Citegeist

Recent ER&L 2007 presentation

// February 28th, 2007 // No Comments » // Conferences

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Electronic Resources & Libraries 2007, where I presented a talk on integrating library resources into learning management systems (aka course management systems).

I’m a big fan of PowerPoint’s notes view–I have a hard time keeping up just by looking at the screen, and printed notes (how 1.0 of me) really help. I’ve expanded the notes a bit and posted the resulting PDF.

Enjoy this now; I don’t know how long this link will work, since I’m leaving Claremont at the end of March.

Many thanks to Susan Hollar of the University of Michigan, Susan Fliss of Dartmouth College, Sara Davidson of UC Merced, and Karl Haushalter of Harvey Mudd College for helping flesh out this presentation.

The Disconnect Between Students and the Library

// February 22nd, 2007 // No Comments » // Conferences

John Law of ProQuest just made an excellent point worth sharing, in the talk “Observing Student Researchers in Their Native Habitat”: a student found lots of good resources for searching for newspaper articles on how George W. Bush is represented in the media–they were even library resources–but he couldn’t get to any of them because he searched Google and found pages linking to other libraries’ electronic resources. Even if a student does start at his own library web site, what is the search box that’s usually most prominent there? The catalog. Where do students do most of their research? Outside the library. Where are items in the catalog located, for the most part (when students can even find them)? Inside the library. Massive disconnect.

One of the most cringe-inducing video snippets Law showed was of a student poking around his library’s catalog. It was an excellent illustration of how much OPACs still really suck and how far librarians really have to go to reach students. Good grief, Charlie Brown.