Hey Kate! Have you partnered with your local History librarian? 🙂 What you describe is tough to balance, though, and I find that by trying to teach students the overall concepts, it seems to work a little better. Also, we can meet with those students who are struggling so that you can focus on content!
]]>Research Tools Survey
This survey is designed to give me a general sense of the class’s level of familiarity with the library’s various research tools. We will be meeting with The John Hay Library’s scholarly resources librarian and collections curator on 2/9 and I’d like to help them tailor their presentation to your needs. They’ll also be introducing us to collections that might be of interest for your research project for this or other courses you are taking.
1.The database(s) that I most often use for school-related research is/are:
2.I’ve worked with Brown reference librarians on past research projects: YES NO
If “YES,” what was useful and/or not so useful about the experience?
If “NO”, please explain why.
3.My research strategy is best described as follows:
4.The most difficult aspect of conducting research is:
5.When we meet with the research librarians, I would like them to address/answer the following issues:
It was an informative exercise but one that would be harder to implement with a larger class. So, one question I have is this: how can we effectively gauge students’ baseline skills so that our efforts to improve them are targeted?
I must say the results of my small survey confirm your statements about the problem of information overload. In describing the most difficult aspect of their research students responded with statements like these, “The obstacle I encounter is an excess rather than a scarcity of relevant sources; how do I identify appropriate material and synthesize the information” and “Too much information; how do I decide what information to include and to omit?”
]]>Maybe we should add some sort of brainstorming to develop techniques to persuade institutions with all of these fabulous resources to update the wiki.
And many thanks for the book tip – I’m going to send an order to my collections folks now!
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