ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

A Non-Credit/Non-Graded Course at the University of Kansas

Bibliographic Instruction

In a continuing effort to determine the best approach(es) for bibliographic instruction at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, reference and instruction librarians are developing a non-credit/ non-graded sequence for students who are interested in learning basic research skills. The course was advertised by posters placed throughout major academic buildings on campus, the student union, and Watson (main) Library. Enrollment and attendance are voluntary: the sequence is open to students at all levels and in all areas of study.

The course, which lasts for seven weeks, meets once a week for one hour and forty-five minutes. Each session covers a predetermined topic (syllabi are made available) and consists of a lecture, relevant demonstrations using handouts and supporting materials, and interactive discussions. The sessions cover the following topics and concerns:

1) Introduction; classification systems; card catalog—Author/Title.

2) Card catalog—Subject; Library of Congress Subject Headings; subject tracings.

3) Periodicals; periodical indexes; our COMCAT for serials.

4) Reference books—dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographical tools, others.

5) Reference books (cont.)—bibliographies.

6) Other materials, including microforms, newspapers, and government documents.

7) Designing a search strategy; other topics; review.

At the conclusion of each of the first six sessions, an assignment sheet for those who wish to follow up the session’s coverage with a brief set of exercises, is distributed. Typical questions ask the student to utilize class materials and basic research tools. For example, an exercise following the first session lists a group of call numbers— representing major and local classification schemes—for identification, and after another session the students are asked to evaluate several periodical indexes for their respective coverages of the topic “inflation.” Thus a blend of quick, specific questions and more detailed, evaluative questions is offered.

This program stresses no particular subject area. Students are asked to state their major areas of study/interest and, if any are identified, relevant examples are used in explaining procedures and materials. In response to interests in education, the Current Index to Journals in Education was utilized in one class for explaining a periodical abstracting service. However, the principal intent of the instructors is to teach basic skills applicable to research in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. This practice provides a course that can be used as a basis or prerequisite for subject-specific instruction or as an independent study. Many academic departments currently offer or require some type of subject research, but they presuppose knowledge and techniques that many students are lacking.

This sequence was offered on two evenings (two sections) during the first seven weeks of the spring 1981 semester, and one section was given during the last seven weeks of the semester. The turnout at this early stage has been encouraging. Students from numerous disciplines have attended several or all of the sessions, and both graduates and undergraduates have participated. Our intention at the time of this writing is to offer the course during summer session.

Evaluation methods are being employed in the form of a preand post-test of general library knowledge and a simple questionnaire distributed at the last class meeting. Some effort was made to reach students who could not or chose not to attend the final session in order that a larger pool of data could be obtained. The same test was given on both occasions the first time the course was offered. Questions concentrated on local situations as well as a general knowledge of library systems. For example, students were asked about the structure of the public catalog in KU’s Watson Library and quizzed on the constituent parts of a citation taken from a Wilson periodical index. For those who took the test of twenty factual questions twice the mean score on the pretest was 9.7; the mean score on the post-test was 15. The respective ranges were 6.6-14 and 9.5- 20 (all students improved their scores). Those who took the pre-test but not the post-test showed a mean of 7.7 and a range of 1.4-17. Students were not shown the pre-test scores until after the post-test was given and corrected.

The supplementary questionnaire asked for comment on topics such as the relative difficulty and importance of the respective sessions and whether or not the student would enroll for a one-credit course which, if offered, would require tuition charges. As a follow up, we have succeeded in getting a valuable question placed in an official university survey to be piloted before the end of the spring semester that reads, “If Watson Library were to offer a one-credit course in basic library research skills, would you be interested in taking this course?”

This method of instruction appears to be worth further investigation and development. A university with an enrollment of approximately 23,000 students and more than 100 academic programs providing majors or concentrations of study presents both formidable obstacles against and various opportunities for testing and implementing methods of bibliographic instruction. Advertising, scheduling, course content, and evaluation methodology all need to be expanded and/or refined. Better use of campus advertising media can be made, and evaluation methods producing more accurate measurements can be formulated. In time, other approaches may supplement or completely replace this approach, but at present it provides a valuable contribution to our instructional program.

—Charles M. Getchell, Jr., and Robert W. Melton.

Editor’s Note: Charles M. Getchell, Jr., and RobertW. Melton are Reference and Instruction Librarians at the University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, Kansas.

NEW CHOICE STAFF MEMBER

Susan C. Cooper

Susan C. Cooper has been appointed assistant editor for nonprint materials at Choice magazine, ACRL’s review journal for college libraries published in Middletown, Connecticut. She comes to Choice from her former position as nonprint librarian at the University of Maryland Libraries, College Park. In that position she was responsible for the coordination of reference services, selection of software, and supervision of the film collections and bibliographic maintenance staffs. Prior to her position at College Park she was circulation librarian at the University of Maryland’s Law School Library in Baltimore.

Cooper received a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Delaware and an MLS from the University of Maryland.

WATER DAMAGE AVERTED AT RERKELEY

More than 4,000 valuable water-damaged hooks belonging to the University of California at Berkeley have been restored using a space simulation chamber in Sunnyvale, California, at the Lockheed Missiles & Space Company. According to Barclay Ogden, conservation department head of the university’s general library, all the waterdamaged volumes can be salvaged and returned to the shelves for use.

The books were damaged last February 7 when a defective sprinkler system at the Doe Library' annex caused water to (low down over book stacks. Most heavily damaged were the collections of the General Library’s Government Documents department. These include U.S. Congressional and budget records and British, French, and Italian parliamentary records dating to the seventeenth century.

The books were moved within 36 hours to a cold storage installation and frozen to prevent mildew deterioration while arrangements were made with Lockheed to use its vacuum chamber method to dry the books.

Within the chamber the combination of controlled heat and vacuum causes the water in the books to change directly from solid ice to water vapor, avoiding the damaging liquid phase.

The Lockheed vacuum chamber was also used to restore books damaged in the 1978 flood at Stanford University Libraries. See Philip D. Leighton, “The Stanford Flood,’’ C&RL 40 (September 1979):450-59, and Sally Buchanan, “The Stanford Library Flood Restoration Project,” CbRL 40 (November 1979):539-48.

Ogden said that Berkeley’s formulation of a disaster plan for just such an emergency allowed their staff to freeze the books quickly enough to allow proper restoration. The plan, which had been distributed to key staff members, identified the locations of valuable library materials, defined the chain of command to allow an immediate response, and detailed the necessary procedures for clean-up. Even though the damage had occurred on a Saturday evening, the library staff was able to freeze all the affected books by Sunday night.

Restored books are examined by Linda McWilliams Ogden, private rare book conservator from Berkeley, California; Leon Davies, Lockheed project engineer; and Barclay Odgen, conservation department head of the University’s general library.

ACADEMIC/RESEARCH LIBRARIAN OF THE YEAR AWARD

ACRL invites nominations for the Academic or Research Librarian of the Year Award, presented jointly by ACRL and the Baker & Taylor Company. Anyone wishing to submit nominations should request a nomination form from the ACRL office, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611.

Recipients of the award since its inception in 1978 have been: Keyes D. Metcalf and Robert B. Downs (1978); Henriette D. Avram and Frederick G. Kilgour (1979); and Evan I. Farber (1980).

The Awards Committee selects persons to receive the award in accordance with the following guidelines:

PURPOSE: To recognize an individual member of the library profession who has made an outstanding national or international contribution to academic or research librarianship and library development.

CRITERIA: Individuals nominated should have demonstrated achievements in such areas as

1. Service to the organized profession through ACRL and related organizations.

2. Significant and influential research on academic or research library service.

3. Publication of a body of scholarly and/or theoretical writing contributing to academic or research library development.

4. Planning and implementing a library program of such exemplary quality that it has served as a model for others.

The nominee does not have to meet all four criteria stated above.

NOMINATIONS: Nominations for the award must be returned to ACRL, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611, and must be postmarked no later than January 1, 1982. Nominations must be submitted on an application form, in quintuplicate, with no attachments or secondary letters.

NATURE OF THE AWARD: The Academic/ Research Librarian of the Year Award shall consist of $2,000 and an appropriate citation.

The Awards Committee for 1982 is chaired by Pearce S. Grove, Western Illinois University, Macomb.

THINK TANK APPOINTED

ACRL’S Bibliographic Instruction Section has named a seven-member ‘think tank to discuss present and future trends in bibliographic instruction at the BIS Preconference in San Francisco, June 24-26. The group will report its deliberations in a panel presentation at the closing general session.

The think tank facilitator is Joanne Euster, director of the library at San Francisco State University. She will provide a procedural framework for the group and keep it moving using both individual and group process techniques.

The other members are: Fran Hopkins, coordinator of reference services, Paley Library, Temple University, whose interest is in the sociology of knowledge and organizational behavior; Donald Kenney, head of general reference at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, who is interested in the impact of automation in BI, and AACR2; Brian Neilsen, head of reference at Northwestern University, who won the Best Paper Award at the National Online Information Meeting in 1980 for a paper entitled, “Online Bibliographic Searching and the Deprofessionalization of Librarianship;” Anne Roberts, coordinator of library instruction at SUNY Albany, who has a book in progress on BI for librarians; Carla Stoffle, assistant chancellor for educational services at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, who has published extensively on faculty involvement, planning objectives, and evaluation; and Paula Walker, library instruction coordinator at the University of Washington Undergraduate Library, who has developed a successful program oí course-related instruction called BIBLIO LAB.

After the annual conference the BIS think tank may meet on an informal basis to continue to discuss the future of bibliographic instruction in academic libraries.

RBMS STANDARDS COMMITTEE

Preservation of library materials led the list of topics under discussion at the third meeting of the RBMS Standards Committee at the ALA Midwinter Conference, Washington, D C., on February 1. Barbara Jones, head of the cataloging department at New York University, briefed the committee on the work of the Research Libraries Group’s Committee on Preservation, which is beginning to study the development of a method for recording preservation information in machinereadable records. Committee members expressed an interest in having such techniques standardized for inter-institutional communication, especially in the area of copy-specific information relating to preservation, physical description, and provenance.

Patrick Russell, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, and Helen Butz, University of Michigan Library, and chair of the Standards Committee, reported on the current status of the “Relator Terms for Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Cataloging” (C&RL News, September 1980, pp. 238-39). The ALA Resources and Technical Services Division’s Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access had taken a positive view of the Standards Committee’s request that a revision of AACR 2 be initiated to allow for the optional use of such standard lists of relator terms, and had sent a resolution to the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR suggesting that it study the issue. In addition, the Office for Descriptive Cataloging Policy of the Library of Congress, responding to a letter from the Standards Committee, had also been favorably disposed to the list and had expressed its willingness to review its earlier decision not to use relators, and to study the possibility of making use of certain terms from the list in its own rare materials cataloging.

Russell, editor of the list, indicated that a few minor revisions are now in order, some stemming from suggestions made by the Library of Congress. He was charged with preparing a draft “second edition” of the list for discussion at the committee’s next meeting.

Stephen Davis, from LC’s Descriptive Cataloging Division, reported on the progress of the Committee’s Standard Citation Forms for Bibliographies and Catalogues Used in Rare Cataloguing. This list had originally been prepared by Peter Van Wingen of LC’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and he and Davis had drafted a revised version of the list and an accompanying statement of working principles for the committee’s review. The committee endorsed the statement of working principles and requested that committee members be allowed to suggest additional entries for the list between now and the summer 1981 meeting.

John Thomas, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, presented a draft introduction and working principles for the Genre Thesaurus for Rare Books now being prepared by the committee.

The committee then took up the Thesaurus of Descriptors for Physical Characteristics of Rare Materials, originally prepared by Alexandra Mason, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. It was agreed that work would not proceed further until a comprehensive statement of its purpose and scope had been drafted.

The committee also voted to sponsor an Automated Cataloguing Discussion Group within RBMS to serve as a forum for general discussion for those who use automated systems in the cataloging of rare and specialized materials. The discussion group is expected to have its first meeting in 1982. Those interested in helping to plan for it are encouraged to contact Helen Butz, Head, Rare Book Cataloging Division, Hatcher Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.