Thanks for noticing me

Thanks, Betha Gutsche, for not only giving my blog a shout-out, but for also suggesting some good blogs on library technology I wasn't aware of. Link to her article.

An unexpected use of chat

Our library has an assignment that all first-year students must complete in their freshman orientation class (a one-credit course designed to help freshmen get acclimated to college). This assignment requires students to come in to three services points in the library (the circulation window, the reference desk, and a desk near the periodicals collection) to pick up handouts describing the services and resources available at those locations. A fourth handout is retrieved by visiting a page linked to on our library's Ask a Librarian page.

Once students have retrieved all the handouts, they log in to Blackboard and take an online quiz in which all the questions are keyed to information on the four handouts. Students must get an 80 on the quiz to "pass" and may take the quiz as often as they like. Questions have links to relevant pages on the library web sites that pretty much answer the question. The goal is not so much to quiz the students on what they've learned but rather to familiarize them with the library's resources and services through an interactive exercise. By picking up the handouts in the library, students get a mini-tour of sorts (albeit, self-guided); by going to the Ask a Librarian page to find the fourth handout, students can see that we have e-mail and chat reference services. Over the past few years that we've offered this exercise, we've had good results with it and hear from students that it is a fun way to learn about the library.

This past month, something new happened that I hadn't expected. As students were taking the online quiz, they starting logging in to chat reference (which they probably just learned after retrieving the fourth handout) and asking for help with the quiz questions. My first response was that students were cheating by doing this, but then I realized that we already pretty much give them all the hints they need--the links to relevant web pages I mentioned earlier--when they are viewing the questions in Blackboard. As a bonus, the students are now really getting familiar with our chat service. My hope is that these enterprising students will return to the chat service for help with other questions.

As has been discussed endlessly elsewhere, one of the hurdles of making a chat service work is letting users know it is there in the first place. We advertise it in many other ways than just this library exercise for freshmen, of course, but I found this use of the service kind of funny and interesting.

Trying to keep up

It's been hard to be consistent in posting messages here. I realize that this is a cliche of blogs, but it's easy to let your site go fallow. By way of explanation, I should note that I'm taking classes at night at Hunter College so that I can secure a second masters degree, this one in American history (the first was a masters in library and information science from the Pratt Institute). I don't expect to complete my degree until spring 2006, as I'm also balancing being a parent and working full-time as a information services librarian at Baruch College. Still, I hope to do better with this blog.