ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Bibliographic Instruction: User Education at UCLA

The 1980s may be an inauspicious time to embark on a new and comprehensive user education program, but that’s just what the UCLA libraries are doing. Starting in the 1982 Fall Quarter, librarians from the undergraduate College Library, with voluntary assistance from librarians and staff from other UCLA libraries, will help teach 50 sections of English 3 each quarter. The “library component” of the class takes one class session and is composed of a ten-minute talk on the UCLA library system, a twelve-minute slide/tape on a search strategy, and in the remaining 25 minutes, a hands-on replication of the strategy in the reference area of the library. This program is modelled on one in use successfully at the University of California, San Diego. The major difference will be in the larger audience to be reached.

English 3 (Composition, Rhetoric and Language) is required of all UCLA undergraduates. For the first time it is required in the student’s first year as an undergraduate. This means that all 4,000 entering Freshmen will take English 3 in their first year and will get a basic dose of library instruction. They will be exposed to, taught to use, and taught the value of, subject encyclopedias, LC Subject Headings, the card catalog, periodical indexes, and the UCLA periodicals list. This process will create a base from which other bibliographic instruction can build. Instruction in more advanced courses will then be able to concentrate more on the literature of a particular discipline rather than on the techniques necessary to find information.

For the past three years College Library was involved in English 1, a course required of students who did not pass the basic composition exam (about 50% of entering freshmen). Upon successfully completing English 1, the students moved on to English 3. The Library’s involvement in English 1 was in the form of a self-paced workbook. Rather than simply transferring the workbook to English 3, the Library and the English Department agreed on a new form of library instruction. Reasons for the move away from the workbook are many and varied. Primarily, faculty and librarians feel they can more closely coordinate library instruction with course-assigned research projects by bringing the class into the library. Instruction is timed to precede the research assignment, and the topics used in the search strategy exercise will be chosen by instructors or they will relate to the content of those courses that are subject-focused.

True, this may be an inauspicious time to begin a large user education program. Past theory has always held that “the more you teach them about the library, the more they will demand of you.” UCLA, like most publicly supported universities, is hardly in a period of financial growth and not in a position to add public or technical service staff. So naturally the question arises, “How can we handle the increased demand for service?”

Quite simply, our users will be more selfsufficient once they have completed English 3. There will be times when demand for reference service outstrips supply of librarians. This has happened often over the past several years. Our users who have taken English 3 will be better able to work unassisted. When they do have questions, the questions will be more substantial reference questions, not directional questions. We will concentrate our staff resources in times of highest UCLA undergraduate use, which, according to surveys conducted last year, are Monday through Friday. We will pull back staff resources from days and hours of heavy outside use (high school students, the general community, and other college and university students) on evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays.

This may be an inauspicious time to begin a user education program if it involves adding new staff or decreasing existing services. We believe that it is a good time and in fact a long time overdue to start this program. There is a strong commitment at UCLA to ensure the success of entering undergraduates and to ensure that upon graduation they will have the ability to reason, to think critically, to analyze problems, and to write lucidly and with style. This is an important product of a university education and one which will serve the student throughout life.—Thomas K. Fry.

Editors Note: Thomas K. Fry is college librarian at the University of California, Los Angeles.■ ■

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