One of the things I've struggled with doing well is the database demonstration. It's easy to do a rote example and forget the role that sparking interest plays in learning retention when you're tasked with doing a demo. Over the past quarter, I've had the opportunity to do three database demonstrations and I think in each case I've learned something new about how to maintain engagement both for me and for my audience.
Demonstrating Failure. For a Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies class in January, I was asked to go through two of the guides in GWSS and to talk about searching finding aids. For this session, I opted not to prep a specific example but instead to feel out a search based on what the room talked about before my demo. Prior to the session, I had taken time to experiment in a couple different ways with searching so that I could respond well to whatever prompt got thrown my way. In the one-shot, we ended up stumbling on a search with very limited results. This was facially frustrating because, of course, I wanted to be able to show the depth of our collection, but for me it's important to remember that more often than not that's what the research process looks like. You usually get limited returns and have to figure out either how to find better results or why certain voices are missing. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I didn't really get a chance to go too deep into that issue, but it's a healthy reminder that "failure" is ok in front of an audience. Demonstrating Place. I also had the opportunity to demonstrate Readex's Congressional Serial Set database with a slight twist. Both of the times I got to roll through the different ways to engage the database I was presenting to other librarians. Without the frame of a class assignment, I made a three-point plan to get through a couple of the ways to engage with the database. I started with a citation search. We get a lot of reference questions, especially on chat, that look like "where do I find xyz thing the citation looks like this: ____", so this was something that the audience would need to know at some point. After that, I demonstrated advanced search by showing how to find maps and images of Mt. Rainier National Park and how to use the browse function by looking at the treaties signed by the territorial government with the tribes whose land the UW sits on. Working in a land acknowledgment to the database demonstration was about accomplishing both inclusion and justice priorities but also about making government documents immediately relevant. Looking at the browse search function this way also allowed me to gesture to what was missing and to the fact that the language we use today is not always the language used by primary sources.
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The Jackson School Task Forces are the Capstone project for UW International Relations Students. After setting up the general structure of the LibGuides for all of the Task Force sections, I joined Jessica Albano on Task Force J. In the second week of the quarter, the task forces come to the library for a session on concept maping and library resources to start them off on their research process.
The concept mapping part of the session went really well. After breaking up the group of 14 into three groups there was some slowness to start getting things up on the board, but once things got going they went really well. The share out also went really well. They came up with a lot of good relationships between concepts and some good starting keywords for further searching. What we wish had gone better was the division of the students into groups. Some task forces divide the students prior to their library instruction session, but this instructor had not chosen to do that. Since the concept mapping portion of the session was my responsibility, in the future I would ask the students for three over arching themes that have emerged in their research and let them cluster around those ideas rather than dividing them artificially. They expressed in the share out that the three themes we used to divide them felt artificial, so I would want to mitigate that in the future. Overall, it was a successful session despite some issues beyond my control and the rocky start that I unwittingly imposed. On April 9, I got to observe a teaching session run by another librarian directed at students in UW's GEOG 315 class. Per the catalog description, GEOG 315: "Covers the beginning steps in the research process... Students develop basic library and writing skills as preparation for future research methods classes and independent research." The instruction session asked the students to share their topics and then covered potential geography research challenges and useful resources for their upcoming lit review and annotated bibliography assignments.
One of the mainstays of library instruction is the worksheet, and I was particularly interested in the way this librarian structured that part of the session. Instead of printing out a sheet of paper for students to fill in, they used a google form. I liked this for a number of reasons. One was that it saves on paper that students may or may not keep. Another was that it sent their answers to the section TAs and to the librarian so that they could return to that document later and push useful, specific resources to the students. Of course, it's a little harder for the students to keep their answers, and since the form walked them through how to annotate a source for an annotated bibliography having that example to look back on would be crucial. I talked to the librarian later and they said this was the first time they had done this kind of a thing that this was something that they would want to fix next time. All in all, I really liked this approach and plan to use it in the future. It's a really effective way to update a really useful teaching strategy. |
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