Subscribe for Free
View PDF
Send to a Friend
 |
||||||||||||||||
|
Training Can Be Your Library’s Best Promotion; Here Are Five Top Training Tips
Rachel Daniels
1. Find Helping Hands
Some academics can be enlisted to be "champions" for electronic resources. Not only will some fervently recommend databases in their lectures and tutorials but some will even set assignments involving use of particular resources. Get to academics early on in their careers so you can groom them for useful promotional purposes! We get information on new staff members before they start and this allows us to make an appointment for each during the first week of the college induction process. During this appointment each new faculty member is given a tour of the library, provided with necessary passwords and given a detailed introduction to online resources. Also, if you possibly can, involve academics right from the start of the resource acquisition process. Use them in database trials and encourage feedback from them.
We do not spend time reinventing the wheel by writing guides to individual databases but we do link where possible to helpful online guides produced by database suppliers. For example the Help link for ScienceDirect leads customers to the ScienceDirect interactive tutorials. Why not let the experts have the worry of producing and updating!
2. Carefully Plan Live Trainings
There are several elements to bear in mind when thinking about promoting e-resources to students through training. Consider the following.
- Time It Right
Through liaising with academics, try to negotiate an appropriate time, when your librarian-led training will tie in with assignments. - Make It Relevant
Discover what subjects and assignments students will be covering in their courses and ensure searches you use demonstrate useful and pertinent resources. If students can see the immediate benefit of using resources, they are more likely to come back and try them again. - Select Impressive Resources
Strategically select databases and websites you will show in training. You are unlikely to be able to show students everything, so go for the ones that make an impression, either visually or because of content. (Full-text databases go down a storm – particularly if you have students who leave assignments until the last minute!) Also sell the benefits of image databases if students are likely to give presentations. - Teach Transferable Skills
As you can’t show everything and because new resources can be acquired at any time, concentrate on effective search skills useful in any resource. To avoid glazed expressions, I rarely mention Boolean and keyword searches; instead I suggest the process for searching for information is like the process of buying a car. Involved are four principles: - You think about what you want in a good car.
- You consider what you don’t want. (Someone always mentions a Robin Reliant or rust!)
- You consider what you will use it for.
- You work out the best place to buy it from.
In terms of information searching this translates as:
- You think about the subject of your search and keywords you can use. What sort of documents will answerquestions in your assignment?
- You think about what you don’t need. You narrow down a search by the usual methods: adding more keywords, narrowing search dates, searching particular fields and so on.
- You think about what you will use the information for. The search and required results may vary depending on if a student is writing an essay, briefing paper, presentation or full-blown dissertation.
- You work out the best place to find the information. We have found there is no point in fighting the allures of Google but we do state why students should not solely rely on this; they probably won’t believe you until you prove it to them! It’s a useful time to remind them of key resources in their areas and to point out other Internet search aids such as Scirus or using portals such as AERADE, EEVL or Humbul.
