Saturday, March 07, 2009

Notes from 3/6 ARC Meeting at Mount Wachusett Community College: Next Generation Research Guides

Attendees: Christine Drew, Jeannette Lundgren, Tina McAndrew, Pamela McKay, Corinne Smith, Sara Marks, Heidi McCann, Louise Collins, Ellen Madigan Pratt, Jess Mynes, Nancy Boucher, Dale Labonte

Sara Marks, Instruction Services Librarian discussed Fitchburg State Library's use of libguides.

Their library web site has many links, not search boxes, and few staff could edit the web site. Libguides provides them with an easy way to create web-based research guides, course research pages, and many staff can edit them. Sara teaches from a libguide when doing library instruction session.

Features they use include: tabs for organizing their libguides pages, polls, embedded YouTube videos, meebo chat, options for end users to rate links and leave comments. Sara look at the usage statistics & their citation page receives a lot of hits. A great feature is the link checker.

Sara created a short video for faculty on how to post libguides links within their Blackboard course site. She is also working on updating many screencasts which she plans to post into YouTube and post within libguides. Caveat Emptor: IE browser has trouble displaying embedded videos wthin libguides, she demonstrated using Firefox.

Sara also creates a libguide for programs, speakers and events they have at their library, which can include linkes to books, a biography of the speaker, and a calendar.

FSC Archives staff are using it to post some information, photos on their special collections, including a page on Robert Cormier, the author.

Heidi McCann, Reference and Instructional Services Librarian, shared information on their libguides implementation at Mount Wachusett Community College

Heidi serves as webmaster for the library and despite initial aversion to libguides, wanted to give staff more control. They paid extra for their custom URL (subjectguides).

She does not teach using libguides, but creates a guide to send to the faculty to distribute to their students after the library instruction session. The libguide serves as a summary for the students.

Faculty are enthused about libguides & impressed with it - so watch out, you don't want to become only a "libguides creator."

Libguides has great tech support but there are some minor annoyances she's found including:
-pop up not default for links
- privacy settings and google indexing or no indexing not easy to figure out, but tech support helped with this.

There's a lot of potential they haven't yet converted all guides since they just got access to it last year

Alternatives to libguides
  • open source software created by Oregon State: Library a la carte - must have good relation with your IT department or control of your web site
  • Microsoft Sharepoint - required university login at most schools
  • Blogs or wikis (see BizWiki at Ohio State )
  • Improving library web site and/or use of Content Management System (CMS) such as drupal
  • Google sites - if you don't have control over your library site
  • Blackboard or course management system: create guides within course shell

ARC Business

Leadership 2009-2010
- Sara Marks will be Chair
- Ellen Madigan Pratt will be secretary

Ideas for future meetings
- k-12 librarians, teachers & how they teach information literacy
- use of federated search in teaching information literacy
- future of the reference collection & weeding (talk with CMRLS staff for speaker ideas since they have a workshop on this topic)