Not this kind of crucible, courtesy of Flickr user Andy.Schultz
I work at a predominantly undergraduate institution where all the librarians have to be generalists at least part of the time. As a result, some of the instruction I do falls outside of the sciences, and some of my additional projects aren’t directly related to the departments I serve.
For example, this week I will be teaching a one-shot session for a first year writing seminar. The overall topic for this seminar is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. A couple of weeks ago I taught a session to some local high school students who were looking for information on contemporary poets.
Back in library school, I took a class on “reference sources in the humanities”. While the actual reference sources covered haven’t been especially useful to me, the insights into the research culture of the humanities was very helpful. Did you know that books are much more important to scholarship in the humanities than they are in the sciences?
While I get nervous when students come to the reference desk looking for poetry information in the same way some of my colleagues probably get nervous when a student comes to the desk looking for NMR spectra, I have the skills to help most of them find the resources they need.
And when they have in-depth, senior-thesis, primary-sources-in-history types of questions, we have a well established research consultation service at my library so that I can refer them to one of my amazingly capable colleagues for the help they need.
The image "Chemoluminescence" is courtesy of Flickr user "everyone's idle"The official, American Chemical Society “Chemistry Week” was last week, October 18-24th. Lots of exciting events took place in lots of wonderful locations.
But this week, October 26-30, is my own personal Chemistry Week. This week, I will teach 4 two hour information literacy sessions to organic chemistry students, provide the lesson plan and all in-class content for three additional sections of organic chemistry, and teach a session on evaluating resources and expanding your literature search to senior seminar students.
I recently gave a presentation about what types of things we talk about at the various levels. I enjoy teaching theses sessions, and I believe they are useful to the students.
This year I’m trying to focus on assessment – are the students actually learning what we want them to learn? Do they already know it before our session? Do they think the sessions are useful?
Each student in the organic lab is completing a brief follow up survey, so we can get a sense of how useful the session is and whether the students actually learned what we wanted to teach them. For this follow up survey we are asking a few questions about learning outcomes, plus a couple of attitudinal questions.
In the upper level seminar, students are filling out a brief survey about their previous research experiences, to give me a sense of their comfort level with certain resources (Scopus or SciFinder) and to allow them the opportunity to ask any research questions prior to our session (I’m not anticipating that they will have many). While students are normally not very good at assessing their own weaknesses, this will give us some information about student attitudes toward research.
I’m excited about seeing the result – hopefully they will allow the chemistry faculty and I to continue to improve the way we teach about the chemical literature and literature searching.
smiley face stickers courtesy of Flickr user "South Carolina's Northern Kingdom"
I enjoy searching for information – tracking down obscure citations and rejoicing over finding a related article in a different field. I love a search that goes from online resources to older print materials and back again.
I was asked recently to work with a faculty member to do a literature review for a journal manuscript in science education, and I have been having a lot of fun tracking things down.
I had a starting place – a list of preliminary sources and a rough draft of the paper – to guide my work, but it took off in many directions.
So, what techniques have I pursued?
Starting from the preliminary bibliography, I can examine the works cited sections of those papers to find additional relevant material.
In addition, I can use Scopus to track citations forward in time.
Exploring keywords in multiple databases. Like any search, there isn’t just one way to describe the topic we are searching.
Using Google and other specialized search engines to explore the web. There is a lot of science education material on the web that has been posted by various educators.
I was working with a topic I found interesting, in a field I am familiar with, with a faculty member who is nice to work with. It all adds up to job satisfaction.
Like many academic libraries, our library budget has recently been cut. Last year, we dealt with the cuts by severely cutting our book budget and our student employee budget. This year, the additional budget cuts made some journal cancellations necessary. Most of our cuts involve canceling individual print or online subscriptions if we already had access via an aggregator (like ProQuest or Ebsco). We have (thankfully) been able to almost completely make up our budget gap without loosing access to any content.
As a result of examining our journal subscriptions, the opportunity arose to subscribe to the full text geology resource GeoScienceWorld. If we canceled individual subscriptions to journals that were available in GeoScienceWorld, we could almost make up the difference. We would need to cancel a couple of other journals in order to make this feasible.
I thought that the increased content and ease of use provided by GeoScienceWorld made this a good move, and I took the question to the Geosciences department.
I created a list of individual journals we would need to cancel (that would be available GeoScienceWorld). I created a list of journals that we would gain access to. I also created a list of suggested cancellations we would have to make in order to make up the difference. In creating my list of suggested cancellations, I worked hard to minimize the loss of content.
In a meeting with the Geosciences library representative and department chair, they were very receptive to my plan, even suggested some cancellations that I assumed would be ‘off limits’.
Overall, they understood the budget pressures – their departmental budget had also been cut – and they appreciated the fact that this decision was being left (mostly) in their hands. The department chair was going to bring the information back to the department for a final decision – making sure that all the faculty are in the loop.
I am pleased with the communication between the library and the faculty on this issue, and I will try to use this example as a model in future decisions regarding departmental resources.
Over the next couple of weeks, I will be teaching information literacy sessions in three different senior-level undergraduate Biology seminar classes. Although the topics differ, the content that I discuss is fairly similar.
Finding (and understanding) a topic
I don’t discuss this in every class, but in a class where students have (mostly) free range to select a topic, I try to give them some resources that will help them narrow the field.
I point them to relevant science news sites and blogs. ResearchBlogging.org is one of my favorites because it leads the students directly back to the primary literature. I discuss the merits of browsing a journal’s table of contents, and provide them with links to appropriate journals for their field. This is all normally done with an in class exercise that gets them to look at some of these resources. Hopefully they may come away with a topic idea.
Do students appreciate this guidance? I’m not sure.
Review of primary vs. review articles
Most of the faculty I speak with say that their Senior-level students already know the difference between a review article and a primary research article. I find that some students can tell them apart, but the majority can’t identify a review article when they see it. Some students have had information literacy sessions in sophomore and junior level classes where I discuss this in detail (throwing in science news and blogs too) but I don’t see all of our Biology majors, so it is kind of hit-or-miss.
As a result, I normally spend the first 10 minutes of a 50 minute session reviewing the difference between these article types.
I ask students to examine two different articles and for each I ask them:
How is the article organized?
Whose research and experiments are the authors writing about? Their own? Or the research of others?
This isn’t rocket science, and at the senior level, these questions are fairly easy to answer for these students. They just may not have been asked to look at these before.
After we identify the review and primary research articles, we talk about how each of them can be useful.
Can you use either for this particular assignment?
If you can’t use a review article for this assignment, how can it still be useful to you?
Finding appropriate articles
This section is normally the main reason why the faculty member contacted me in the first place. I normally focus on a few basic principles:
Choosing an appropriate resource for the topic you are searching
Selecting appropriate language and terms to use for your search
Understanding the nature of citations and how tracking them forward or backward in time can help you find additional information.
Students sometimes have topics already chosen, sometimes they don’t. The session will involve some hands on time searching an appropriate resource (often Scopus).
And of course, we talk about how to get their hands on the actual full text of an article.
What I don’t spend time on
It may be controversial, but I don’t spend time teaching Boolean logic, unless I have more than one session with the students (and even then I don’t call it by name).
I don’t get into specifics about citing sources unless we have more than one session, although I will recommend the use of Zotero or another citation manager.
I haven’t really talked much about open access, open science or other emerging forces in scientific communication. I do want to find time to work open access into the conversation in the future – perhaps in the bit about how to get the full text.
Is any of this similar or different than what other librarians talk about in upper level biology classes?
Multidendritic sensory neurons illustrating Green Fluorescent Protein from Flickr user Balapagos
Sometimes I feel as though I need to know about everything. When I teach an information literacy session, I feel ill-prepared if I don’t know about the topic of the class. As a result, I have learned a little bit about a lot of things over the past couple of years:
Green fluorescent protein
Markovnikov reactions
Epigenetics
siRNA and miRNA
North American trees
Synoptic climatology
The evolution of snake fangs
Trematode parasites
The nature of my job requires me to learn a little bit about all of these topics so that I can help students find the relevant literature.
Unfortunately, I’m only human, and I still get lost in many things that are outside of my geology background.
Fortunately, I know enough about the literature and scholarly communication of these subjects to help students with what I need to help them with. I can lead them into the world of scholarly communication in its various forms that they are just discovering. At the same time their professors are leading them into the world of their disciplines.
When the partnership between faculty and librarians works well, it can be incredibly powerful. Students can learn to explore the record of the scientific enterprise while learning enough about the discipline to understand what they find.
Students can almost always find something about their research topic. However, they don’t always understand the nature of what they find in a couple of important ways:
They may not understand the nature of the item they find – website, article, news item, review, conference proceedings, blog post etc.
They aren’t yet knowledgeable enough in their field to understand the context in which a particular item stands.
I try to help students with the first item in a lot of the classes I teach. Prior to any discussion about which databases or citation styles the students will want to use, we go back to the beginning and talk about the difference between various types of articles that they may find:
How to tell apart a review article and a primary research article (it isn’t hard, but many of them have never thought about the difference before)
What a news article looks like and how it can help lead you to peer reviewed articles
How to identify an article abstract when you find it through Google
But up until now, I haven’t spent a lot of time helping students figure out the context of the articles they provide.
Even upper level undergraduates are still novice scientists, and they don’t yet have a sense of what is happening in a particular field. They aren’t yet sure which researchers are the established authorities in the field. Students don’t quite have the background to know how a field has progressed over the last 5 or 10 years.
Helping students understand the context of their research topics is largely the job of the department faculty – teaching them the subject knowledge to understand where things fit.
However, there are tools and tips and tricks that librarians can teach these students to help them understand the context for their subject matter.
First, we can introduce them to appropriate reference materials that may provide some background. Wikipedia isn’t a good source for their research paper, but it may help them understand terms and disciplines they aren’t yet familiar with. Specialty encyclopedias that often get dusty on the shelves can be brought into the classroom to help students understand how their topic fits in with everything else.
Second, we can help them utilize the built in tools in many of our databases to analyze the search results they find, to see when research on their topic was being done, who was doing it, and how well individual articles were received by other scientists. Many databases have tools that allow users to retrieve the keywords used by papers from a particular results set – what are the most common terms that arise? Citation databases like Scopus or Web of Knowledge help students see whether later researchers found a particular paper to be useful. Users can often examine the publication years from their results set – was this a hot topic 10 years ago? Is it popular now?
Teaching students about these resources and advanced analysis features can help them bridge the gap from novice to expert scientist, helping them out until they have the knowledge to say “Didn’t someone publish a study contradicting this idea just a few years ago?”
The librarians I’ve met at workshops, at conferences, and on the web, are generally strong supporters of open access. My impression has always been that our professional philosophy of providing information to our users free of charge (to them) fits very nicely with the philosophy of the open access movement.
Recently, I’ve started to wonder if our actions with regard to open access have any correlation with our professed opinions.
A recent article in the (subscription only) journal College and Research Libraries seems to support the idea that while we talk the talk, we aren’t very good at walking the walk, so to speak.
Kristi L. Palmer, Emily Dill, & Charlene Christie (2009). Where There’s a Will There’s a Way?: Survey of Academic Librarian Attitudes about Open Access College and Research Libraries, 70 (4), 315-335Issue TOC
In this study, the authors surveyed academic librarians about their attitudes and certain actions regarding open access.
The authors conclude that while librarians believe that libraries should be educating users about open access and encouraging faculty to publish in open-access journals, they aren’t actually engaging in conversations about these activities. Librarians are also hesitant about devoting library resources to support open access.
One significant problem with this study was the failure to examine the publishing actions of librarians. The actions discussed in the article mainly involved reading about open access and talking about open access with colleagues and faculty. I was disappointed when reading the article, because to me, publishing in open access journals is one of the highest profile actions a librarian can take in support of open access.
In fact, if librarians are to have any credibility with others when we encourage them to explore open access publishing options, shouldn’t we be publishing in open access journals ourselves?
Symptomatic of the problem seems to be the lack of high-impact open access journals in library and information studies. Open access journals in librarianship exist – there are 96 listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals website – but many of these service particular countries, specialties or publish infrequently.
This is something that librarians can change – publish in an open access journal, then talk about the experience with your colleagues and the faculty at your institution. Support your beliefs with measurable action.
UPDATE – A College and Research Libraries Pre-print was posted this morning – The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature (PDF) – indicating that 27.5% of articles from the top 20 library journals could be found in open access full text online (either on the publishers website or in an institutional repository). So we aren’t publishing in OA journals, and we aren’t self-archiving most of the time either.
On a weekly basis, a new article or editorial comes out discussing the shifting paradigm of how scientists communicate with one another. According to many, the journal article – the mainstay of scientific communication – is about to undergo a major metamorphosis as blogs and new journal concepts affect how science is done. A recent report from the Science Online London 2009 conference exemplifies this.
I am very excited about these changes, and I spend some of my time checking out real-time science blogs like Useful Chemistry, participating on online science networks like Nature Network, and exploring what PLOS ONE has to offer.
But how relevant are all of these new changes to the average undergraduate? Do they need to know about them? If they don’t need to know now, will they in the near future?
Most of the writing assignments I’m seeing are still asking students to find traditional scholarly articles as the only sources for their papers. Most of the faculty at my small undergraduate institution are still very traditional with regard to scholarly communication. A (very) few faculty still have to be convinced that an online journal is acceptable, and I wrote an email a few months ago explaining that PLOS Medicine is a highly regarded journal.
Until a consensus develops around what is scholarly and what isn’t in the online world, how are undergraduate students (who still need help telling apart a review article and a piece of original research) supposed to navigate these on-going changes?
In the short term, I don’t think that undergraduates need to know a lot about these developments, beyond their own personal interest in science blogs or online science news. For the time being, a science student can successfully navigate his or her undergraduate education without an awareness of the scientific blogosphere or the concept of open science.
As much as I would love to share my excitement of all of these fascinating changes, I don’t think students need to know about them. At the moment, I teach students about the basic differences between review articles, primary research articles and news articles.
In the future I will probably talk about blogs and social networks and how to access primary data sets – I’m looking forward to it.
the Undergraduate Science Librarian 