New Identities: Adapting the Academic Library

Formats of library resources in Information Literacy Instruction

Karen Quinn-Wisniewski, Coordinator, Library Electronic Resources Community College of Baltimore County

New Identities: Adapting the Academic Library

Let’s gripe about the constantly changing formats of library resources that we need to use and teach students

and let’s see how we can help each other to save our sanity.

Karen Quinn-Wisniewski, Coordinator, Library Electronic Resources,

Reference Librarian, Information Literacy Instructor (and other duties as assigned)

The History of Libraries

∗Physical

∗Virtual

∗Before Google

∗After Google

The History of Finding Information

Do you use these in instruction?

Research Databases: which one?

Physical and Virtual

McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology

Encyclopedia Britannica

Challenges

• Learning new content and interfaces for each product – we need MORE staff development, but

are often too busy to teach ourselves • Vendors ‘upgrade’ mid semester

• Serving adult learners or the technological unskilled. The majority of CCBC students are 30 years of

age or older.* • The minute the technology goes wrong at the front of the class • When your demonstrated search has unintended results

• With ALL online subscriptions – access! It’s less of a hassle to use Google

• Sometimes Google does a better job understanding keywords and doesn’t need a Boolean search.

Wikipedia is often listed first – is it still a monster? It’s 13yrs old – has the information improved at all?

*CCBC Annual Student Profile and Trends 2014 http://www.ccbcmd.edu/media/pre/annual_student_profile.pdf

∗ Teachers and students alike report that for today’s students, “research” means “Googling.” As a result, some teachers report that for their students “doing research” has shifted from a relatively slow process of intellectual curiosity and discovery to a fast-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete an assignment.

Purcell, Kristen, et al. "How Teens Do Research In The Digital World." Education Digest 6 (2013): 11.

‘Googling’

Use of “Public Internet” in Papers

Initial data from the Citation Project study of student use of sources in researched papers from sixteen US colleges and universities (released August 2011) http://citationproject.net/CitationProject-Sixteen_School_Study-Sources_Selected.pdf

∗ Whether its LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest, people are becoming increasingly reliant on their personal network for information. There are now over 2.8 billion social media profiles, representing around half of all Internet users worldwide. LinkedIn now has over 147 million members. Facebook has over 1.1 billion members and accounts for 20% of all pageviews on the Internet. Google+ currently has over 90 million users.

Frey, Thomas. “Future Libraries and 17 Forms of Information Replacing Books” http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2012/03/future-libraries-and-the-17-forms-of-information-replacing-books/

Social Media as an Information Tool

“Research shows that Wikipedia is often consulted for academic tasks, usually in the early stages of the research process….” Kyung-Sun Kim, et al. "Undergraduates' Use Of Social Media As Information Sources." College & Research Libraries 75.4 (2014): 442-457.

Wikipedia?

“A random selection of articles was chosen from [two] encyclopedias to be evaluated by academic experts in their respective fields. The experts were not told whether the article they were reviewing came from Wikipedia or from Encyclopedia Britannica. Their findings show that only eight serious errors were found, four from each encyclopedia.” Rand, Angela Doucet. "Mediating At The Student-Wikipedia Intersection." Journal Of Library Administration 50.7/8 (2010): 923-932.

A number of studies document use of Wikipedia in higher education learning environments such as classrooms and libraries, both to encourage participation in contributing and to increase outbound links availability to authoritative resources. Ibid.

eBooks

∗ So many different readers/ platforms/ providers and buying models: DDA, UDA, PDA.

CCBC’s eBook Challenges

• Various platforms and learning the differences

• Available access to a specific title. Number of concurrent users is different based on the type of collection (subscription or owned). Instructors want to assign titles for required reading have trouble differentiating.

• Difficult to download – it requires an account, specific reader, etc. The whole book? Only a chapter?

• Dissimilar search algorithms

• It’s hard to be authoritative to students (or faculty) when you say “it’s up to the publisher” such as the printing page limit.

• Faculty to use a book for this assignment – do they mean print only?

∗ Physical and/or streaming?

Media: which ones?

CCBC’s Challenges

• In streaming subscriptions, you don’t own the videos, you ‘rent’ them

• Online subscriptions don’t have all the videos we need

• So we still need to buy the DVD

• We have trouble letting go of outdated formats

• Vendors remove streaming videos based on licensing – they ‘weed’ , not us • Technical issues: embed/stream on CMS? Work with authentication system?

And a discovery service that is supposed to simplify.

Or does it add one more layer?

We create libguides and you do too. Does it help?

Books -> Articles -> Web sites -> Media -> Citation Help

What students use for research

One in four teens are “cell-mostly” internet users, who say they mostly go online using their phone and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer. Pew Research 2013 http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/03/13/teens-and-technology-2013/

The app generation

…there are many wonderful apps, designed to do well, better than most of us could do on our own, what needs to be done.” Gardner, Howard, and Katie Davis. The App Generation : How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, And Imagination In A Digital World / Howard Gardner And Katie Davis. 2013

What’s in the Future? The Future is Now.

∗ It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most

intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

---- NOT by Charles Darwin

∗ “Improvise, adapt and overcome.’” --Old Marine Corp slogan

http://www.marcorsyscom.marines.mil/News/PressReleaseArticleDisplay/tabid/8007/Article/509497

∗ kqwisniewski@ccbcmd.edu

∗ https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenqw

∗ http://libraryguides.ccbcmd.edu/profile/karenqw

Thanks!