January 22, 2008
Library Subject Guides in the Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, Trans-disciplinary World
The Women's Studies Section of ACRL offered an interesting discussion topic at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia last week, "(Re)Thinking Subject Guides: Interactivity Unbound." This group offers great topics which generate a surprising amount of interest, based on the fact that I ended up sitting on the floor for this.
There was a great deal of sharing from a number of institutions on how they are dealing with subject guides. Two libraries mentioned using LibGuides from Springshare. Here are a couple of examples of institutes using it, Boston College and Dalhousie University. I'm not going to get into the pros and cons of this software in this entry, since my purpose is to simply spill the gist of the discussion that took place.
Another management system mentioned was Luminis, which offers personal portals with tabs and will automatically show subject librarians.
A Michigan State librarian mentioned using open source LibData for subject guides, created by University of Minnesota. Here's an example of one of their subject guides for African Studies
Wayne State mentioned using Conduit software to create toolbars with different categories.
There was talk of using Del.icio.us to create a feed or list of online resource into guides but people agreed that it doesn't work well for personalizing a guide once you're in Del.icio.us.
One participant said there is such a thing as too much information and offers strictly one page guides to undergraduates at the University of Central Florida.
There was talk about whether "emerging technology" is the best thing to use for subject guides. Some folks said good ol' paper handouts work best for them. Others give handouts during instructional sessions but also offer them as PDFs and post links to them online.
We discussed using wikis as subject guides and I was surprised by acomment from one librarian who said people at her institution bulk at offering wikis for students because the library discredits using Wikipedia for academic research so creating one might encourage the wiki mentality. (Honey, the wikis are already HERE! Read Everything is Miscellaneous)
University of California - San Diego's Science and Engineering Library talked about using wikis but one person said they ended up with too many wikis and couldn't tame the clutter. They are now working on working out ways of creating better control over wikis and working toward standardization.
It appeared that many librarians opted for newer, easier technology for subject guides in order to circumvent institutional IT departments which weren't allowing them to create their own personalized tools for specific courses or topics.
Someone in the group asked if anyone kept statistics on the use of subject guides in their library and there was very little response to that idea. One library had surveyed students to see what they would like in a subject guide. There was no mention of the results of this survey. A couple librarians mentioned they relied on subject guides for answering research question from disciples in which they were not as familiar with resources. Others said their faculty used subject guides and even suggested topics for guides. That lead to a discussion on how you determine which topics need subject guides. Most librarians base guides on the disciple areas within their institutions. If you don't offer a major in European Studies do you really need a subject guide on that? This ends up being one of the major problems facing librarians as disciplines become more and more intertwined.
Posted by swortman at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)