Skip to content

Pegasus Librarian Posts

Maintaining Research Guides, the Never Ending Struggle

Published by Iris on Monday, February 11th, 2008

I spent a good part of today trying to wrap my brain around a new subject area so that I could a) figure out which resources might be important for the assignment, b) figure out if we had access to those resources, c) figure out what to substitute for the stuff we didn’t have, d) create an online research guide for that assignment, and ultimately e) stand up in front of that class on Wednesday and say coherent and useful things rather than idiotic and generally boring things.

As I was experimenting with new sources and concocting tips for the students who will soon be using them, copying and pasting relevant chunks from other guides, and then deleting about a third of the information after realizing I’d needed it to wrap my head around the project, but my students probably didn’t need it… as my guide emerged little by little throughout the day, I mused on the changing role these guides are having in my professional life, and on their convoluted lifespan.

Before going further, a word of explanation. At our library we have three kinds of guides: subject guides, course guides, and general guides. General guides are those things that aren’t specific to a discipline at all (like “Using the Library from Off Campus“). Subject guides serve as portals for research within a major, and there’s at least one for every major on campus. Each liaison maintains the subject guides for his or her liaison departments, and we each have the option to create a course guide for any course we think needs one.

Recently, I’ve begun rethinking my guides. It started last year when I changed almost all of them over from being organized around types of sources (finding articles, finding books, etc.) to being organized around topics or tasks (finding primary sources, finding social/historical context, finding authoritative scores etc.). Now this year, I’m using the subject guides more and more while I’m at the reference desk, both to organize my own thoughts about a new topic and, more importantly, to model this behavior for students. After all, it’s probably much more useful to send students the extra click through a subject guide than to force them to sink or swim in a list of 200 or more research databases! This also keeps me honest, because I actually use the guides all the time, so their faults scream out at me until I finally get time to remedy them.

And in my life, I do my most careful thinking when creating course guides. These grow out of a specific research task and force me to really come to grips with the research challenges inherent to that task. Then, at the end of each term, I retire the term’s course guides but copy and paste the best bits into the subject guide for the appropriate major. Next term, as I create new guides, some chunks can be copied straight out of the subject guide, but there’s always something new, or some sections that just aren’t appropriate for the larger guide, so those get built from scratch almost every time.

And so this circular evolution of course guide to subject guide and back again keeps me writing and updating guides pretty much every week of the year.

p.s. For the curious, today I was working on a guide to Medieval and Renaissance Music (link will be live through March 2008, after which point it’ll be archived offline).

Comments closed

Musings on Periodicals

Published by Iris on Friday, February 8th, 2008

We’re in the midst of our biennial print periodicals review at the moment, and it’s gotten me thinking about how to be a good steward of our periodicals collection. Personally, I love electronic journals better than print journals in most cases. There’s just so much more you can do with them, none of which involve photocopying. (Photocopying is a sore topic with me, right now, for completely separate reasons, none of them interesting.) So faced with a list of journals and the choice to continue with the print subscription, flag them as candidates for e-access only, or cancel them entirely, I’d go with the electronic version in a heartbeat for many, many titles.

However (you knew there was a “however” coming), there are a couple of categories of things that I will not give up in print if I have anything to say about it. (And remember, I’m the librarian for Languages and Literature, so my views are biased in that direction.)

  • Periodicals that include ads or images that aren’t indexed or included in the electronic version. I spend enough time with my American Studies students (and my colleague spends even more time with her History students) finding ads and images that being forced to give up basically our only accessible copies of these ephemera makes me weep for the students of 20-years-from-now who will be basically prevented from pursuing whole swaths of research topics.
  • Periodicals that include or are primarily composed of fiction, poetry, or art. These genres are used in many ways, some of which is enhanced by electronic access, and some of which are decidedly NOT. I want to leave the door open for the later cases.
  • Periodicals that are routed and that a) don’t have good alerts built into the electronic version or b) are routed to people who don’t care for alerts because they and their workflows are set up to need the thing itself sitting and staring at them before they’ll be reminded that they actually did want to sit down and read for a while. I’m that way, myself, with somethings. Not with my professional journals, but with somethings, so I can entirely sympathize.

Assuming I’m looking at a periodical that doesn’t fall into one of these categories, the next things I’d want to know before jumping for the e-access-only option are:

  • Does the e-access include PDF full text? This is especially important if foreign characters (such as Greek, Russian, or Asian characters) are important, or graphs, or images, or really anything other than the text itself. It’s also easier for students to cite exact and original page numbers.
  • Do we get to retain perpetual access to the issues we’ve paid for? (This is a biggie, and possible from some vendors.)
  • Is the eJournal’s interface easily usable? Are the result lists for searches understandable?
  • Are there RSS and email alert options for searches and new issues?
  • It sure would be nice if we could still send articles to other libraries via Interlibrary Loan. (I still worry about the world’s libraries going e-only and cutting each other off from sharing their collections with each other and with smaller libraries.)

These are the things that run through my head as I page through the periodicals on my list. What other criteria should I be thinking about?

1 Comment

Learning Japanese

Published by Iris on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Some people have expressed an interest in looking over my shoulder while I learn Japanese via Rosetta Stone. With that in mind (and because I really didn’t have enough blogs yet, it seems), I’ve started a new blog just for that. That way, those of you who find it amusing or interesting can follow along, but the rest of you can stay here with my more library-centric musings.

Here’s the first post from the new blog, and the last one that will be posted here.

On Sunday, I cracked open my brand new goody box of Rosetta Stone materials and got ready to learn Japanese. Of course, first I had to figure out which of the two CDs needed installing first, and how not to blow my ear drums out with the headphone volume, and how to make Vista play nice with the Rosetta Stone application. I also thought I might read the user manual, since I want to do this right, but I realized that I’m just not a manual reader at heart and gave up after flipping past most of the first 10 pages.

Finally, everything was in tip top shape, I’d regained my hearing after an initial misunderstanding with my volume controls, and it was time to begin. Only I didn’t. I cleaned up my kitchen instead, wondering all the while why I was nervous about this. That done I… no, I didn’t get started. I called home and caught up with family news for a while instead. But by this time the sun had set and I was in serious danger of not meeting my own goal of getting started over the weekend, so I screwed up my courage, sat down at the computer, and began lesson one.

I quickly realized I’d have to get over my analytical “must know why things work” mentality. Presented with “Teeburu no shita ni ira otokonoko” there were just so many questions! Why is the “boy” at the end of the sentence, when I’m pretty sure the picture meant that the boy is under the table (and no, the boy was not drunk, he was playing under the table)? Are there cases in this language like there are in French? What if he “was” under the table? Is “to be” irregular in Japanese just like it is in other languages? Do nouns decline? If “to be” is irregular, how am I ever going to learn it based on these pictures? What if I forget these vocabulary words?

Clearly I’m having trouble sitting back and trusting Rosetta Stone to do it’s thing. I will work on trusting it. When it gets to be too much, I’ll reach for my dictionary and look up a couple of the words to see what they mean in a dictionary-type way, but every once in a while I’ll try to just let things flow. After all, this program has a pretty good reputation. Maybe I shouldn’t second-guess it too much.

Comments closed