Reference Renaissance: Outreach, E-Learning, Resource Guides

The second session I attended on Tuesday at Reference Renaissance was Outreach, E-Learning, Resource Guides with panelists:

• Kathleen Keating University of New Mexico
• Marleen van Wyk JS Gericke Library Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch South Africa
• Stephanie Alexander and Jennifer Gerke, University of Colorado at Boulder

Kathleen Keating began her presentation by noting that her co-author and major outreach librarian, Paulita Aguilar was unable to attend due to a major family celebration.

During this conference I began to feel that every presentation from an academic librarian would begin with demographics and facts about their college/university. I've been omitting these sections figuring you'll see them once the conference presentation materials become available. But I did want to call attention to the fact that University of New Mexico libraries have standing orders for any Latin/Central American book that is published. They must have quite the collection and I hope to visit there sometime.

It would also help you to know that UNM is a very diverse campus with strong ethnic student groups. These groups have counseling, study facilities and computer pods at Mesa Vista Hall. There are separate sections for the various ethnic groups and a common atrium. The UNM library worked with the people who run Mesa Vista Hall to setup a satellite facility for the library. This involved obtaining a grant to provide Mesa Vista Hall with reliable wifi access so the librarians could access library databases. When access to library print materials is needed, the librarian at Mesa Vista can IM the main library to have them look up print materials and send over chapters or articles if needed.

Staff for the Mesa Vista Hall is drawn from all the UNM libraries, although I got the impression that Paulita Aguilar was a major presence there. She was in many of the pictures that Kathleen showed. Librarians made sure to keep a dish of chocolate available at all times, which proved to be a major attractant.

So far, the outreach program has provided 960 hours of coverage over six semesters. During that time staff answered 845 reference questions and provided an unknown number of workshops and group instruction sessions.

One important consequence of staffing an area where students, faculty and counselors work is that stronger relationships are built with patrons while librarians learn more about the cultures they're working with. Librarians who staff the Mesa Vista Hall satellite have been invited to graduations, birthdays and other milestones for students and staff. They're considered part of the Mesa Vista Hall community and the UNM librarians find this helpful.

The next speaker was Marleen Van Wyk from South Africa. Her talk seemed to center around the challenges that Stellenbosch University Library faces, including a student community with varying degrees of information literacy, limited budgets, a low staff to student ratio and inadequate training facilities. Despite this the library has a high level of client satisfaction and have published information literacy guidelines. For some reason, my notes seem particularly sparse for this section of the presentation. I urge you to wait until the conference materials come out before drawing any conclusions about this particular part of the presentation.

After Marleen Van Wyk came Stephanie Alexander and Jennifer Gerke of the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB). After noting the absence of their colleague Kathryn Lage, they embarked on an exciting tale of how reorganizing library subject guides and making them database searchable created an explosion of usage.

The UCB library at one time had a list of subject guides that was a simple alphabetical list. The list had 65 guides, which turned out to be a subset of what was available. Staff decided to create a homegrown database driven finding aid with metadata and put the result at http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/research/guides/index.cfm.

The redesigned guide page offers a search box or browse options by: academic department/library, course number, citation, "how do I" and database name. There is also a listing of the "most requested guides" which are currently History Course Web Pages, Religious Studies Subject Guide, and Aerial Photography and Satellite Imagery.

A big advantage of the new database format is that library staff now have access to usage and search logs. Analyzing the "zero hits" from searches has led staff both to improving metadata to make existing guides more findable and sparked the creation of new guides driven by user data. There examples of both which will be shown in the presentation materials for this talk.

So far there have been 400,000 plus searches in the guide database, so clearly users are interested in this functionality. Usage of the guides themselves is up 48% after database implementation. Usage of business information guides is up a dramatic 112%. Stephanie and Jennifer explained this dramatic increase to the fact that prior to database implementation, business guides were not listed separately on the guide page. There was one link to "business guides." With database implementation, individual business titles are exposed to the visitor.

For the future, UCB is planning a librarian survey, some refresher training on guide creation and a usability study to make the database even more effective.

This is another example of how increased visibility leads to increased usage. And I'm happy to see more librarians shining a brighter light on the resources they create.

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Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.