thursday)
Time: 1pm-2pm (1)
Hours completed (IST): 79.5/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 94.5/150
Tammy and I met briefly today to discuss Tuesday. She thought the assessment helped her have an idea of how I did and we discussed in detail my strategy and how I felt the session went. We also spoke about my LibGuide which had been lagging behind a bit. We did brainstorm a bit and I came up with a few page ideas: a list of satire news sites, an explanation of satire, satire online/new social media, and authority.
Hours completed (IST): 79.5/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 94.5/150
Tammy and I met briefly today to discuss Tuesday. She thought the assessment helped her have an idea of how I did and we discussed in detail my strategy and how I felt the session went. We also spoke about my LibGuide which had been lagging behind a bit. We did brainstorm a bit and I came up with a few page ideas: a list of satire news sites, an explanation of satire, satire online/new social media, and authority.
Friday, April 10, 2015
March 10, 2015 (Tuesday)
Time: 5pm-6:30pm (1.5)
Hours completed (IST): 78.5/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 93.5/150
Today was my first solo BI. Things went really well. I showed up early to get a little clarification from the faculty member as to what she was looking for her students to learn and the type of resources she would want them to use (books, SPRJs, etc.). She expressed a preference for journal articles and thought that having workshop time at the end was a great idea.
The class was very small, maybe twelve students, and they were not a talkative bunch. I stopped quite a few times to ask questions and, with some prodding, did get students to offer answers. I think they just realized that I was going to keep asking questions no matter what. For the most part, I asked most of the questions during the second sample search (the one with a more formed topic) as I did not have to discuss limiters so much and wanted them to think about searching more actively here. To begin, I told them my topic [Salaries of people who work in historically low-paying jobs.], then entered the first part of the search string: (wealth* OR pay* OR saving* OR salar*) and explained what I had done and why. "What do you think we should put in the next line," I asked. Silence.
I tried again for a response by asking, "So we need to think about low-paying jobs. What are some industries that don't pay much...other than academia?" I got a couple of chuckles, not much, but then a hand went up. "Janitors," the student answered quizzically.
It was a start. I explained that janitors usually don't make a lot of money and that is a good answer but maybe not the best for searching a database. "Think of it this way," I explained, "do you think that enough academics have written about the salaries of janitors to get enough hits, or should we try something broader?" I told them that I thought that retail work and fast food were both jobs with low pay and likely to get us a good amount of hits. We added (retail* OR fast food) to our search string.
I then asked them to tell me what else we needed for my search. I got silence again so, worrying about using up too much time, explained that we needed to add the workers themselves into the string with (employ* OR worker*). After that we again discussed setting the publication date range and I asked them what we should set it to. One student replied with 2010, which we had done previously. I explained how that would normally be a good time; however, because we were searching for a topic related to the economy I told them that 2007 was a better place to start. When I asked them why, one student correctly said it was because of the recession.
Despite worrying about time, I ended up finishing with too much time left. The professor asked if I would show them how to use KentLINK (the school catalog) because I had just briefly covered it since the professor was looking for them to use journal articles.
After that and getting silence in return to my plea for questions, I let the students workshop. I also asked the faculty member if she would be willing to fill out my assessment since I had nobody there to observe me. Luckily, she was happy to. While this was hardly a scientific exercise, it at least gave me something to talk about with Tammy.
Hours completed (IST): 78.5/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 93.5/150
Today was my first solo BI. Things went really well. I showed up early to get a little clarification from the faculty member as to what she was looking for her students to learn and the type of resources she would want them to use (books, SPRJs, etc.). She expressed a preference for journal articles and thought that having workshop time at the end was a great idea.
The class was very small, maybe twelve students, and they were not a talkative bunch. I stopped quite a few times to ask questions and, with some prodding, did get students to offer answers. I think they just realized that I was going to keep asking questions no matter what. For the most part, I asked most of the questions during the second sample search (the one with a more formed topic) as I did not have to discuss limiters so much and wanted them to think about searching more actively here. To begin, I told them my topic [Salaries of people who work in historically low-paying jobs.], then entered the first part of the search string: (wealth* OR pay* OR saving* OR salar*) and explained what I had done and why. "What do you think we should put in the next line," I asked. Silence.
I tried again for a response by asking, "So we need to think about low-paying jobs. What are some industries that don't pay much...other than academia?" I got a couple of chuckles, not much, but then a hand went up. "Janitors," the student answered quizzically.
It was a start. I explained that janitors usually don't make a lot of money and that is a good answer but maybe not the best for searching a database. "Think of it this way," I explained, "do you think that enough academics have written about the salaries of janitors to get enough hits, or should we try something broader?" I told them that I thought that retail work and fast food were both jobs with low pay and likely to get us a good amount of hits. We added (retail* OR fast food) to our search string.
I then asked them to tell me what else we needed for my search. I got silence again so, worrying about using up too much time, explained that we needed to add the workers themselves into the string with (employ* OR worker*). After that we again discussed setting the publication date range and I asked them what we should set it to. One student replied with 2010, which we had done previously. I explained how that would normally be a good time; however, because we were searching for a topic related to the economy I told them that 2007 was a better place to start. When I asked them why, one student correctly said it was because of the recession.
Despite worrying about time, I ended up finishing with too much time left. The professor asked if I would show them how to use KentLINK (the school catalog) because I had just briefly covered it since the professor was looking for them to use journal articles.
After that and getting silence in return to my plea for questions, I let the students workshop. I also asked the faculty member if she would be willing to fill out my assessment since I had nobody there to observe me. Luckily, she was happy to. While this was hardly a scientific exercise, it at least gave me something to talk about with Tammy.
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 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.
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]:
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]:
Thursday, April 9, 2015
March 6, 2015 (Friday)
Time: 8am-12pm (4)
Hours completed (IST): 72/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 87/150
I showed up early to prep the introduction for today's BI. This was another outreach session with a high school. I did much better with the introduction but still felt self-conscious. Tammy said that I did a good job, though. I helped students workshop until I needed to leave at noon. Most of my time today was spent helping students locate books in the stacks and scan them.
Hours completed (IST): 72/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 87/150
I showed up early to prep the introduction for today's BI. This was another outreach session with a high school. I did much better with the introduction but still felt self-conscious. Tammy said that I did a good job, though. I helped students workshop until I needed to leave at noon. Most of my time today was spent helping students locate books in the stacks and scan them.
March 5, 2015 (Thursday)
Time: 8am-6pm (10)
Hours completed (IST): 68/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 83/150
Today was another crushing day of work. I met with a member of the SLIS faculty to discuss the work atmosphere in academic libraries. While I always receive a lot of great advice while working in the library and on my practicum, I felt it was necessary to sit with somebody who spends more time studying academic libraries and is heavily involved in research. It was definitely helpful to get a broader perspective from somebody who is an "outsider" to the library in some ways. Particularly, as somebody who came from a research-heavy discipline, it showed me the level of commitment I would need to be an active writer especially if I work someplace that has no tenure or has lower requirements for research. By overlapping this conversation with my meeting earlier in the week, it seems that I better get used to planning out almost every minute of the day if I want to accomplish everything I hope to do.
After the meeting I helped Tammy with the workshop portion of a BI with a local high school. These students, unlike the previous, were not able to check out books so along with helping them search eResources and finding items in the stacks I also assisted them in using flatbed scanners so they could email themselves the relevant parts of books. The students broke for lunch from noon-to-one and then spent another half hour workshopping.
After this I observed Michael lead a BI with a class from the School of Communications. It was interesting that he chose to use a LibGuide that he built for the class as a tool for teaching. Not only does this seem to help with class preparation but it helps students become comfortable using the LibGuide while in the class. A difference that I have noticed between English and Communication BIs is that the latter is less likely to provide workshop time. Personally, I feel that workshopping is an important part of the BI experience for students and for the librarian: students can begin using the information while it is fresh and there is help on-hand and the librarian can observe students searching as a way to conduct an informal summative assessment.
Soon after it was time for me to do the introduction for the sophomore-level English BI with Tammy. Everything went well, mostly. I was able to get some of the students engaged but, despite my preparation, I seemed to stumble over things and several times asked Tammy what I should or should not talk about. The rest of the session was incident-free and the students left with a good star on their work. Afterwards Tammy and I discussed the session and what happened. I explained that I was very self-conscious about what I was and was not supposed to talk about. We concluded that I was trying to do the whole session in my head which may have caused me to worry more about what I was saying. We decided to look for an opportunity for me to do a session solo in the next few weeks.
Hours completed (IST): 68/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 83/150
Today was another crushing day of work. I met with a member of the SLIS faculty to discuss the work atmosphere in academic libraries. While I always receive a lot of great advice while working in the library and on my practicum, I felt it was necessary to sit with somebody who spends more time studying academic libraries and is heavily involved in research. It was definitely helpful to get a broader perspective from somebody who is an "outsider" to the library in some ways. Particularly, as somebody who came from a research-heavy discipline, it showed me the level of commitment I would need to be an active writer especially if I work someplace that has no tenure or has lower requirements for research. By overlapping this conversation with my meeting earlier in the week, it seems that I better get used to planning out almost every minute of the day if I want to accomplish everything I hope to do.
After the meeting I helped Tammy with the workshop portion of a BI with a local high school. These students, unlike the previous, were not able to check out books so along with helping them search eResources and finding items in the stacks I also assisted them in using flatbed scanners so they could email themselves the relevant parts of books. The students broke for lunch from noon-to-one and then spent another half hour workshopping.
After this I observed Michael lead a BI with a class from the School of Communications. It was interesting that he chose to use a LibGuide that he built for the class as a tool for teaching. Not only does this seem to help with class preparation but it helps students become comfortable using the LibGuide while in the class. A difference that I have noticed between English and Communication BIs is that the latter is less likely to provide workshop time. Personally, I feel that workshopping is an important part of the BI experience for students and for the librarian: students can begin using the information while it is fresh and there is help on-hand and the librarian can observe students searching as a way to conduct an informal summative assessment.
Soon after it was time for me to do the introduction for the sophomore-level English BI with Tammy. Everything went well, mostly. I was able to get some of the students engaged but, despite my preparation, I seemed to stumble over things and several times asked Tammy what I should or should not talk about. The rest of the session was incident-free and the students left with a good star on their work. Afterwards Tammy and I discussed the session and what happened. I explained that I was very self-conscious about what I was and was not supposed to talk about. We concluded that I was trying to do the whole session in my head which may have caused me to worry more about what I was saying. We decided to look for an opportunity for me to do a session solo in the next few weeks.
March 4, 2013 (Wednesday)
Time: 6pm-7:30pm (1.5)
Hours completed (IST): 58/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 73/150
I spent time reviewing the introductory material for tomorrow and did some work in the KentLINK and OhioLINK catalogs to be sure that I was familiar with their set-up. I also needed to choose a book to use as an example. I thought about a few of my favorite books and decided that using "The Devil in the White City" provided enough variation to be useful. For example, it is available in both catalogs in several formats and also had several different statuses (available, due, lost, etc.).
Hours completed (IST): 58/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 73/150
I spent time reviewing the introductory material for tomorrow and did some work in the KentLINK and OhioLINK catalogs to be sure that I was familiar with their set-up. I also needed to choose a book to use as an example. I thought about a few of my favorite books and decided that using "The Devil in the White City" provided enough variation to be useful. For example, it is available in both catalogs in several formats and also had several different statuses (available, due, lost, etc.).
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