News in a Post-Truth Era

Credible or click-bait? News literacy? Checking facts? "Fake News"? which is, at best, just false or at worst a lie.

How can you tell what's credible and what isn't? This needs to be taught, effectively and without bias. But how? The audience is ... middle- and high-schoolers. College students. Even adults!

I'm gathering the best articles and lesson plans and adding them to a guide I created:

It includes resources for evaluating news sources (I love you, AllSides.com!), lesson plans, and fact-checking websites. I'm tweaking a great checklist on evaluating news sites based on Evaluating news sites: Credible or Clickbait? by Candice Benjes-Small. Sooner or later, I'm going to add my favorite articles on the topic.

For now, I'll list some of them here:

• Knight Foundation. "How Youth Navigate the News Landscape." 2017, https://www.knightfoundation.org/reports/how-youth-navigate-the-news-landscape.
• Ostenson, Jonathan. "Reconsidering the Checklist in Teaching Internet Source Evaluation." portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 14, 2014, pp. 33-50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2013.0045. 
• Valenza, Joyce. "Truth, Truthiness, Triangulation: A News Literacy Toolkit for a “Post-Truth” World." School Library Journal. 2016, http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/.
• Wineburg, Sam et al. "Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning." Stanford History Education Group, 2016, http://purl.stanford.edu/fv751yt593

I've been pondering this quite a bit lately and am speaking on the topic of teaching news literacy to a few different audiences. First to the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association advisors, then to a group of SILS and MEJO students at UNC on March 31, and to the Society or Professional Journalists Region 2 conference April 8 at Elon University.

Do you have a favorite resource for teaching how to evaluate news credibility? Do share!

Flipping the Information Literacy Classroom

I'm switched up my teaching and am using a flipped classroom model to teach four sections of Advertising and Public Relations Research at UNC's School of Media & Journalism.

Their class task is to find secondary research on their client or brand in order to create a SWOT analysis. Working in small teams, students must identify their client's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats using any resources available to articulate these elements.

After I found the amazing graphics information literacy textbook Information Now: A Graphic Guide to Student Research by Matt Upson, C. Michael Hall, and Kevin Cannon (which I wrote about last year), I decided to try flipping this session. I ask the faculty to have their students read several pages from the chapter "Journals & Databases" before class.

I paired that reading with I readings of  four pre-selected articles on a "Brand in the News." They read a scholarly article, a trade article, a popular magazine article, and a SWOT analysis - which I pre-selected from my trio of databases. Check out the list of articles on my library portal for the class (aka LibGuide).

When they get to class, we talk about each of these journal types based on their reading of the Information Now chapter and of the four articles. This takes about 15 minutes. Since they've already looked at EBSCO for the four articles, my demo on how to search EBSCO is relatively quick, so I quickly break them into their teams to research their client in the three databases. They get about 30 minutes to do their own searching, and then we talk about what they found and any search problems that cropped up along the way.

This is in contrast to the old way, where I went into class and talked about the difference between scholarly, trade, and popular magazine articles. I'd bring in examples of each periodical and ask the students to articulate items such as the audience, writing style, use of graphics, and authors for each source type. These sessions were productive and I felt that students really understood the difference in article types. I'd then spend about 10 minutes showing them how to search Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, and Communication & Mass Media Complete to find these articles.

While students learned the difference in article types, they didn't really get a good sense of how to search -- at least, not in my anecdotal assessment.

The new method teaches these sophomores & juniors the difference in article types just as effectively as before, with samples from their own discipline -- and for the most part, they learn this before I get into the classroom. That frees me to have them focus on their searching for scholarly, trade, and popular publications in their teams.

The faculty like this approach and have been very willing to give the students the assignment prior to class. I'm heading into my second semester teaching this way and look forward to the results.

Teaching Topics

I'm revising my instructional methods yet again this semester: I'm asking students to answer questions in advance of our time together. These questions typically relate to the assignment or mimic what the students would do in Real Life.

For instance, I asked the graduate students to find what we librarians call "known items" -- articles on a topic similar to one they will be researching on their own. The prompt indicates that the articles were assigned by a professor or were articles that they themselves found while reading a book assigned for class. I carefully chose the three article / types they needed to find:

1. The first was easy to find on Mr. Google, whether on- or off-campus.
2. The second was easy to find if the students used the library site I made for their class (i.e., if they used a library database)
3. The third was only available as an Interlibrary Loan, through the library site I made for their class.

Their second scenario requires them to develop good search terms for that topic in a library database.

When I'm in the class with them, we leapfrog from these questions -- and the challenges they raise -- directly into doing searches in library resources. I am moderately confident that this method is increasing student engagement with the library instruction session... will need to do a bit of assessment to determine if that is the case.

You can see the prompts and the library site I prepared for one of these classes at http://guides.lib.unc.edu/mejo701/scenarios

Stephanie teaching a PR class, Fall 2015

Information Now! "Graphic Textbook" for Info. Literacy

Information Now: A Graphic Guide to Student Research by Matt Upson, C. Michael Hall, and Kevin Cannon is a terrific addition to the tools I use to teach students how to do online research.

I love it for two reasons:

1. It's graphic, cute, and trendy ...
2. It's accurate, thorough, and humorous.

Here are some specifics of what I love about the book:

• The librarian uses chairs to illustrate why subject headings can be helpful -- adding that chairs are also seats, and are within the category of "furniture."



Chairs, p. 34

• She illustrates Boolean operators with Venn diagrams, by talking about a search for Pirates (no, not the Pittsburgh Pirates), ships (no, not a UPS truck), and history: 

History of Pirate Ships, p. 46

• There's a whole chapter devoted to journals & databases, and I've used the 7-page discussion of popular, trade, and scholarly journals in classes with good results.

Journals, p. 55

• The chapter on searching the web (including Wikipedia) is followed by a chapter on evaluating sources. The librarian offers the usual (to librarians) questions about authority, purpose, accuracy, relevance, and objectivity. Here's an illustration of a persuasive site:

Persuasion, p. 86



• The book concludes with a chapter on Using Information Ethically, which covers plagiarism and citations, as well as how to quote or paraphrase what you've read.

Paraphrasing, p. 92

I've used it with undergraduates in one-shot sessions -- asking them to read a chapter or two before class, and then discussing the content in class. I've also taught the book in an introductory reference class at UNC's School of Information and Library Science. Finally, I've had my student workers read chapters of the book as part of their training on what a library does -- so they can better help their fellow students from behind the reference desk. I will definitely continue all of these.

If you teach anyone to search for information, I recommend using this book as a supplement to instruction. It's terrific!

Bonus: the book succeeds at being relatively inclusive in its graphics (although the librarian does reflect the majority of U.S. librarians in her look and gender).

People Reading, p. 56

Confession:

I must raise an ethical question of my own: is it ok for me to use so many photos of graphics used in the book? Chicago University Press can answer the question ... but in my defense, I...

• took photos with my phone (i.e., lower quality) 
• blurred out some of the text.
• only used a tiny handful of graphics

AND since the illustrations are what make the book so great, no review would be complete without at least a few selected images.

PR Collaborations with Students: #ParkLibSavesTime

I worked with 2015 PR major, Michelle Park, to promote the Park Library to students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Our goal was to persuade students that talking to me could save them time and help them turn into more efficient searchers.

Michelle's idea was to serve food and inspire students; she named the event "S'mores with Stephanie" and baked a s'mores cake (chocolate cake with marshmallows - mmm!). She designed a terrific graphic, and we developed the #ParkLibSavesTime hashtag.

We targeted two classes whose students had to use the library in their spring classes. We also invited students from the entry-level news writing course to come and cover the story as an assignment for class.

The session featured a student-led panel of students who had worked with me for classes and talked, in their own words, about how using library resources improved their classwork. We also had a three-question treasure hunt, with prizes for those who answered the questions quickly (there were also "Easter egg" prizes for students who chatted with us, tweeted the session, or clicked on a tab on the S'mores website.

The evaluations were positive from students in all groups: we received post-event feedback from 12 attendees (almost 50%), most of whom had never met with a librarian before but said they were more likely to do so in the future.

Our collaboration caught the attention of JOMC professor Nori Comello, who encouraged Michelle to submit the campaign to the N.C. Public Relations Society of America. And in fact, Michelle won their InSpire Award, with great feedback from the judges.

These notes included (emphasis mine):

• "love that your hashtag included an actionable message ... not just "ParkLib" but "Saves Time." Brilliant. Again, most professionals don't think to use this ..."
• "Really thoughtful ideas here - doing the reverse interview was brilliant. I remember having to go through Library orientation, and even though I do a lot of research for my current job and love libraries, the term "library orientation"just scares everyone. "
• "Really good results, especially for a first time event! I'm only surprised that the Library plans to limit it to an annual event. I would think that doing this at least every semester (if not 3 or 4 nights at the start of each term) would benefit not only freshman but all students as they navigate new class demands. "

Michelle has graduated, and I'm left pondering the advice to do this several times each semester.

For more info:

• May graduate wins InSpire Award from N.C. Public Relations Society of America. Press release at UNC JOMC, May 14, 2015.
• S’mores With Stephanie. Michelle Park's blog, April 23, 2015.

Requiring Students to Meet with a Librarian, @launcch

My SILS grad assistant and I presented some interesting research at the Librarians' Association at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conference on March 13, 2015.

Check out our slides:

Does Forcing Students to Ask for Help Work? from Stephanie Willen Brown

More details:

I've worked with students in Jim Hefner's JOMC 424 (Electronic Media Management) class, spending more and more time with his students. In spring 2014, he began *requiring* students to meet with a librarian, rather than encouraging them to do so, as they prepared to write their 12-15 page research paper. He had tried all manner of encouragement with little success; requiring students to meet with a librarian was much more successful.

In fall 2014, we received IRB approval to survey Hefner's students to assess if their meeting with us had an effect on their confidence in writing the paper (somewhat) and they perceived it would have an effect on meeting with a librarian in the future (they said it did).

This presentation highlights our research findings and discusses our plans for future interactions with Hefner's students.

Takeaway message: Tell faculty to require students to meet with a librarian!

What They Learned in Class

I taught a "one-shot" session of The World of Mass Communication this semester. It's a 100-level class designed to introduce students to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

I went in to talk about doing better Google searches AND to show them some of our spiffy news databases. I created a LibGuide for the class which got a lot of use that day in class an a wee bit of use following the class.

As usual, I asked the class to write a bit about what they learned in class. Because the class had over 300 students, we were not able to talk about what they learned. Instead, the professors asked students to write in Sakai (our course management system) a sentence or two about what they learned.

Professor Boynton sent me a copy of what they said. The comments themselves were helpful, but I also enjoyed looking at what they learned in a word cloud.


I was happy to see that several of the things they said they learned were topics I had taught in class: "I learned how to use quotes in google to get more exact search results" and "I really like the chat option that the library offers so that many of our questions can get answered!"

One of their assignments was to find a blog and analyze it over the course of the semester, so I taught them that they could do a fancy Google search with inurl:blog -- which is why that phrase shows up in the tag cloud.

The class was great fun to teach, and the word cloud helps me analyze what they learned in my session.

Search: Fail

image from findicons

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox had a nice (if sobering) column in March: "Converting Search into Navigation."

Nielsen's conclusion: "Users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web. A few years ago, I characterized users' research skills as 'incompetent,' and they’ve only gotten worse over time. 'Pathetic' and 'useless' are words that come to mind after this year's user testing."

His study focused on e-commerce websites, but I think the results would be even worse if we studied user search behavior for academic purposes. His first user had trouble finding a pink iPhone case on Amazon, largely because she was unable to translate her meaning into something that Amazon could understand, or as Nielsen put it, she did not "realize that Amazon uses a full-text search that doesn't understand the meaning of a query."

Nielsen suggests that websites should be designed for "mediocre searchers." I know that the UNC Library is trying hard to do this with its book catalog and Articles+ super search. Sadly, library database vendors aren't as good at this.

What's the solution? At a minimum, be aware that your students aren't as search savvy as you think they are — they are likely not as search savvy as you are.

In an email to faculty, I added: in an ideal world, I'd have you invite me to come talk to you students. An interim step is for you to tell your students to come talk to me (or another librarian) about improving their searches in Google and using better resources like America's News (for news articles) or Communication and Mass Media Complete (for scholarly articles in JOMC areas).

But again, remember that students aren't as savvy at using Google as you (or they) think they are!

found through Greg Notess'  | Search Engine Showdown April 2013 blog post "Searcher Behavior."

"#Hashtags in the Academy" at #scio13 on Storify

@Lalsox and my session called #Hashtags in the academy: Engaging students with social media was a great success! We had lots of great conversation which generated some (unanswered) questions as well as some terrific ideas about using social media in the classroom.

Several attendees talked about using social media with their college / graduate students. Ideas like:

• @Cotesia1 / Marianne Alleyne has her Insect Physiology students create a "twitter lecture" in 25 tweets. Here's her Storify of those lectures. 
• @WhySharksMatter / David Shiffman has done a similar assignment with his marine biology students. Next time he teaches it, he promises to Storify them. 
• @2footgiraffe / Adam Taylor set up #scistuchat to encourage his high school students to chat with scientists via Twitter.
• @MelanieTbaum / Melanie Tannenbaum has just started using Twitter with her social psychology class: : @UIUCPsych201 Hashtag: #PSYC201.

There was additional discussion about students' digital footprint now and in the future and some unanswered questions. 

Take a peek at the Storify and feel free to comment on here or Twitter (using #tagacad). I'll add useful tweets to the Storify.

Engaging Students with Social Media, #TagAcad preso at #scio13

I'm so excited to be facilitating a conversation at ScienceOnline 13 called #Hashtags in the Academy: Engaging Students with Social Media with Lali DeRosier.

We want to talk with attendees -- as well as others around the interwebs -- about the role of social media in the high school and undergraduate classroom. 

Is it possible to engage students with Web 2.0 tools in ways that meaningfully support learning?  We will moderate a conversation about what’s worked and what hasn’t with social media in the classroom. 

Because it's ScienceOnline, we want the session to be reflective of the audience's interest / experiences, so Lali and I are going to be tweeting some questions to get the conversation started.

The questions are below ... Lali will tweet & Storify the first few questions, and I'll tweet & Storify the last few. Feel free to comment here or to reply to one of the upcoming tweets.

Librarians, I'm also interested in how y'all use social media to engage with your students, whether in a specific class or your discipline or your library as a whole. Comments from other non-teaching academics also welcome!

If you do comment, please use the hashtags #scio13 #TagAcad so Lali and I can track your comments.

Questions

• Do you use social media to engage with your students?
• What was your biggest social media success in the classroom? Failure?
• To what extent should social media be embedded in curriculum? Or used to supplement the curriculum?
• Are some social media tools more academic than others?
• How can we help students navigate their personal vs. academic / professional personas?
• How important is social media to our students’ future? As they consider jobs and/or graduate school?
• How does social media advance the content of the courses?
• Does social media improve the efficiency of communication?

• If you aren’t using social media to teach, what would make you start? 

Thanks for your feedback!

Embedding LibGuides into Course Management Systems

from
http://www.iconarchive.com/show/
color-stroked-icons-by-mfayaz/find-icon.html

My getting-ready-for-school tasks include creating library course guides for each class I plan to talk to about using library resources. Last academic year, I taught 54 groups, including "one-shot" instruction sessions, orientations for new & prospective students, and non-course workshops.  I created 31 course guides in support of these sessions, including the ever-popular page for Penny Abernathy's Digital Media Economics and Behavior, Barbara Friedman's Women and Mass Communication, and Dave Cupp's History of Broadcasting. These three pages were among the top 10 visited pages of the whole Park Library website last year. 

Whoo! those pages are popular! I have long known that, as a student of website analytics.  A recent article in Reference Services Review provides another level of support for this assertion.

Aaron Bowen, reference librarian at the University of California, Chico, conducted a small study of students' use of LibGuides (software for creating library course guides) in Blackboard, a course / learning management system. The LibGuides were embedded in CSU Chico's Blackboard sites, much as UNC library course guides are embedded in our Blackboard / Sakai course management systems. Bowen queried students about their use of resources used to conduct research for their Communication 131 class.

The results were striking: Of the "57 valid responses, 36 students (63.16 percent) responded they did not use any internet resources, other than the Guide, to complete their assignment." In my words: wow! 63% of students who responded to the survey only used library-sanctioned resources to do research required for their assignment. Those students did not use Google or Wikipedia (or they didn't admit to having done so), while 30% used Google and 16% used Google Scholar in addition to the Guide (9% admitted to having used Wikipedia).

Lots of research indicates that students use Google or other resources on the free Internet to research for their courses. Bowen's research is more consistent with Alison Head's 2007 research described in First Monday that only about 10% of students use Google and other free websites to start their research for courses.

So, good news broadly for student research: there are cases when students are more likely to use library resources to complete their assignments. And good news more specifically for me & my UNC colleagues: embedding library guides into course management systems improves students' use of our resources.

http://www.iconarchive.com/show/
red-little-shoes-icons-by-raindropmemory/
Document-icon.html

For More Information

• Bowen, Aaron. (2012) "A LibGuides Presence in a Blackboard Environment," Reference Services Review, Vol. 40 Iss: 3, pp.449 - 468
• Head, Alison. (2007) “Beyond Google: How Do Students Conduct Academic Research?” First Monday, Vol. 12 No. 6.
• JOMC Library Course Guides, Fall 2009-present.

Find Good Research, Free

image source: FindIcons 

I recently spoke to Daniel Kreiss' JOMC 244 class: Talk Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication, and I created this library resource guide for further research.  I wrote this post for the class tumblr (talkingpolitics.tumblr.com) and am reposting it here.

My presentation had two goals:

1. Show researchers how to improve search terms to generate more relevant
2. Show researchers how to access free resources for finding scholarly & newspaper articles. 

I'd like to highlight some of the tips and resources I shared in class in the hopes that they will be useful to those seeking to incorporate research into their reporting.

Search tips: Generating Good Search Terms (any resource)

1. Start with your concept -- such as negative advertising
2. Too many results? Put "quotes" around the phrase to require it be searched as a phrase: "negative advertising"
3. Add another term or two to your search, to make the results more precise:  "negative advertising" AND campaign AND politics

Search tips: More Precise Results (library search engines; won't work in Google)

1. If you're searching a library database / search engine, limit the content type to scholarly articles or newspaper articles
2. To expand your results, but keep them relevant, try the wildcard operator, *: "negative advertis*"  AND campaign* AND politic*, which will search for
• negative advertising; negative advertisements; negative advertisement
• campaign; campaigning; campaigns
• politics; political; politician; politicians
3. To expand results further, while still keeping them relevant, use synonyms for one search term:
• "negative advertis*"  AND (campaign* OR election*) AND politics

Free Search Resources 

Most states in the United States offer multiple free search engines to residents with a library card. I'll focus here on resources for North Carolina residents, but this model exists all over the U.S.!

NC Live offers hundreds of free, full-text resources to North Carolina residents with a library card. Check out this list of search engines to help you find free journals and newspaper articles!  

• Academic Search Complete is incredibly useful for scholarly articles, though it also includes newspaper and trade publications. The full-text of many of these articles identified will be available for free; if not, ask your library to get the articles for you (free! via "Interlibrary Loan" magic).
• Newspaper Source Plus has full-text from hundreds of U.S. newspapers, including over 50 from N.C. as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

All you need to access these is a free North Carolina library card.

Note: while these resources are "free-to-you," they cost the State Library millions of dollars. Please use them!

You may wonder about Google Scholar, which is Google's way of finding scholarly articles.  I have mixed feelings about Google Scholar, which I have documented in a blog post.  As long as you know what it does and doesn't have, it's fine to use. But if you need the full-text of an article that's not in Google Scholar, please ask a librarian!

image from IconArchive

Which brings me to my last point: Ask a Librarian!  Many news organizations have an on-site library, including CNN, the New York Times, and NPR -- if you are lucky enough to work at one of them, please make use of your library resources! Luckily, all you need is a public library card to contact a librarian at your public library for research help. They are happy to help all residents, including journalists.  Public universities are also equipped to help members of the public, including journalists.  

If you spend a little time up front learning what library resources are available in your community, it will save you lots of time later AND will help you find more relevant material to write about.

How Librarians Can Help in Real Life, at #scio13, and more

Librarians are so helpful!
(Creative Commons image courtesy of
Christchurch City Libraries on Flickr) 

How do librarians help scientists? If you haven't worked with a good librarian, it's hard to know what we can offer and how we can be useful. I'd love to see a session at a scholarly conference (ScienceOnline, AEJMC, I'm looking at you!) where librarians model how we work our magic with patrons.

I envision a real-time demonstration of the "reference interaction"* between a librarian and a grad student or other patron type. *The term "reference interaction" is used to indicate the session where one of us meets with a researcher ("you") and asks questions about what kind of information you need. We then suggest resources tailored to your need and make sure you know how to use them. 

In my current position, as librarian for journalism & mass communication, recent questions have included:

• How to download the entire issue of magazine from HathiTrust 
• Information about online advertising rates for newspapers. Patron needs both the rates themselves as well as scholarly articles about online advertising for newspapers. 
• Looking for NBC News archives for possible use on Carolina Week. 
• Need scholarly articles on the history of social media for an independent study. 
• Fact-checking resources for a class of advanced editing students (list of resources) 

As a super librarian / information coach, I was able to help all of these patrons. But if you didn't know someone could help you find resources as diverse as these, you'd just go to Mr. Google (or Dr. Google Scholar; read my thoughts on this) and see if you could find something useful. 

Maybe you'd go to your favorite database -- many students would go to JStor to get scholarly articles because they'd learned about that terrific search engine in a class. BUT that would be unproductive, because JStor doesn't contain current articles in it (why? "moving wall") ... so if you wanted articles about the success of advertising for online newspapers, you'd get frustrated and go back to Mr. Google.  Or maybe you'd go to LexisNexis, because you've used it before. But you wouldn't find scholarly articles there ... so back you'd go to Mr. Google.

Another reason to talk to a librarian is that we work with folks from many disciplines and can often refer you to someone doing related work. For instance, Student A recently asked me how she'd find a list, (ideally with contact information) of African American newspapers. I pointed her to an excellent resource (the Gale Directory of Publications & Broadcast Media) AND mentioned that one of her colleagues, Student B, had used the resource to identify Latino media outlets. I suggested that Student A contact Student B for tips on how best to use the resource for this project.

These reference sessions generally take 10-30 minutes, depending on how detailed the question is and how knowledgeable the patron is about the resources available. Good librarians will make sure that you know the best resources to use AND that you know a few tips on how to make the resource(s) do what you want.

It's one thing to write about this in a blog post, or for librarians to study and discuss this amongst themselves.  There's got to be a way to show you what we do and how we can help ... so I propose a librarian demo at conferences to demystify our services and share resources with a broader audience.

College Students @ the Library

A recent ethnographic study assessed how college students use the library for research projects and study needs. The results are worth your time to read if you expect students to do library research: basically, students rarely ask librarians for help.

USA Today summarized the study in August (College students rarely use librarians' expertise), and here's my summary of their summary.

The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project was a 2-year, 5-campus ethnographic study on how students use their campus library.

The researchers found that students "tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases" -- they didn't understand sources (neither Google nor library databases), nor did they know how to find good articles.

Worse — in my view — when students went to use a library database, 50% of them used databases that a librarian "would most likely never recommend for their topic." (I've experienced this myself). Students "showed an almost complete lack of interest" in getting help from a librarian — despite all of the above.

Instead, students consult with faculty who:

• Tended to overestimate students' research skills
• Didn't require a visit to the library to start their research
• Had low expectations of librarians
• Had a sometimes limited ability to teach students effective search strategies and resources

The study also notes that it is difficult for faculty and librarians to put themselves in the place of undergraduate students who don't know how to do library research. No library theory of mind here!

My prior reading of the library literature suggests that the best way to overcome students' disinclination to use the library is for faculty to require them to use the library as part of their research. Students are more willing to follow faculty suggestions than anything else regarding library use, so if you require them to consult with a librarian, they are more likely to do so. This is particularly true, other research suggests, for students of color.

If you want your students to improve their research and use better articles in your classes, please encourage them to visit one of the libraries on campus. Better yet, ask your subject librarian to come to class and work with your students as a group to improve their library research. I consistently hear from my faculty colleagues that my sessions improve the quality of articles students find, so having a librarian speak formally to classes is A Good Thing.

For More Information

• Kolowich, Steve. “Study: College Students Rarely Use Librarians’ Expertise."USA Today Online Aug. 22, 2011.
• Duke, Lynda. College Libraries and Student Culture What We Now Know. Chicago: American Library Association, 2011. Information @ ALA.org or borrow through WorldCat.

Working with Faculty on Instruction Assignments

Two of my former students have pointed me to an interesting blog piece called "Stepping on Toes: The Delicate Art of Talking to Faculty about Questionable Assignments" by Ellie Collier.

Collier talks about faculty aversion to "online" resources -- and instead of just complaining about difficult-to-teach library assignments, she provides examples of how to other librarians have worked with faculty to improve those assignments.

I recommend it especially to students interested in working in an academic library, but it's got some actual instruction interactions which would be interesting to librarians of most stripes.

For More Information

• Collier, Ellie. Stepping on Toes: The Delicate Art of Talking to Faculty about Questionable Assignments. In the Library with the Leadpipe, March 18, 2009.
  

Web 2.0 for my friends or, a Facebook Frenzy!

In thinking back over 2008, one of the best things about the year was the proliferation of friends, buddies, and acquaintances I met. For the most part, this meeting took place online, through various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.  Many of my library colleagues have written about how they use these tools for professional tasks, such as staying connected with distant colleagues, getting ideas, answering professional questions, and even keeping up with their patrons (for a great treatise on using Twitter in a library setting, see Brian Mathews' article "Social Eyes").  I've found these social networking sites to be a great addition to my professional life.

But I realize that my face-to-face (f2f), non-librarian friends are not quite as tech-savvy as my f2f library friends are.  I find that I keep up with my real life friends less now that I spend so much time online - my spouse and I even stay connected on Facebook!  He and I have talked about this, and we decided to hold a Facebook Frenzy.

This weekend, we've invited some of our f2f friends who are not as tech-savvy (or "tech-addicted") as we are over to our house for an afternoon of Facebook, Skype, and hulu.  We have wireless, and we've encouraged our buddies to bring laptops if they have them, and we also have some laptops of our own people can use if they don't have a traveling computer.  It's going to be informal, with us showing the three sites, answering tech questions (two friends have just gotten MacBooks, so I anticipate some questions there), and talking about privacy settings in Facebook.

From my own experience, I know I learn best when a friend shows me something - it happened with Facebook and with Twitter; if I hadn't had friends there, I probably wouldn't have explored them.  I want to take my teaching expertise out of the academy and into my personal life -- and I have an ulterior motive:  I want to hang out with my f2f friends online in addition to, well, face to face. 

Online Reading List Creation Tool? Not!

I'm teaching reference at Simmons again in the spring, and I am pulling together my reading list. (see the Fall 2007 reading list). That list looked nice and meets most of the criteria I have for a reading list:

• Citations are formatted properly in MLA, and include the name of the database where I got the full-text as well as the date accessed. I am a stickler for good citation style in my classes, and I feel I should model that in the citations I give them.

• The list is sorted on several levels: first by week, then by topic, and then alphabetically by author (or title if there is no author). This is important because I want students to easily know which readings are due when (tho' some find it confusing that you need to read week 2's articles BEFORE week 2's class), and under what topic.

The downside of this kind of list is that it's complex to maintain. It starts with the citation, which I email to myself, paste into a FileMaker database and fix the metadata, and then export with correctly formatted html, and then paste into the html file, which is finally uploaded to the Simmons server. phew! I'm tired just writing all that out!

It's been 18 months since I taught reference, and I thought there must be a better way. Ideally, I wanted a two-step process to export from the article to the bibliography: 1) find the article and 2) export to bibliography -- while maintaining good MLA citation style and complex sort order. My options seemed infinite, with so many bookmarking and social networking citation sites available. Sadly, none met all my criteria, so I'm back to manually coding my html file.

Here's what I tried. The links go to a few sample articles I wanted to share with my class, along with notes about why each product didn't meet my needs:

RefWorks

• On the plus side:
• It's RefWorks, which I encourage my students to use during their career at Simmons.
• It's incredibly simple to get citations from EBSCO, CSA, etc. into RefWorks.
• It's possible to create shared folders that anyone can view.
• It's very customizable, with 15 user-defined fields and an infinite number of ways to format citations.
• Simmons' RefWorks is OpenURL-enabled, so it's easy for students to get to the full-text of the article, PLUS they get early familiarity with Simmons' ArticleNow!
• On the minus side:
• The default view for RefWorks' shared folders is not customizable. The metadata doesn't display consistently across document types (article, book, web page), and the Standard View doesn't display in any recognized format (APA, Turabian, MLA). I wrote the company and was told that it is not possible to modify the Standard View.
• The inability to easily display instructions for textbook readings in the Standard View (i.e., chapter number, title, and pages for the chapter, along with the book title) was the straw that broke this camel's back.
  

CiteULike

• On the plus side:
  • Easy (theoretically) to add citations with a bookmarklet.
• Citations are online.
• Easy to add tags.
• On the minus side:
• None of the citations I tried to add through their bookmarklet actually loaded. I tried from Scopus, which is on the CiteULike list of "web sites". EBSCO isn't on their list, so I wasn't surprised that EBSCO citations didn't import automatically. That's a deal-breaker, as a large percentage of my citations are in EBSCO's Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database.
• The ads on the interface are distracting and leave little room for viewing citations.

Connotea

• On the plus side:
  • Includes date and time the citation was added to the database. The downside is that it's not in my time zone.
  • The default is to share citations.
• On the minus side:
• Not possible to automatically add from EBSCO or other Simmons databases; only via their bookmarklet.
• The article's metadata is not added automatically via their bookmarklet. The default is to only display the title with a hyperlink to the article. It's possible to add complete citations, but that requires extra steps -- and the point of this exercise is to save time.
• Lots of red on the page is tiring. Page is kind of cluttered.
• Extra features like "related"articles and links to others who've linked to the same citation are not relevant to a class reading list.

2collab.com

• On the plus side:
  • Clean, simple layout with professional colors.
  • Scopus citations imported easily.
  • Nice tagging.
• On the minus side:
• It works best with Elsevier databases. This is a problem for two reasons:
  • I have access to Scopus through my main job at UConn, but not through Simmons. So any citations I find in Scopus that I want to use for class have the UConn / Scopus URL rather than a Simmons-friendly (i.e., proxied) URL for easy access to the full-text. I'd have to copy & paste the URLs from LISTA for citations that are in Scopus.
  • Scopus doesn't index some of the non scholarly journals, so I had to manually add Stephen Abram's terrific Searcher article Evolution to Revolution to Chaos? Reference in Transition.
• Making articles shared was a two-step process: clicking the "group" box AND agreeing to the pop-up that yes, I do want to share this article.
• Finally, it didn't do well with textbook chapters -- too much manual metadata entry.

I also looked briefly at EBSCO's shared folders and Zotero, but neither seemed easily shareable, so I didn't actually test them. Briefly:

• I love EBSCO's folders, but if you want to share them, you have to email everyone with whom you want to share the folder, and with 21 students in the class, that's too much extra work for moi.
• Zotero's got great potential, but as it is now resident only one one browser, it's not ready for a shared class reading list.

I have used a wiki in the past for my source list (which looks a lot like a reading list, since many of the sources are books, and all need to be properly cited). I asked students to annotate each source on the wiki, and that was terrific. However, I still had to format the citations, both in html and wiki style. For next semester, I have put my sources in delicious, and I will use that both as the source list AND the annotation vehicle.

Back to the software under discussion: Please note that I have assessed these tools to be used as a reading list, which is not exactly what they were designed for. I have taught many UConn students and faculty to use RefWorks, and I will continue to do so. It's great for keeping track of citations. Similarly, the other products I've described have great features for researchers and scholars.

Sadly, though, none is robust enough to serve as the reading list for my upcoming class. I am keeping the list in the "cloud" though, using dropbox for its easy, everywhere access. Take a look at the Spring 2009 reading list -- it's in flux, but you might find something fun to read!

Deconstructing Scientific Articles

I spent some time this evening reading thoughtful, well-reasoned critiques of a few recent medical studies. On his blog, Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience, Steven Salzberg describes 5 problems about the recent report that Cresor can result in "a 'dramatic risk reduction' in heart attack risk for men."

In Serious doubts about new study of statins and heart disease, Salzberg summarizes the studies: "[they] claimed that people with normal cholesterol levels could get significant health benefits [by taking Crestor]. If true, [these two studies] impl[y] that millions more people should start taking statins to protect themselves against heart attacks." He adds "[t]his new finding is rife with problems, despite the breathless news reporting about it" and goes on to describe 5 of them:

1. "Both studies were funded by AstraZeneca, the drug company that sells Crestor," although Salzberg is quick to add that this is clearly disclosed in both articles.
   
2. The lead author of both studies is Paul Ridker, who owns the patent on the primary test for C-reactive protein (CRP) levels, and he stands to benefit financially if more people are tested for CRP. Again, Salzberg calls this only eyebrow-worthy, as this is clearly stated in both articles.
3. Although it suggests that a seven-variable method is more predictive than the traditional five-variable model, "the Circulation study didn’t report separately on the effect of CRP and family history of heart disease."
   
4. "[T]he NEJM [New England Journal of Medicine] study actually reports a very small benefit: ... you’d have to treat 95 people for 2 years with statins to prevent 1 heart attack."
5. "The patients in the NEJM study were randomly divided into two groups, treatment (Crestor) and placebo [and] there are 3 critical variables where the two groups are not identical."
   

It's a fascinating read, because Salzberg knowledgably disputes the articles' claims (and includes a few snarky notes about how the media covered the story).

If you like that post, you might like these:

• New members for Vioxx Hall of Shame In which Salzberg updates his list of medical researchers who had been paid by Merck to conduct studies of Vioxx (October 2008).
  
• NIH halts chelation study after patients die Reporting on a Medscape Journal of Medicine article that reports on the halting of the NIH's Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT). (Sept. 2008)
  
• And what else is acupuncture good for? Reporting on a Yahoo! News headline " 'Unclear whether acupuncture helps fertility' " (July 2008)
  

I like these posts because they debunk bad science ... and I also humbly suggest that they may be helpful in teaching science students how to evaluate scientific articles.

For the socially networked: I found this blog through my FriendFeed buddy Jean-Claude Bradley, who follows Lars Juhl Jensen, who linked to Salzberg's blog.

Extra-Curricular Librarian

I recently spoke at the Spring 2008 meeting of PVAAL, the Pioneer Valley Association of Academic Librarians. My topic was "The Adjunct Life and other LIS Extra-curricular Activities," and at the talk, I reflected on my five years teaching library students and blogging. I promised to post links to what I talked about here, as well as the PowerPoint I used.



So ... the Adjunct Life comes from the title of an article I wrote in June for Library Journal (The Adjunct Life). I summarized the article and added new bits, but if you want to know what it's like for me to teach, this is a good review.

I talked about blogging -- why I do it and how I find the time. Why? I addressed some of that in an October blog post entitled "Another Reason I Blog." Another handy side effect of my blog is that I can point people to it as a way of getting to know my professional interests. It's a more comprehensive business card / resume, which illustrates my thinking and quirks (and sometimes even my cats).

Finally, I talked about two articles I am co-writing with a graduate student at UConn. We are writing about our shared experience in the Scopus Student Ambassador program, which I blogged about back in June. What was (is, we're still writing the second article!) fun about the process was that we had different angles on the project -- Chelsea was very interested in the peer-to-peer nature of the training, while I was focused on the great partnership between the UConn libraries and Scopus. And we both get two articles out of it! (More on them when they are published ...)

So ... all of this extra-curricular activity takes a lot of time. Is it worth it? Mostly, yes. The good thing about blogging is that I can do it on my time -- so when I am feeling unintelligent, I can keep my mouth / blog shut, and when I am feeling inspired or determined to understand something better, I can blog about it. Teaching is it's own reward -- the students are great fun, inspiring, and they encourage me to keep up with LIS trends, technology, and databases, all while keeping perspective on the essentials of library theory

Why I Teach Dialog in LIS

I've started blogging occasionally over at the ACRL blog. My first post is called Why Do I Teach (Dialog) in LIS? If you've learned Dialog in the course of your library school education, take a gander at the post & let me know your thoughts. Turns out to be a very polarizing question!

There are some interesting notes in the blog's Comments section, and Wayne Bivens-Tatum's post over at Academic Librarian are interesting as well.

So, come on and join the dialog!