Making the K-16 Connection

There comes a point in the career of every instruction librarian who teaches first year students when you throw up your hands in frustration and kvetch, “What do they teach these kids in high school?  What are those high school librarians doing?”   First year college students aren’t hatched out of a science fiction pod when they arrive on our campuses – they’re the product of twelve years of schooling and (we hope) many visits to their school libraries.  Connecting with our school library media center colleagues is a real eye-opener.  We can look fondly on the terrific standards developed by AASL (21st Century Learner) and ISTE (NETS) for K-12 information literacy, but we need to understand the reality of school libraries in this era of budget cuts, staffing shortages, and standardized testing that takes away from research and library time.

That’s why we’re so pleased that Tim Johnson is volunteering with Instruction & Outreach this summer.  Tim is the library media specialist, information technology support, and webmaster (whew!) at Western Alamance High School in Elon, North Carolina.  Tim wanted to learn more about what goes on in an academic library, and he also wants to understand what skills his students need when they arrive on a college campus.

We’re taking advantage of Tim’s presence to pick his brain about what happens in high school.  What kind of research assignments are students doing?  What skills do they need, and how do they acquire those skills?  What typically happens in a high school media center?

While he’s part of Instruction & Outreach, Tim will be working on a number of projects (for example, looking at how academic libraries provide language learning materials) and meeting with folks throughout the Libraries.  He’ll also give a presentation for library staff on what’s happening in high school libraries. 

Making the K-16 connection is an important outreach effort for instruction librarians.  And maybe K-16 isn’t enough – when I was working on statewide academic integrity efforts in Maryland, we used the term “P-20” (preschool through grad school).  The more we know about our students the more successful our instruction efforts will be.

An embarrassment of riches or two essential tools?

Duke is fortunate enough to have had site licenses for two citation management software tools -- EndNote and RefWorks -- for the last two years. Duke spends a decent amount to provide access to both tools for all faculty, students and staff.  What exactly are we paying for?  What kind of traffic are EndNote and RefWorks seeing?

EndNote traffic is difficult to track, as users download it to their personal machines and work with their libraries offline (unless they happen to open EndNote Web accounts). We do know, however, that EndNote has been downloaded 6,977 times this fiscal year (July 1, 2009 to present).  It is worth noting that a single user my download the software to as many computers as he or she likes, so estimated number of users is actually over 11,700.  And the number of questions we get about it both at the Libraries and through the Office of Information Technology underscores the fact that Duke users are certainly doing more than simply downloading the piece of software.

Because RefWorks is web-based, we can get a slightly better picture of both who is opening RefWorks accounts and how they are using the application.

Since Duke initiated its RefWorks license in July 2008, 3,125 users have opened RefWorks accounts and downloaded 117,238 references to their personal accounts.  Undergraduates make up the majority of RefWorks users with 2,140 accounts.  Graduate students follow with 538 accounts, and faculty have opened a total of 140 accounts.  Other users include librarians, alumni, staff and researchers.  RefWorks averages about 119 new users per month, and we've seen a 23% increase in our user pool since the end of the Fall 2009 semester. 

As you might imagine, traffic to RefWorks is highest during the core months of the fall and spring semesters (September through November and February through April, respectively), with the highest number of total monthly users in October 2009 (with 492 users) and March 2010 (456 users). Average number of sessions per user per month topped out in October 2009 with an impressive 12.4 RefWorks sessions per user, on average.  Over the course of the year, the average number of sessions per user per month was 4.6.

We've compared these numbers to usage stats at some of our peer institutions who also subscribe to RefWorks, including UNC, UVA, Yale, Johns Hopkins and Cornell.  We fall right in line with our peers in terms of average sessions per month per user and average number of new users per month (adjusting for differences in full-time enrollment).   

Librarians continue to market RefWorks each fall and offer training sessions as part of the course-integrated research instruction they do for undergraduates and graduate students.  They also maintain a support page; field questions at the reference desk and through instant message; and help students, faculty and staff through one-on-one consultation.  

RefWorks is wrapping up its second year of a three-year trial period at Duke. The members of the university's site license committee are beginning to think critically about whether or not it is fiscally responsible to continue to fund both EndNote and RefWorks on a site-wide basis.  What are your thoughts?   Should Duke continue to make both options available at no cost to users?

And I can't mention RefWorks and EndNote without also giving a nod to Zotero, which Diane blogged about in April. Want to know more about how the three tools compare?  Check out the Libraries' Citation Tool Comparison chart.

LibGuides by the numbers

It's that time of year -- and, no, I'm not talking about summer vacations or the heat index.  Instead, it's the end of the fiscal year that's on my mind -- and all of the stats, facts and figures that accompany it.

As I've mentioned before, Duke Libraries are among the many that subscribe to LibGuides -- in fact, we just renewed our annual license.  And one reason that no one here at Duke gave a second thought to renewing the service (aside from the fact that librarians, students and faculty alike find value in the application), is that we regularly track usage to ensure that students and researchers continue to make use of the courseguides and subject guides librarians create each semester.

Let's take a look at traffic to Duke's LibGuides between January and the end of May (roughly the spring semester)...

There were over 83,000 hits to all 426 of our published guides.  To help give this raw number some context, we saw nearly 150,000 hits to all guides in 2009, so we're well on our way to topping that number during this calendar year.

Librarians created 99 courseguides (the most guides created in one semester to date!), and these 99 guides received 25,388 total hits, an average of 256 hits per guide.  The department to receive the highest number of guides?  You guessed it -- Writing 20, with an impressive 32 LibGuides.

While every guide created has received traffic (in a previous semester, if not this one), there are a handful that are particularly popular.  We'll call them our LibGuides Top Five:

• History 190B.01: Chubby History with 1,800 views (this guide also earns the distinction of "Most clever name," awarded by yours truly) 
• Duke Libraries Kindles with 2,398 views
• PUBPOL 114 with 2,676 views (and that's just one section of PUBPOL 114 -- the other section also received over a thousand views)
• Images Collections at Duke with 4,977 views (fun fact:  The creator was asked by LibGuides staff to contribute his guide to "Best of LibGuides" -- kudos to you, Lee!)

And, a drumroll for our most popular guide of the semester...

• Middle East Studies with a whopping 5,198 views

Thanks to you, loyal LibGuiders, for your incredible efforts this past spring -- I have no doubt that you'll continue to deliver outstanding content to your students and departments, not to mention those outside of Duke who stumble upon these gems online.

Other questions about usage of LibGuides at Duke?  I'd love to hear from you.

Librarians as consequential strangers

The Pew Internet and American Life Project’s director, Lee Rainie, recently gave a presentation, “How libraries can survive in the new media ecosystem.”  There is a lot of interesting information about the growth of the media ecosystem (which is in itself a contested term).  Rainie here uses it to describe the devices (like televisions and computer) in use in a home or office. 

What grabbed my attention is an observation by Rainie that librarians could be thought of as “consequential strangers” in a social network.  So, what’s a consequential stranger?  Turns out the term was coined by researcher Karen Fingerman and publicized in a book by journalist Melinda Blau, “Consequential Strangers: the power of people who don’t seem to matter…but really do.” (italics in the original).

 Blau says that we “walk through life interacting with people who skirt the edges of our social circles without realizing that they’re as important as our intimates.  They punctuate our days, but we take them for granted: our coffee person and car mechanic, our coworkers and fellow volunteers, a golf buddy, a teacher, and most of our Facebook ‘friends’.”

Lee Rainie takes that concept and extends it to librarians.  We’re the consequential strangers who are there when you need us to help you find information.  And perhaps libraries are what Blau calls ‘being spaces,’ where “a welcoming climate enables strangers to become consequential strangers. Being space is a win-win: consumers feel safe and known, and they broaden their own convoys.”

And, yes I think we matter…we really do.