Putting LC Call Numbers in Order: The Game

Need a break?  Try something relaxing, like playing a quick game of placing library books in proper order according to their Library of Congress Classification System call numbers.  Look at this webpage on Understanding Call Numbers if you need a refresher. 

Do you ever teach others how to use call numbers?  Does it go something like this?

First, remember to place them in order alphabetically.  When a call number begins with one letter, it comes before another that has two letters: N before NA, for example.  Then, look at the numbers.  Count up from the number  one: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 45, 100, 101, 789, 1001, etc.  Third, notice the decimal .5 comes before .52, which also precedes .6, since it is a decimal.

• N100.C45 comes before NA99.A33
• N100.C45 comes before N100.5A32
• N100.C45 comes before N100.C5

Now play the call number game if you have not done so already.  Thankfully the Lewis-Clark State College Library has made this game available after it disappeared from elsewhere.  Michael Ford, formerly at the University of Pittsburgh, created the game originally.  Once he moved on, his game became unavailable on the U. of Pittsburgh's website.

Browse the Library of Congress Classification Outline.  Drill down the outline to see how the narrower topics shoot off from the broader ones.

An Aside
In looking for the links to the Library of Congress, I discovered a very brief message from Clint Eastwood, America's tough guy.  He encourages the viewer, you and me, to make our day by reading a book: Clint Eastwood video.  We are talking about finding books in the catalog and on the shelves today in the ACAD 1199 class I am teaching.  This video seems like an appropriate one to start the class. 

It seems like a good idea to teach about keyword Boolean searching, subject heading searching, and understanding call numbers.  Ideally, students will leave the class more confident searching the catalog and finding books on the shelves.

If you teach library instruction classes, what have you done to instruct students in searching your library's catalog?

LearningExpress Library: Great for Skill Development & Test Preparation

Here's a Prezi presentation I created to help people understand what kinds of great resources are made available through the LearningExpress Library.  All residents of Idaho may access these resources.

We often see students who wish to prepare for the GRE, the LSAT, and other graduate entrance exams.  Additionally, international students come looking for materials to help them get ready to take the TOEFL test, and it is nice to have easy-to-reference materials we can recommend that speak to all of these tests.  The Idaho Commission for Libraries has secured funding for the subscription of this resource over two years, so this subscription ends in November 2012.

LearningExpress Library Demonstration on Prezi

It also offers many computer, math, and reading tutorials.  Anyone interested in becoming a U.S. citizen can also prepare for the necessary test(s) with resources here.

Active-Learning Presentation

Tomorrow I will be giving an active-learning presentation to librarians at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT. I have been updating and revising previous presentations along these lines. On my Google Sites page you can find some of these materials.

I anticipate that there will be lots of discussion. Librarians like to talk it seems. If you look at or want to use my presentations, please let me know and attribute me accordingly.

Follow-up on Instruction Menu

My colleagues liked the idea of having an instruction menu, so I created one for the First-Year-Seminar instructors. I conducted a search via Google to find some sample menus online to help me get my creative juices flowing, and I found the following menu from Jus Cookin’s Restaurant. After sending it out for my colleagues to take a look, I received some feedback:
-- "You must have had fun."
-- "I liked your delicious menu."
-- "It’s a little cutesy and maybe a little overdone, but I do really like the options you’ve provided."

I would have to agree that I got a little carried away with the idea. I need to remember my audience. Another colleague gave some useful input, noting that many faculty will not want to read all the verbiage included on the menu as it currently stands. She suggested including more graphics while making certain that the description of the menu item was straightforward and easily understandable. With some of the adjectives in the menu now, it's possible that the meaning may be obscured.

She also put forth the idea that breaking up the menu might be more palatable for the FYS instructors, as they would have more leeway to choose what they wanted for their students. She encouraged me to stick with the menu idea; many instructors would appreciate something new and different, while others may not feel it's as serious as it ought to be. It's hard to know who your audience is sometimes; however, knowing your audience and tailoring your services to their "tastes" can increase your chances for success.

The meeting with the FYS instructors is on Friday, so I have a little more time to tinker with the menu. Ideally, it will attract more customers than it repels.

Library Instruction A la Carte: The InfoLit Menu

In recent weeks the ALA's Information Literacy and Instruction listserv had asked for those librarians who had helped create or who work under a "menu" system to post their "menu" to the listserv. Anyway, I learned that several librarians across the country have implemented a systematic program where professors on campus can choose from a menu of information-literacy options. Someone made mention of an article that explained how librarians from Radford University had created such a menu. Here's the full citation:

Benjes-Small, C. & Brainard, B. (2006). And today we'll be serving…An instruction a la carte menu. College and Research Libraries News, 67(2), 80-82. Retrieved Wednesday, November 15, 2006 from Library Literature and Information Science Full-Text database (200603203836004). [See also a brief summary of the article at the following site: Information Literacy in Higher Education: Annotated Bibliography. I highly recommend reading the article.

Take a look at the sites I have tagged with the word menu. I will only talk about two more of the sites in this post. Radford University's Instruction A La Carte Menu outlines a few basic information-literacy topics that their librarians are willing and able to teach. According to the article, they had professors who wanted them to teach something else the day of instruction in addition to what they had already agreed upon teaching. Now, they can point to the menu whenever a professor tries to get them to teach more than they are able in the allotted time period and say that another instruction session would be need to adequately cover the desired material, or they would need to cut one item from the menu.

Creating such a menu has opened the eyes of their faculty to the kinds of things their librarians can teach. In their own words Candice Benjes-Small and Blair Brainard note: "We had hoped that the menu would communicate to the professors the limitations of a single 50-minute session, but we found that the menu also served as a vehicle for sharing possibilities" (82). Faculty did not realize that their librarians could cover more than just finding articles in databases and books in catalogs. It's good that librarians share their expertise and be assertive in doing so. The Radford-University librarians seem to have succeeded in doing this in a consistent manner with the help of their menu.

Some librarians would disagree with a few items on their menu, such as the plagiarism item. Benjes-Small and Brainard claim that this has become a popular topic for librarians to discuss in recent years, but just because it is popular may not justify its presence in a library-instruction session. A campus Writing Center or a Freshman English course may be a better-suited venue for a plagiarism discussion. Speaking from experience, plagiarism discussions beg the question of how to properly cite and paraphrase sources, focusing on the mechanics of writing.

Why should librarians teach plagiarism or academic honesty? Librarians are trained to find and evaluate information. On the other hand, if instructors believe their students will take the plagiarism discussion more seriously from someone who is not their teacher, perhaps it is justified, yet the stern nature of a plagiarism discussion makes it so that the librarians look like the bad guys in front of the students, further exacerbating the bad reputation librarians have been bequeathed as stuffy, they-don't-like-to-have-fun people who live in a romanticized world full of books. Well, we do get the privilege of interacting with books--one of the greatest pieces of technology ever, but that doesn't mean we should be the ones teaching about plagiarism. Chances are that I might re-write this post, because it shows evidence of my frustration with professors and instructors who do not respect the work of librarians, those who act non-plussed to be in the library and only come because it's a requirement for their freshman seminar class. No doubt I have misinterpreted body language from instructors, but the perception of being under-appreciated [the Spanish word "menospreciado" seems to capture my meaning more closely as it is somewhere between being under appreciated and despised] is certainly not a good one to experience. Let us do what we do best = help people find and evaluate research materials and information to suit their needs.

[If someone writes a post or article justifying why librarians can or should teach a plagiarism session, please let me know. Even as I re-read the previous paragraph the idea occurs to me that information literacy involves analyzing sources and ideas for their validity = the positive side of learning and research. Information literacy to some extent is the antithesis of plagiarism, so maybe plagiarism is justified as a library session. Still, I would rather focus on the positive, creative efforts of finding and evaluating information than on the negative don't-do-this-or-else type of plagiarism discussion.]

The Radford menu shows that there are plenty of items to please a large number of professors. Again the Benjes-Small & Brainard article inspires me: "The menu has become a powerful marketing tool. After being shown the array of choices for library instruction available, professors are now much more likely to request a second library session for their classes" (82). Hurray! This sounds like a positive step in the right direction--a step that I feel would be good for most, if not all, academic libraries to take, particularly if they value library instruction. When I presented the idea of having a menu in our program, my colleagues seemed to agree that it would be worth doing. We will probably even create a specific freshman-seminar menu, so instructors can choose what they want, rather than being forced to follow a particular program.

The University of Alaska Southeast has create a similar Information Literacy Instruction Menu. They have presented their menu in a somewhat similar style--with a question such as "Will your students need to select and narrow a topic?"--as the Radford-University librarians, although it is manifested a bit differently on their website. They allow for their instructors to click on boxes next to the menu item, so a request can be sent to the librarians with all the desired items.

An important element that each website includes is the caveat that the menu only speaks to the most popular selections of the group at large--not the individual needs of a specialized class. They reserve the right to cook up specials for a professor's class; this would require that a professor express their unique needs to the assigned librarian who could then tailor the instruction session to fit the tastes of the clients in question.

For those instructors who desire hands-on activities for their students, the cost [accounted for in number of minutes] would increase. Quantifying instruction in such a way really goes a long way in justifying to instructors the necessity of bringing their classes in for more than one fifty-minute session.

Please post a comment to my blog. Let me conclude this post with a quotation from Albert Einstein on the positive thrill of teaching: "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." Quote found at Quote World. This particular quote was found here.
It speaks about the real teacher, someone who can actually "awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." These are the kinds of teachers that light fires for people, inspiring them to learn, be creative, and be movers and shakers--productive with their lives. This is something worth aspiring toward.

Information-Literacy Audiences

Somewhat recently an instructor in the English department requested to use the library instruction room to give his class research instruction. Our policy states that nobody use the room without a librarian present, and we reserve for instruction of library resources or information sources. In my view it's an information-literacy room. I could not see any valid reason for refusing him the room, as he did intend to use it to teach his students how to conduct research using the library resources.

I sat in on the instruction session myself to observe his approach to library research. He actually talked about Boolean terms. In fact, he asked the students about the term, and someone even dared to say that "AND," "OR," and "NOT" were the correct Boolean terms. He even asked them what they were used for ["What do they do for us?"], and another student said they are used to connect keywords in a search. Sometimes I assume students do not know these things, but many have already had library instruction, so they have heard it already. This instructor, Dr. X, had asked how many of the students had attended a library-instruction session in their English 101 course, and most of them indicated that they had. Librarians would do well to ask questions to see how much their audience already knows. In fact, we should be asking the right kinds of questions of the instructors before they bring their class into the library for instruction. As this instructor said, "We all know how to diagram the word 'assume.'"

He did not dwell on things for too long, because he wanted students to have time to conduct research while someone [us] could help them. He showed the library quick links to find the catalog and the databases. He showed the call-number link that shows the names of the books that come before and after the one clicked, so you can browse the shelves virtually. [I'm still not sure this always works exactly in this way, because many different items are located in different parts of the library with very similar call numbers, such as reference books, periodicals, items in special collections, etc. But it's pretty good, since there are lots more books than journal titles and reference materials.]

It was great to see him point out the Resources-by-Subject pages with their different sections, namely books, web sites, and articles. Come to think of it, he did not mention contacting any librarians for help. Perhaps I should encourage him to do so the next time he brings his class to the library.

This leads me to my most important observation in this post. Why did he not want a "reference librarian" to teach his class? He willingly told me after the class had finished that he has been to library-instruction sessions where the librarian takes the entire time explaining how to do research. He feels strongly that students need time to do it in the class. Like he was saying, students leave the library session and do not do any research for a while and in the meantime they forget what they "learned," so when they try it themselves they stumble and cannot find anything. Their recourse is to Google the information--something they know how to do already. They need time to practice, run into roadblocks, and ask for help when their instructor or librarian is close by and ready to offer it.

He attended a graduate library-instruction session last semester, and he tells me that the librarian talked for two and a half hours about how to do research. In his view, a valid one in my opinion, he felt he knew how to do research already otherwise he would not be where he was = in graduate school. I appreciate the feedback he gave me, because librarians who do give instruction need to be aware of their audiences. We are often chomping at the bit to show them everything we have, that we overlook some of their basic needs and desires, like just trying it on their own. During that two hour and twenty minute session he tried to write down ideas for his own research.

Chances are that some of his colleagues liked the workshop heartily and did not complain; however, many probably wished that they had an opportunity just to practice and start doing some research where a librarian could assist them directly with a specific question.

One of the things I liked the most about his class was how he emphasized evaluating the results of search in determining which ones will be used. "Do you pick the first five if five is what you need? How do you select sources?" This is definitely something I need to do better at myself.

Earlier in this post I mentioned that librarians should be asking the right kinds of questions of instructors before they bring their classes into the library. Here are some questions that we might ask, depending on the situation. If anyone reading this post has more questions along these lines, please add them as a comment to this post.

• What would you like me to focus on during the 50-minute, library-instruction session?
• How much would you like me to focus on the article databases, library catalog, citation resources, developing a search strategy, evaluating search results, showing the library web site, etc.?
• How much time would you like for your students to conduct hands-on research?
• What did you like most about previous library presentations given to your previous classes?
• What did you like least about previous library presentations that I should avoid?
• Where do your students need the most help with their research?
• How do your students learn the most?
• What is the biggest question you hope students will strive to answer in your course?
• What one important thing do you hope your students will gain from their visit to the library?
• What can I, as a reference/instruction librarian, do to help you and your students?
• What are some of the topics that interest your students?
• Which texts do you use/require in your course?
  

Clearly, not all of these questions should be asked of every instructor, but as a faculty member I want to help the university accomplish its research and learning mission. The library, its resources, and staff know that they can contribute to this worthy goal and advance information literacy = critical thinking + knowing how to find the best, most-accurate information needed.