Great days of teaching

I have had a few great teaching moments in the past week. Last year, a few of the students in that class got to the library very early. While I was setting up, one girl complained, "Why do we have to do this again? I've been here so many times already!" I ran through the useful resources for the assignment, asking them to explain some of the stuff. There were many questions they couldn't answer. I talked about relevant reference books, but when they broke off to do their lab assignment on creating a profile for a neurological disease, they went straight to Web sites.... and they got very frustrated. Finally I convinced one of them to try the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, and there was a moment of light shining down as they got it. They were recommending it to the other groups, and I watched those heavenly spotlights shine down.

This year I told the students how much previous students liked that resource, so many of them went straight to it. They loved it even more. One group had to be told to go use some electronic resources because they were so involved in the print encyclopedia. It was wonderful. It was like having a celebrity endorsement.

Today I taught two English composition courses. We did the spy game and it went very well. For the first time, I coupled the game with a clicker review at the end. Almost the entire class got every single question right, and a majority of them reported that this was a fun way to learn about the library.

Furthermore, one student that I had worked with one-on-one the previous week, came up to tell me how much she had learned about the library from our meeting. She was raving about the resources and the elevator. She seemed very excited about her topic and research, which absolutely thrilled me.

Online Reference Tools

I have been given the task of exploring possibilities were our library to decide to move to more online reference works. Oxford offers a number of reference books online, but when we looked at the titles, none of the librarians was particularly interested. I asked for a quote from Cambridge Histories and it was outrageously expensive, even after the PALINET discount. Today we got a CHOICE card that covers Credo Reference, which seems worth looking into.

I'm a more than a little boggled by all of the issues involved. The first is can we afford it at our little school? Most vendors consider a "small school" to be 5,000 FTE, and even a school that size has a much bigger budget than us at about 1,300. Some reference resources are a one-time fee with annual maintenance fees, and some are flat-out annual fees like a regular database. Some allow you to select individual titles, some are whole collections. How any of them work with Reference Universe will be important to us deciding whether or not to get them at all.

I really love reference books and am always so happy when I take the time to look at them. I think all libraries are watching students skip the reference step and go straight for Web sites, books, and articles. Some libraries report more use of electronic reference resources, and if students are more likely to use those, then they are definitely worth pursuing.

Reference Question Stumper

I just had a student at the reference desk whose professor is offering extra credit if they can figure out what the significance of the number 39 is in the movie Blow-Up. He said there's a book in the library that will tell them. She had already searched out a dictionary of symbols, and we looked through some others. I also used Reference Universe. When I write out "thirty-nine," it returns several reference articles on the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. She read about them in one of our reference books, but doesn't see the connection. I didn't know what else to try, and am not having any luck on the Internet either...

A little while later...
With some tweaking of the search terms in Google, I found the number thirty discussed in a book called After Hitchcock. It's either a reference to Hitchcock's 39 Steps, which has similar themes in its plot, or that Antonioni was living in Europe in 1939. Long live Google Books. Now if they'd only let me print a page or two...

Something to Blog About

Two nights ago, I was watching a Simpsons re-run with my fiance (it's one of the few tv shows we can agree on, along with Jeopardy, Cash Cab, and Dirty Jobs). It was a very touching episode that gave a reference book a brilliant moment in the sun. Homer has to do marketing research to try to get more business for the bowling alley so he can get a raise. He put on his reading glasses and is reading Advanced Marketing at the dining room table. That ends up in the trash as he moves on to Beginning Marketing. That also ends up in the trash. Then he is seen with the New American Dictionary, looking up the word "marketing."

I wanted to possibly use this clip in the instruction classroom. It would bea great introduction to reference books and getting students to start at the beginning. However, I hardly ever watch the show and couldn't think of how I would possibly figure out which episode it was.

Within seconds of starting my search, I found the exact episode title, season, summary, and list of cultural references on Wikipedia. It has its own entry for every single episode of The Simpsons through the summer of 1999 (the later DVD's are apparently not available yet). I am completely blown away, and this is a great way to illustrate how Wikipedia covers popular culture much better than any print encyclopedia... I highly doubt any pop culture encyclopedia has its own entries for every Simpsons character, episode, and location!

I looked up Gil Grissom, a character from CSI, and the entry includes the character's life story, first appearance, and have individual entries for episodes of that show as well... Print Preview shows it would take 9 pages to print this article. ER also has a list of episodes with summaries, but not individual entries.

I know Wikipedia was extensive, but I never realized how extensive. It has been incredibly helpful to me today, now I can get that season of The Simpsons on DVD if I want to show it in class, as well as finding new ways to procrastinate at work (which I hardly need)!

Reference Resource of the Week

I started another blog called Reference Resource of the Week this afternoon to highlight things in our reference collection to the other librarians here. We recently reviewed our reference standing orders and there were many items on that list that I was very unfamiliar with but sound like they could do some great things.

The blog format seems like it will be perfect for this. I can easily update and change this, it allows for comments from my fellow librarians. If anyone else wants to contribute, I can set up access for them, posts will show up by title (a.k.a. resource title) in the archives and will be searchable, plus it comes with an RSS feed which I turned into an e-mail alert since the other librarians here don't do much with RSS.

I started today with Gale Directory Library since we just got access to it today. When I look at print resources, I can leave it at the reference desk for the week. I hope this will make us utilize a broader portion of the reference collection when we help people at the desk, and select a broader range of resources to highlight during instruction sessions.