More on spoon feeding

Spoon feeding is only the start for students, but we may also want to go back to it later in their careers.

Ned Potter (thewikiman  http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=1821 ) has also blogged on the spoon feeding debate. I was pleased to see that he had taken a similar line to my post yesterday emphasising the need to take a developmental approach.  He says

spoon-feeding should be the first step in a structured approach to helping students navigate their way through a degree, with the library embedded and responsive at all stages 

I couldn't agree more!  Although of course he acknowledges this is the ideal and not the norm yet!

What also caught my eye was the comment from jothelibrarian talking about the same process in the corporate library where she works.

This reminds me of discussions I've had before about the poor transfer of information skills from one context to another.  I worked with a librarian in an FE college who had recently joined us from a local high school.  One day she was literally banging her head against the office wall in frustration.  Students she had taught in the high school were in but had forgotten everything she had taught them there about using indexes in books, online catalogues etc.  She knew they had these skills in high school, why not in College a few months later?

It looks like this spoon feeding analogy doesn't quite go along the same lines as weaning a baby - we will need to do it more than once!

Lastly Jo comments that she goes back to spoon feeding herself with senior colleagues

However those colleagues that go on to become senior managers often have need of the spoon again. They are so busy, and have so much going on that there is simply no way they could do all the research they need. With those colleagues, I find a good (fast!) reference interview followed by some swift research on their behalf is the way to go.

This is a very similar approach to the one I used with teaching staff in the FE & Sixth Form Colleges I have worked in.  Not only does it support our colleagues and organisations by using our skills to best effect, it is also great PR and really helps to build the good relationships that are likely to foster the partnerships we want to build in teaching all those literacies.

Picture credit freeloosedirt http://flic.kr/p/4Sb8HN

How much help?

I've been stimulated to write this post in response to Simon Barron http://undaimonia.blogspot.com/2012/01/help-how-much-help-should-libraries-be.html and Georgina Hardy's post http://cpdbygeorge.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/133/ mentioned in Funktious's comment. (Hope all those references make sense!)

The thrust of Simon's post is that we shouldn't help too much in academic libraries to ensure the students develop their own information literacy, however Georgina considers that we can over emphasise this and "We must be very careful not to value process above principles."

We have had similar discussions in FE libraries - the natural inclination of the library staff I've worked with is to help and find the information the students are looking for; but we have tried to wean ourselves off this and support students to use the catalogue etc to find resources themselves.

I can very much identify with both sides of this debate as I also wanted to get our students (HE & FE) to use the online resource we subscribed to, and this was very much an uphill battle.  I agree  with Georgina that the main point of providing these resources is for the students to engage with them as part of their learning.

I have no data to back this contention, but I would estimate that in any cohort of students there will be the following categories of students in varying proportions:

1. those who are actively engaging with the online content and learn the research skills alongside their subject and can carry those forward into future careers 
2. those who struggle but who will come to info lit sessions and ask for help at enquiry desks
3. those who struggle and get by on the bare minimum not fully engaging with the resources available or picking up any research skills despite our best efforts.

If we facilitate students accessing the materials with direct links on reading lists, VLEs etc then at least the students in group 3 will be enabled to access the resources and learn from the content. Those in group 1 having easy access the essential resources will have the time and energy to extend their reading and develop the research skills to support this.  Lastly those in group 2 will gain confidence and with support hopefully move into group 1.

Maybe the solution is to offer different levels of content links as the students progress - lots for first years and decreasing for second and third years, together of course with lots of tips on searching and evaluating. We also need to be explicit as to why we are doing this so that the students don't think they are just getting a poorer service in later years!

On a personal note I have to confess that the best mark I got as an undergraduate was for an assignment where I left it too late to get access to any of the (print only) resources and had to muddle through with what was to hand.  This drove my creativity and I made links I might not otherwise have done.  I wouldn't recommend this as a strategy to others though - there have been plenty of times where deadline surfing has done me no favours at all!

Picture credit: http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4091/5096437962_91971f8d52.jpg Jessica M Cross

Logging enquiries

Record enquiry work, share it with the team to avoid doing stuff twice and hand the resulting information to the customer in one easy hit.

Dealing with more complex enquiries taking more than a few minutes is a significant part of our library’s workload. We’re too small to need a bespoke system, but needed an efficient way of both recording and sharing the work done and handing over information to the customer. I’d come up with a number of ideas – using a blog, a self carbonating form and a spread sheet (based on I think Fid Bleasdale’s idea presented at a CoLRiC conference years ago). None had lasted, but one of my team (Steve) suggested using OneNote. Inspired! Of course, that’s just the kind of thing it is designed for.

So we now have a template that has commonly used headings. These also remind team members that have a favourite source to think about the others too. I’m an online junkie and don’t always think about the books enough and at least one of my team wouldn’t think to use our online databases without a memory jog. Not every section will be needed, so the redundant bits can easily be deleted.



When the form is completed we can either attach the note to an email, copy and paste the content into the body of an email or print it out depending on what details we have. I printed one today even though it referred to online sources as I had also printed out the two documents concerned for the student. We have our contact details on the form, so the student knows who to ask for if they need something clarifying.

We also include the search terms we used (well the successful ones!) to guide the customer next time. Screen shots have also been included if the database is tricky to use. We haven’t written up any case studies yet, but that’s the next step towards the end of the year. We’ll pick one or two from each curriculum area, strip of customer names and contact details and then circulate them to the relevant teaching teams (and of course College managers!)