Oh yes, another posting gushing about how much I love LibGuides. I can’t help it! LibGuides has solved many of our problems at Fitchburg State. Well, many library problems. Over the summer I created this document for faculty about ways to put the librarians in Blackboard to help support your class. Most were clunky and required we have instructor permissions. Nobody took us up on the offer and rightfully so. Then we got LibGuides and started creating, what I call, class shortcut pages.
We create them for virtually every class that has an instruction session with a librarian. We put up everything the students will need to successfully complete their assignment: databases, reference tools, RefWorks, polls, etc. If we can, we give them examples from their own topics listed in the guide. The class assignment and session dictate the content of the guide. Thus, each guide is a bit different. Here is one of my favorites for a math class we did in the fall.
The guide solved a variety of problems. First, it allowed us to link to a Meebo chat. It’s with the librarian who made the guide if they put a Meebo box in. Any guide made with our reference account gets the Ask A Librarian box because it’s on that profile. I can add persistent links to articles suggested by the professor (if I have them) complete with our EZProxy code. I can offer research help and I can support issues that come up.
We use the guide to organize our sessions rather than using power point. We link to the guide on our research help page and our list of traditional subject guides (a beast on it’s death bed in my opinion). We also send the professor the link so they can link to it from their Blackboard pages. The students don’t have to come to the library webpage to access it, they simply get the link from Blackboard and go directly to the same sources we discussed in the session.
Feedback from the guides is informal right now. There are the statistics. For my math session there were only 8 students in the fall and 0 students now (the class is not being offered). We did the session in November and in two months the guide was hit 32 times. That averages out to each student using the guide 4 times. In January, right now, the guide has still be hit another 16 times. Remember, this was a class of 8 people. There was a lot of hands on during the session and many left with their research nearly complete. Most of the links were hit in November and just a few were hit in December. I am sure there is a bit of curiosity traffic.
Other feedback has come from in session comments. One student in a literature class I did enjoyed the session because of the guide. As she was leaving she commented on how this session was so much better than the others she had done over the years because it focused on their assignment and she can easily get back to the guide. That was a class of 20 students with only 15 showing up for a session. Since October the guide got 161 hits with the majority of activity in October when they worked on their assignments. One database, Literary Reference Center, got 80 hits that month from my LibGuide alone. If I had done my typical session the students would have forgotten the database and gone to Academic Search Premier because it was the first on our list of databases.
The most popular guide is for our English Comp class, Writing 1. We had about 24 sections of this class come to the library for a session. There were about 22 students per session to total over 500 visits to the guide in our sessions. The main page of the guide got 1588 visits last year. This means there were about 3 times as many visits to the guide as students in the classes. I am not sure if professors linked to this guide, but the numbers are insane and are only going us as we plan to use it again this semester. We have even created one for our Writing 2 class to build upon what they are using. The focus of this session, Credo Reference, got more than 500 hits in the semester. I even think the statistics from LibGuides are a bit conservative. This is one guide that we added a grammar section too when we heard faculty venting about poor grammar skills. I added a feed to the Grammar Girl podcast and fun grammar activities I found online. I even link to silly videos like Ask A Ninja and the Common Craft “…In Plain English” movies.
Last semester we created 8 class specific guides. This semester many more faculty are accepting the offer and even asking for them. Today I am going to do a hard sell in a faculty workshop to give the specific example and start drumming up business for the possibility of having a guide, but no instruction session. I think, for my library, this is a great way to embed a librarian with minimal effort. It also creates portals for students that address the needs of that class. It’s another part to being where they are when they need us.
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