Steven's question about teaching library users is an interesting one.
Recently our library staff viewed a video featuring Rick Anderson, called
"Always a River, Sometimes a Library." Rick was questioning
many of the traditional ways we do things. I would say his point of view
was from academic libraries, but the panel included also people from
public libraries. One of his main points, as I see it, was that libraries
should stop doing instruction. A couple of his main reasons: we can't
hope to reach a significant percentage of the users; we need to
concentrate on making the resources we offer more transparent, so that
instruction is not needed. I agree with both points.
Instruction appears to be a major part of my library's functioning, both
in groups and one-on-one. During a discussion of the above-mentioned
video, our head of instruction said, with pride, that we reached 9,000
students last year through instruction (some would probably be
duplicates). That's a bit over 25 % of our FTE students, so one might or
might not say that it is significant percentage. And we have users that
are not students, too, of course.
Some of our public service people have a lot of criticism of the catalog
(we are Innopac); one says "it sucks." I'm sure we have a long
way to go to improve it, but I personally find that the other databases
we offer, the multifariousness of them, and the interfaces we provide,
suck as much as the catalog. Pardon the made-up word (multifariousness).
Examples of the latter: full text or not; full text available to all
users or not; need to log in or not; remotely available or not; display
of data; searching; printing and downloading functionalities, etc.
Jack
At 09:26 AM 6/14/2006, Steven Carr wrote:
I also
have a question:
For public libraries: Do any of you have
a mission/plan/interest in "teaching" the catalog or searching
to customers any more? Or do you do this more in terms of finding
what you want on the net?
For academic libraries: Is this teaching
function still part of your mission as well? What are you
teaching?
Jack Hall
114L University of Houston Libraries
Houston, TX 77204-2000
telephone:(713) 743-9687
e-mail: jhall@uh.edu
fax: (713) 743-9748
Received on Wed Jun 14 2006 - 11:24:40 EDT