September 28, 2006
Got academic blues? Librarians have the cure
Students suffering from assignment shock and other academic maladies will get some relief beginning this quarter as UW librarians offer a series of free, walk-in workshops at Odegaard Undergraduate Library. The eight workshops on the schedule are:
- Libraries 101: Survival Skills at the UW Libraries
- Google Goes to College: Better Searching for Research Success
- Surviving Assignment Shock: Choosing a Research Topic Wisely
- Secrets of Database Searching: Tips and Tricks for Research
- But Where’s the Full Text? Using Citations to Find Books and Articles
- “Scholarly” Articles — WTF* (*What’re the Fundamentals?)
- Hot or Not? Judging the Reliability of Information
- Do I Have to Cite This? Avoiding Unintentional Plagiarism
This is the first time the libraries have offered walk-in workshops on research fundamentals in more than five years. “We used to do them in a sort of passive way,” said John Holmes, reference and instruction librarian. “We didn’t really publicize them much and attendance was very low.”
Librarians went on offering special sessions in classes when instructors requested it, but the idea of basic workshops that cut across all fields lay dormant in the back of everyone’s minds. In the meantime, the role of libraries and librarians shifted a bit. “We now are thinking of ourselves as a learning commons,” Holmes said, “and that brings our instructional role to the fore.”
For the last two years, and this fall as well, librarians have been dipping their toes in the open workshop format by offering presentations during Dawg Daze. Last year’s offerings, Libraries 101 and a Google workshop that was then called Google Unleashed, drew crowds. “We did about three of each and there were people there for every one,” said Laura Barrett, undergraduate services librarian. “They were packed, and people seemed to really like them.”
So last spring, a group of interested librarians applied for one of the “21st Century Library Grants” offered by the libraries administration, planning to use the money to market walk-in workshops so that they would be successful. When the group was awarded $500, they knew it was time to create the workshops to market.
Graduate Staff Assistant Sara Seely became the coordinator for the working group that spent time this summer designing the workshops. The topics, they say, came out of the questions they’ve been asked over and over by students — What’s a scholarly article? Do I have to cite this? Where’s the full text of this article?
“You have to remember, the students these workshops are aimed at are first and second-year undergraduates,” Holmes said. “Many of them have never been asked to do anything other than report. They’ve been told, ‘Find out what is known about this thing and come back and report on it.’ And that’s not research as faculty here understand research, which is asking critical questions and going out and developing your own answers.”
So, even though the students may be adept at using technological tools, they don’t necessarily know how to use them to find the kind of scholarly articles that would be acceptable sources for a research paper. The Google workshop the librarians have designed, for example, shows students how to use tools such as Google Scholar (a special part of Google that targets academic research) and scoped searches (a way of limiting searches to a particular type of site).
“There’s so much commercial information on the Internet,” said Kathleen Collins, reference and instruction librarian. “And Google works on links, so the more times someone has linked to a page, the more likely it is to be at the top of your results list. Therefore, academic topics often won’t show up on the first screen of results. We teach the students tricks that will help them bring this material to the surface.”
The librarians had a starting point for their work, because Holmes had previously created an online tutorial called Research 101 that covers some of the same subjects. The working group built on the modules from that tutorial in creating their presentations.
Now that the workshops have been prepared, the librarians have launched a major marketing effort, targeting both faculty — who they hope will send students to the workshops — and students themselves. Besides the usual posters and flyers, they’re even going to offer workshop participants a temporary tattoo, to serve as a kind of “funky word of mouth” promotion. And although they’re waiting to see how these workshops go before preparing others, they’ve already targeted a couple of new topics — how to integrate sources into a paper and distinguishing primary and secondary sources.
“We’re also thinking about adding a voiceover to our PowerPoint presentations so students could access them remotely,” Barrett added.
Other staff who helped prepare the workshops include librarians Anne Davis and Elinor Appel and Tish Lopez, director of the Odegaard Writing and Research Center.
The workshops will be offered throughout the year in Collaboratory 1 on the first floor of Odegaard. For full descriptions and schedules, go to http://www.lib.washington.edu/ougl/walkins.
