January 13, 2005
Librarians favored following FIG-gy finale
Way before Christmas, campus librarians got what they had long been wishing for — but it wasn’t quite a dream come true.
What they had wanted was a way to reach out to every incoming freshman and tell them about the libraries. But for a long time the majority of first-year students weren’t enrolled in a common class, so that dream was beyond reach. Then came Freshman Interest Groups (FIGs), small groups of incoming students who are all enrolled in several of the same classes and who meet once a week with a more advanced student as leader. Enrollment in FIGs has been continually growing, reaching 71 percent of all incoming freshmen in fall quarter.
And this year, First Year Programs decided that all FIG students would do an assignment called Library Excursion. It required students to either choose a topic or have one assigned by the FIG leader, then go to the library and find material on that topic — a Web page, an article from a scholarly journal, one from an electronic journal, one from a newspaper, and so on — not to write a paper, but just to prove they knew how to find sources.
Suddenly 3,341 students were descending on the libraries, students who often didn’t even know what a scholarly journal is. It wasn’t quite every incoming freshman as librarians had wished, but it might as well have been.
“Librarians are conscientious people, so we wanted to take the assignment in the spirit it was meant — an introduction to the library,” said Kathleen Collins, reference and instruction librarian in Odegaard. “So probably a conservative estimate is that it took 10 or 15 minutes with each student.”
That, of course, translated to hours and hours of librarians’ time. It was time well spent, Collins hastens to say, but an exhausting workload all the same. “We got so we could spot them before they even opened their mouths,” she said of the students. “They’d come up to the reference desk clutching their paper and say, ‘I’m doing a Library Excursion and I’m not sure how to begin.’”
The librarian would then read the assignment given by that particular FIG leader and try to give the student a lesson that would help him or her understand the research process.
Library Excursion, Melody Ferguson, coordinator of First Year Programs, explained, was created in response to comments from faculty and others. The idea was to give students information about the library at a time when they were likely to retain it. First Year Programs had formerly offered library tours in the summer, she said, but these were deemed ineffective and so were discontinued.
FIG leaders did the Library Excursion themselves last spring as part of their training, and they had some leeway as to how they presented the assignment. So some assigned a particular topic to students and others simply suggested the students think of a topic themselves.
That resulted in students seeking information on “politics,” or “friends,” and being gently counseled by librarians that they needed to narrow things down a bit. Others picked a topic such as Michael Jordan and were challenged to find a scholarly journal article that was relevant.
Students were not thrilled when the assignment was given, Ferguson said, but both FIG leaders and students reported positive feelings about it after it was over.
“Despite the groans from my students when I assigned this, I think it was really beneficial for them,” one FIG leader reported on a survey conducted by First Year Programs. “At the beginning of the quarter, a substantial number of my students said they would like to be able to navigate the library successfully, and I think this assignment helped them do that.”
Students were not asked about the Library Excursion specifically, but many of them volunteered comments about it on their surveys. This one was typical: “I wasn’t excited about having to label myself a lost freshman and ask how to locate things, but once I did, I felt a lot more comfortable researching things in the school’s libraries. When I had to go back to do research for a paper in one of my classes, it went a lot smoother.”
That is exactly what librarians had hoped they would accomplish by reaching out to all incoming freshmen. They just weren’t prepared for the volume of students or the longevity of the assignment.
“We’re used to having assignments with a definite end,” Collins said, “but these students just kept coming, wave upon wave, like beachheads at Normandy. And just when we thought, ‘OK, I haven’t had any questions for a week. It must be over,’ they’d come back.”
After a while, Collins decided that all the librarians’ hard work needed to be rewarded, so she contacted the Odegaard librarians to plan a celebration, complete with Fig Newtons and chocolate covered figs for refreshments. But then the Suzzallo librarians found out and said they wanted in on the action. Pretty soon Collins realized that FIG student questions had appeared all over the library system. So she instituted an all-libraries FIG Assignment Door Prize Contest, with a prize given to the librarian who entertained the very last Library Excursion question of the quarter.
And the winner (drumroll please) was Susan Kane of the Odegaard Reference Desk, who answered a question at 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 12, two days after the quarter officially ended. Her prize was an autographed copy of Chris Van Allsburg’s book for children, The Sweetest Fig.
Besides the mention of a fig in the title, the book also was appropriate because of its plot, Collins said. It seems a man receives two special figs, which, when eaten, will make whatever dreams one has at night come true the next day. So the man trains himself to dream that he is the richest man in the world. Unfortunately, his dog eats the figs before he can get to them, so the dog’s dreams come true instead. The moral: Be careful what you wish for — it might come true with unexpected consequences.
The librarians aren’t giving up on their dream, however. Collins said plans are already in the works for First Year Programs and the libraries to work together on a slightly altered version of the Library Excursion for next year. Part of the solution may be Research 101 (http://www.lib.washington.edu/uwill/research101/), a six-unit online tutorial on the research process created by librarian John Holmes.
But that doesn’t mean a computer will take over for the librarians. “We want to find a way to do this that doesn’t cut off access to real live reference librarians,” Collins said. “We like to think that’s the best thing we have to offer.”
The few, the proud, the other winning librarians…
Here are some of the other door prize winners, with comments by Kathleen Collins, reference and instruction librarian at Odegaard Undergraduate Library:
- Steve Weber, OUGL overnight,
4 a.m. Friday, Dec. 10, copy of The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base, in honor of the 11th hour students completing their Library Excursion.
- Alvin Fritz, Suzzallo Reference, evening shift Thursday, Dec. 9, copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, a sure-fire stress reliever — it can put anyone in a more mellow mood.
- Deborah Raftus, OUGL Reference, 1 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 8, “Give me the Brain” card game, featuring zombies working in a fast food restaurant — because answering FIG questions one after another sometimes made us feel like library zombies serving up McInformation.
- Peter McCracken, OUGL Reference and Dottie Smith, Suzzallo Reference (tie), 3–5 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 8, copies of The House at Pooh Corner (see Alvin Fritz, above).
- Faye Christenberry, Suzzallo Reference, noon, Tuesday, Dec. 7, two stress balls — keep one handy in case more FIG students come to call, and a spare stashed in your office in case of emergencies.
Special Category Awards:
- Anne Davis, OUGL Reference, for referring that last question on Sunday evening to Susan Kane, and for spending many of her 10 p.m. to midnight hours fielding FIG questions after all other reference and info desks on campus had closed for the night, a stress ball, which can double as something to throw at all those cellphone-talking students as they come in the building.
- Barbara Miles, Microforms and Newspapers, who didn’t say when she received her last question, but who wrote eloquently that “If one more student comes to the mic/news desk, says ‘I need a newspaper article on _____,’ and then stands there as if expecting me to conjure the article out of thin air, I may need to be restrained,” a mini stress kit, complete with handy pamphlet with some tips for combating workplace stress, and a blow-up bat for those times when you feel like hitting someone…safely.
- The OUGL and Suzzallo Reference Desks, a stress ball each (because helping students can be fun, but stressful too) in the shape of the world, to remind us that we hold the world of information in the palms of our hands.
