Unfortunately, the Cyber Zed Shed presentation that I planned on going to at 1:00 (APIs) did not come off.  Therefore, I thought I’d take this time to finish up the blog post I started earlier.

At 10:30, I attended the Reinventing Research Guides session.  This was the first of quite a few sessions related to LibGuides.  Our library has recently adoptedLibGuides, so I was interested in hearing other librarians’ experiences.  My experience with the product has been very positive so far, and I can’t wait to learn more about what we can do with it. 

The session was presented by Ken Liss from Boston College, Emily Frigo and Laura Harris from GVSU and Maura Seele from Georgetown (formerly of GVSU).  The session focused on the history of library research guides, the questions that the literature has raised about them, the implementation of LibGuides and the results of a joint student survey carried out by BC and GVSU.

History of Research Guides

• MIT Pathfinders from the early 1970s. 
• Included instruction instead of just lists of resources.
• Were aimed at beginning researchers.
• Were “syndicated” for use at other libraries through Addison-Wesley

Questions from Literature

• Scope - how broad or narrow should RGs be?
• Guidance - should it guide students to resources or show them how to find their own?
• design/terminology - what do you call them? how should they look? what vocab to use?
• standardization - how standardized or individual should they be?
• workload - how do they impact overall librarian workload
• The missing ingredient:  what do users actually think of them?

Libguides @GVSU and BC

• Librarians at both schools very frustrated with the old ways of doing research guides.
• LibGuides gave them new flexibility and a way to bypass the hierarchy of getting someone else to do it.
• Initially a lot of work to transfer old guides, but the workload decreases over time.
• Struggling to decide what uses are appropriate and which are “seeing every thing as a nail just because you have a hammer.”
• Standardization has been an issue for GVSU.
• Finding they need to make them as specific as possible (not too general or broad).

Student Survey

• Scope: prefer more specific; many students mentioned course and major info; descriptions preferred by 90% of respondents.
• Guidance: students wanted specific help and “how-to” information added; expected “credible” sources; students not much more likely to approach librarians through LibGuides than in person (”library anxiety” not necessarily lessened).
• Design/Terminology: 90% found tabs at the top helpful; 97% at BC liked the term “Research Guides”; 75% of GVSU students liked the term “Library Guides”; 92% @ BC said they found the guides “very easy” or “fairly easy” to find from the main page.
• Promotion: issues of where to link from on website; blackboard and syllabus popular with students; students not so keen on using facebook as a portal to LibGuides (doesn’t seem “professional” to some of them)

Next Steps

• Promotion steps: market to major institutional stakeholders; get links on CMS and syllabi; integrate with instruction sessions; develop more course guides; add more “how-tos.”
• 92%+ said they would use LibGuides guides again.
• The presenters have, kindly, created a LibGuide about their project:  http://libguides.gvsu.edu/acrl09 .  Check it out!

On another note, I ran into a colleague from my days as a grad assistant at the University of Tennessee at the session.  Go Vols!