| 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 |
- Orientation: Students tour the facility and are
provided with basic information regarding Library policies, practices,
collections, and services
- 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.
- 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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- 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.
| 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. |
Support for Courses:
- 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.
- Librarians can also create handouts on general and specific topics
that will be covered in your FYP section, for print, online, or
Blackboard distribution.
Instruction/Partnering Alternatives:
- Librarian-led instruction sessions conducted during class time in
either the Library or your classroom. Length and frequency suited to
the courses 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. |
- 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:
- Plagiarism checking using the Turnitin system.
The Library provides access to the Turnitin.com system. Contact Gail Golderman for more information on how to incorporate the database into your class.
|
- Support for bibliographic management software such as RefWorks.
| Access to RefWorks software, training workshop, customized materials, consultation. |
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