One thing I've heard mentioned elsewhere but not here (I think):
Card catalogs (which I used in grade school and to some extent in high school, though not much after that) had one real advantage: when you'd learned to use one card catalog, you could use any card catalog without additional training. They all worked the same way. It was, I grant you, a rather limited way. OPACs, on the other hand, are all over the map. Even OPACs made by the same people differ considerably sometimes--the Sirsi iBistro catalog at my old library and the one at my present library are laid out quite differently. And then, as Jack points out, after you've trained someone to use the OPAC, you may well then have to launch into how to search EBSCOhost, or WilsonWeb, or eLibrary, or. . . well, you get the idea. If you spend a lot of time searching for stuff (as many of us do, what with our being librarians and all--or, er, in deference to Walt et al., people involved with libraries in some capacity or other), you get used to how they work, and you can often figure out fairly quickly how a different set up works. But sometimes not. I am sometimes rather overwhelmed. I can imagine how that nice single Amazoogle search box looks to someone who's been swamped with different boxes and drop-down menus and radio buttons and goodness knows what else.
As for the teaching question: I work in a teeny tiny branch library (25,000 volumes serving a twon of 351 people and a school with 140 students), and most of the time, we just kind of know where things are on the shelf. If I have a patron who seems amenable or interested, I sometimes show them one feature of the catalog (how to place a hold, for instance, or how to use the "kids" section) or of a database or even of Google (define:, site:, etc.), but I don't try to do much more than that. I always found library instruction very overwhelming, so I try to give it out in bite-sized tidbits--but that's not a luxury everyone has.
Laura
Laura Crossett
Branch Manager
Meeteetse Branch Library
PO Box 129 / 2107 Idaho
Meeteetse, WY 82433
307.868.2248
www.parkcountylibrary.org
AIM: theblackmollly
Y!M: lcrossett
----- Original Message -----
From: Jack Hall
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 9:14 AM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] "Teaching"
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_at_uh.edu
fax: (713) 743-9748
Received on Wed Jun 14 2006 - 15:30:22 EDT