Thursday, March 25, 2010

Spring 2010 Meeting: Give a Man a Fish or Teach A Man To Fish?

Date: April 16, 2010
Time: 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Mount Wachusett Community College

Topic:  The next generation of library guides has opened up a huge debate: how much information should we be giving our students vs. how much we should teach our students to find information for themselves?  Databases now provide us with search box widgets to add to pages giving students easier access to their searches.  They not provide us with RSS feeds that can be embedded into services like LibGuides to provide students with articles on searches we design.  Vendors like Credo Reference are creating topic pages that provide us with Reference collection summaries and then allow us to push students directly to databases of our choice for the scholarly and popular articles.
Where do we draw the line between giving them the content and teaching them how to find it themselves?  This meeting will be an open discussion on this very issue.  Bring your examples of how you are addressing this issue at your library and in your instruction sessions.

RSVP to Sara Marks by Friday, April 9, 2010

Directions and map to Mount Wachusett Community College

Parking:
Park anywhere in “North Parking Lot C” (very few classes on Fridays so there should be plenty of parking close by). No permit needed. Enter the building, then look for signs.   I’ll post signs pointing towards the library. We’ll be in the Library Instruction and Research Lab, Room 071 on the lower level of the library.