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Your
First-year students typically arrive at Union having mastered the
information gathering practices that enabled them to achieve
academic success in high school. Few of them, however, will have had
any significant experience with an information environment as
complex, rich, or dynamic as that which Union offers. By involving
the Library and its staff in your Preceptorial, you can help ease
the transition these students will need to make in order to become
accomplished researchers in the college setting. We also think that
it is extremely important that students new to Union hear
directly—from someone in the Library—the message that we are here to
help them |
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- Orientation: Students tour the facility and are provided with basic
information regarding Library policies, practices, collections,
and services
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Access: Students learn to access and navigate the various features of
the Library website.
- Research:
Starting with the catalog as the centerpiece of the research
process, students learn to search for Library materials, to
revise their search strategies for improved results, to gather
detailed information about the materials they find in their
search, to request research materials from other libraries’
collections, to launch their searches in periodicals databases,
and to identify and search specialized, discipline-specific
research databases.
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Critical
Evaluation: Students are taught to evaluate and to distinguish between
freely available Internet resources and subscription-based,
research-quality resources that are delivered via the Internet,
to distinguish between popular periodical titles and
peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and to identify the resources
that are best suited to meeting their individual research needs.
- Support: Students are instructed that the expertise of Library staff
represents one of the most important resources that the Library
has to offer, that establishing a working relationship with
Library personnel is likely to benefit many of the projects they
will be undertaking over the course of the next four years, and
are reminded that anyone on the professional staff would be
happy to work with them on an informal, one-to-one basis to help
them identify and learn to use any of the resources that the
Library provides.
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Bruce Connolly (phone: 6281 / email:
connollb@union.edu), David Gerhan (phone: 6614 / email:
gerhand@union.edu), or any librarian with whom you have a
comfortable working relationship to set up an initial planning
meeting geared toward the needs of your First-Year Preceptorial course. |
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Training for Faculty Members:
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Informal,
one-on-one orientation and training session on Library resources
and services for the FYP faculty member prior to the term and,
ideally, at the point where the research project is being
planned.
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Helping faculty to become acquainted with the full range of
resources that the library has to offer is a key component of
the program for us, and helping faculty learn to use these
resources effectively themselves is also a high priority.
Librarians affiliated with the program are interested in taking
you on a tour of the reference collection, demonstrating the
capabilities of the online catalog, identifying electronic
resources appropriate for the research projects you are
planning, determining what types of handouts and instructional
materials are needed for you class, and hearing your suggestions
regarding the resources the Library might need to acquire to
support course-related research. We are happy to meet with you
individually or in small groups, in the Library or in your
office.
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Support for
Courses:
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Librarians
can create web-based research guide for your FYP section,
customized to include the specific print titles, scholarly
databases, and web resources that you want students to use for
their research and writing.
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Librarians
can also create handouts on general and specific topics that
will be covered in your FYP section, for print, online, or
Blackboard distribution.
See the
Subject Research area of the Library website or look at any
of these examples:
Water
Women & War
Gender, Sexuality & Music
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Instruction/Partnering Alternatives:
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Librarian-led instruction sessions—conducted during class time
in either the Library or your classroom—of length and frequency
suited to the course’s overall learning goals or to the specific
and immediate needs of your students.
| These could be one of the standard, hour-long library
instruction sessions, scheduled during a class time and covering
reference sources appropriate to the research assignment,
searching the catalog, selecting and searching scholarly
databases, and authoritative websites. Alternatively, they might
involve a quick visit to demonstrate a specific information
gathering skill or technique—marking search results in the
catalog or a database and downloading them into a bibliographic
management software package, saving search strategies that can
be re-executed over and over via the catalog’s “My Library”
feature, or setting up an alert in a database which will
automatically email journal citations on a research topic at
regularly specified intervals. |
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Support
for Blackboard, including resource development, participation in
online discussions where appropriate, and the option of
registering a librarian as an instructor for your course.
| Blackboard gives faculty the option of registering a librarian
as an instructor for the course and granting the privilege of
posting research-related materials on the Blackboard site.
Alternatively, a librarian might create materials that are
published via Blackboard and/or the “Subject Research” area of
the Library website. |
Back-up for
Faculty:
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Plagiarism
checking using the Turnitin system.
| The Library maintains a plagiarism website and provides access
to the Turnitin.com system. |
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Support
for bibliographic management software such as RefWorks.
Access to
RefWorks software, training workshop, customized materials,
consultation.
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