Experiential Learning Project A
For this assignment, I split my time between shadowing reference librarians at Wilkes
Community College (WCC) and Appalachian State University (ASU). Despite the fact that I
shadowed numerous librarians at both locations at different times of the day, I observed very few
traditional face-to-face reference interactions. Both WCC and ASU explained to me that, because
of a significant decrease in the number of in person reference interactions, there were no longer
specific reference librarians, but instead, all MLIS certified librarians who served the public held
a few hours at the circulation desk each day, where they both performed basic circulation duties
while also answering reference questions and manning reference chat as needed. Because of this,
nearly all of my reference interactions documented below are reflections from observing
librarians leading reference instruction classes as well as providing one-on-one RAP (Research
Assistance Program) sessions for students who had made an appointment in advance.
February 23, 2015 – 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. – Wilkes Community College Library
WCC’s library is designed with one combined circulation/reference desk positioned at the main
entrance. A total of four librarians are employed, including an IT professional, who handles
reference and circulation responsibilities just like the other three librarians. The library is small
enough that all librarians do a little bit of everything, including reference, circulation, cataloging,
reference instruction, creating libguides and digital instruction tools for students. My first day at
this library was a bit disappointing as not a single student approached the desk for help (even
basic printer help!). I spent the first hour of my stay learning how they cataloged new materials.
One librarians showed me how to go into WorldCat to access the book or item’s ISBN number to
then pull the catalog record into WCC’s SirsiDynix e-library cataloging system. The librarian
said she encourages students to search for materials they might need through WorldCat if they
cannot find the item in WCC’s library or a sister library; they might be able to request these
materials through interlibrary loan.
Christy Earp, the library director, then gave me a tour of the entire library. She showed me a
large collection of cassette audio recordings and VHS tapes, both part of their local history
collection, which they were in the process of digitizing. She then showed me a binding/repair
station, which allows them to perform minimal repairs to damaged materials on site. Another
room held a large collection of local periodicals, bound in large sleeves, which had been recently
cataloged by a library volunteer. Earp said many professors and researchers from throughout the
Southeast come to the library’s periodical room to research local history projects, particularly
about the local music heritage as well as a particular Dolly Madison collection which the library
had recently acquired. She then showed me the textbooks used for the textbook rental system, a
partnership between WCC and the local early college based at WCC. Earp explained that many
of the books and resources the library purchases are based on recommendations from faculty to
purchase materials that directly coincide with specific class assignments and lesson plans.
The library collection was relatively small, consisting primarily of a large nonfiction collection.
There was a very small non-circulating ready reference section; Earp explained that the last time
they weeded their collection, they weeded all the print encyclopedias and did not bother to
replace them. WCC’s library also serves as a public library for community members not
affiliated with the university to check out materials, including books and movies, as long as they
are not new releases. The library even had an extensive children’s collection, which had once
been used collaboratively with the local Partnership for Children agency serving low-income
families and their children; however, that program had recently been discontinued, so the
remaining children’s collection was primarily available for early education majors to use in their
classes. There were soundproof digital listening rooms, a couple study rooms, and a side board
meeting room, which contained remnants of an old local history collection. Earp told me of some
particular WWII propaganda in one of the cases which one of the patrons found offensive due to
it’s anti-Semitism nature. As a result, the library has implemented a more stringent signage
policy to accompany all of their displays. The most bustling part of the library were the center
computer terminals where most of the students worked on schoolwork.
March 2, 2015 – 1:00 to 2:45 p.m. – Wilkes Community College
On my return visit, I spent the afternoon observing Christy Earp’s reference instruction class for
English 112, a second level English composition class. The students were writing a persuasive
paper on a topic of their choosing and needed to find a range of different sources, including
contemporary news articles, scholarly journal articles, books, and video to support their
argument. Earp began by immediately directing students to the library’s web page and then
showing them EasyBib, a paid software that enables students to create citations and develop a
bibiliography for their papers. The site formats MLA, APA, and CSE (Council of Science
Editors), with which Earp was unfamiliar. You simply copy and pasted a web address into the
box, hit “cite it,” and the citation would appear. According to Earp, the service is 85 percent
accurate, primarily in arranging the information in the correct order according to the citation
style; however, students still need to pay particular attention to formatting their information in
the appropriate way. She suggested exporting the citation to Google Docs to preserve the
indentation in the formatting. Many of the students were unfamiliar with Google Doc, so Earp
spent some time explaining how this document sharing tool is used.
The class’s professor had notified Earp with some of the students’ topics a few days before the
reference instruction class, so she had time to create a libguide with specific sources catered to
the students’ needs before their class. The English 112 libguide highlights a few specific article
databases and a link to the library catalog for finding books. She paritucarly emphasized the
library’s collection of more than 100,000 e-books, some of which can be accessed through
interlibrary loan. She explained that unlike traditional books, which take a full week to arrive
through interlibrary loan, e-books can be downloaded instantly. However, she cautioned against
downloading them to their device directly as this would indicate that the book had been “checked
out” making it off limits for other students as it could only be checked out by one user. Instead,
she said there was an option for reading it directly online without downloading it.
She then illustrated to the students how to perform a very basic keyword search for a book about
“genetic engineering.” I noticed that she never put any of her search terms in quotation marks
and she explained later that some of these students struggled with performing even the most
basic searches, so she didn’t want to complicate anything by talking about quotation marks. She
did mention who you could also search by book title or subject to get more narrow results. After
finding a book, she clicked on the link to pull up the catalog record and showed the students how
to locate the basic book information (title, author, publication date and publisher) as well as
where to find the built in citation to include in their bibliography. She encouraged the students to
think about their topics and write down a list of keywords to use in their searches, which they
could then modify depending if the search results became too broad or narrow. She advocated
numerous times to allow the librarian to help them order specific books through interlibrary loan
if they truly could not find the materials within the NC community college system.
She then went over the basics of searching for articles in the various English 112 databases. She
made sure to emphasize selecting the full text and peer reviewed boxes to ensure that the
searches resulted in reliable scholarly articles, which nearly all databases have. From the nearly
100 databases WCC’s library subscribes to, she said the libguide highlighted about 9 databases
most applicable to the class. The first database, Opposing Viewpoints in Context,l provides
journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, audio, video, and recommended websites grouped by
topic that allows users to examine opposing viewpoints on the same topic. She should them the
citation button for materials accessed through this database and emphasized the importance of
double checking citation accuracy as many items were a source sited within a second source and
citations could get tricky. Other recommended databases the libguide highlighted included CQ
Researcher (in-depth coverage on policiatl and social issues), Global Issues in Context, and
ProQuest Central (which replaced EBSCOHost) and searches over 175 subjects. She briefly
mentioned that DVDs and online video streaming services were also available through the
library if students needed those.
While this was considered a very basic information instruction class, Earp said they also give
more advanced instruction courses to nursing and culinary students who have very specific
resource needs.
March 23, 2015 –2:00 – 4:30 p.m. - Appalachian State University
My first hour at ASU’s library was spent learning about the recent restructuring changes of the
main floor library layout. The reference desks used to be in the center of the floor, but they since
moved the desk to the side beside the circulation desk so that all librarians on the floor perform
both circulation and reference duties. One of the librarians, Kelly McAllister, showed me how to
monitor the chat reference box. We only had one question, which was from somone physically in
the library whose compter speakers were not working properly. We went to his computer to
troubleshoot the issue and then contacted an IT professional to help him. McAllister said they
had also added a couple student positions to solely troubleshoot technology problems as well as
help students with printer issues; librarians are still expected to keep a daily tally of the types of
questions they answer each day. Since hiring these student employees, the number of technical
troubleshooting questions fielded by the librarians had drastically reduced.
My second hour and a half was spent observing a RAP session between a senior history student
working on her final HIS 4100 capstone paper and an archival outreach librarian. The student
had sent the librarian some information on her topic in advance, but it became clear that one of
the biggest reasons the student was having trouble finding sources was because she was unsure
of how to succinctly state the topic of her research paper. From what I gathered after she tried to
explain it numersou times was that it had something to do with examining the change over time
of the role of Greyhound tour buses before WWII verus after the war. The girl admitted she was
having such a hard time finding sources through ASU’s history databases that she ended up
purchasing a subscription to the New York Times archival newspapers; unfortunately, the
librarian explained to her that the library already subscribed to this and apologized that she had
not been made aware of this sooner. The librarian suggested search Google Scholar through
ASU’s library website as there would be more search results reflecting those databases to which
ASU’s library subscribed. She also suggested writing down a list of different search terms,
including “greyhound buses” or “greyhound line.” She particularly recommended the American
History and Life with full text, which often times provides more anecdotal articles and sources
that reflect historical lifeways (such as changes in transportation), which would have been of
help. Within this database, the librarian noted how the article search results were typically
cataloged using hyperlinked Library of Congress subject headings. Simply copying the subject
heading phrases, such as “greyhound corporation history” into WorldCat yeilded more applicable
results.
The student acknowledged that she had been finding a lot of her primary sources by consulting
the bibliographies of secondary sources, which the librarians strongly approved. This prompted a
return to searching in the New York Times archival databases. The librarian pointed out that you
could limit your searches by document type as well as specific date ranges. A bar graph on the
side indicated which year’s yielded the most search results. Readers’ Guide Retrospective was
another primary source database, which searched magazines and periodicals from 1890 to 1982.
Using search terms such as “greyhound bus lines” was successful in yielding a few results.
In order to find enough sources, the librarian suggested broadening all topic searches to include
general changes in transportation or social changes before and after WWII. The librarian also
pointed the student to some free sources online, such as Duke Library’s digital ad collection and
the Chicago History Museum, which showed a finding aid pertaining to Greyhound buses around
the time of WWII. The librarian even suggested giving the museum a call to see if they could
mail or email her any pertinent documents. The ASU special collection even had physical copies
of LIFE magazine dating back to 1900, which were archived upstairs and could possibly include
ads for Greyhound buses to incorporate the more social lifestyle angle of the students’ research
project. The student had already explored this avenue, spending an afternoon in special
collections and coming up dry.
March 30, 2015 – 12:00 -1:30 p.m. – Appalachian State University
I spent the first 30 minutes touring the Instructional Materials Center (IMC) in the lower level of
ASU’s library. Working in the youth services department of a public library, I found it
interesting to see how an academic library organizes their children’s materials to aid the
education majors who use the materials to devise lesson plans during student teaching. They
shelve all their children’s picture books according to the dewey decimal system, both fiction and
nonfiction, which was unexpected. They also circulate games and oher educational materials
beyond books to education majors. What I found most shocking was the weeding process the
librarians were going through, weeding out 75 percent of their educational bound journals to
make room for a large digital makerspace in the coming years.
After my tour, I shadowed librarian Xianorong Shao at the downstairs circulation/reference desk.
As there were still no reference questions and only a few people to assist with circulation
questions, she went over than handout that she gives her students in her freshman English 1000
Expository Writing reference instruction class. A lot of what she showed me from this handout
was very similar to what Christy Earp did at WCC’s library. The handout began with helpful
research toolds for students including the university writing center and the RAP program, which
I had observed on my last visit.
She then went into the how to search using APPsearch. This new feature accessed on the
homepage of the library’s website, allows users to search for books, articles, and media available
exclusively at ASU all at one time. More than 50 databases are included in the search. If you
knew that you only wanted to search for one material format, then you could limit your search to
articles or books only, as well as journal titles, maps, DVDs, and government documents. Like
Earp, she also emphasized the benefit to reading e-books online instead of downloading them
and showed me how you could search the entire e-book for keywords if desired. The handout
then guides students for finding a book and article on their topic by answering a series of
questions to help them identify the book’s title, call number, summary, and subject term
classification. She emphasized using keyword searches instead of subject searches in article
databases as you have to be able to predict the controlled vocabulary for a subject serach to
return useful results. She demonstrated this by using China first as a keyword seach and then
retrieving an article that then linked to the LC subject headings so you could do a specific subject
search for “China – History.”
For this particular expository writing class, she encouraged using the Article search box to search
through seven databases, including Points of View Reference Center (which Earp had included
on her libguide) along with Academic OneFile, and five others. Her handout asked students to
identify “Where did you start your search?,” “What search terms did you use?,” and to identify
the type of aricle retrieved (scholarly journal, newspaper or magazine). Searching Google
Scholar through the library’s webpage was also preferred over an outside Google Scholar search.
She also emphasized the importance of performing the CRAAP (Currency, relevance, authority,
accuracy, and purpose) to evaluate credible sources. She included a couple other sites to help
evaluate souces, including one published by Cornell library and another published by gallup.
Like Earp, she also heavily emphasized the importance of citing your work. She included a list of
questions the student needed to answer to build the bibliography citation themselves (author,
title, journal title, volume, issues, date of publication and page numbers). She did not, however,
indicate good places to go to get good citations.
March 31, 2015 – 11 a.m. – 1:45 p.m. – Appalachian State University
The next information literacy class I observed was an upper level class, LAW 2150. The class
focused on financial management, which was something I had never had any experience using
resources to conduct searches for. The librarian, Glenn Ellen Strilling used a very advanced
search technique she called “multiple-concpet keyword search” to explore article resources for
her topic. Her topic was: Helping Americans retire financially secure: Mutual fund fees and
fiduciary duty in pension funds and other retirement vehicles. She said herself that she has done
years of research on this topic, so it was easier for her to generate a solid list of keyword terms to
use when creating this search strategy. She underlined keywords in her topic statement to create
three main concept groups which she labeled separately as A, B, and C. Pension, fee, and retire
were her three main identified concept groups. She talked about the importance to doing
truncated searches. For instance, she searched retire as “retire*” which would result in all words
with retire as the root word (retiring, retired, retirement, retires, etc.). I was surprised that a
student in the crowd actually knew what truncated searches were. However, she explained, a
truncated search for fee would not be a good idea as it could turn up any word with “fee” in it,
such as feel, feet, etc.
She explained that you could link all three search terms together using Boolean operators,
primarily AND and nest all the terms in parantheses to get the best, most comprehensive results.
Her search term looked like “(pension* AND fee AND retire*).” She then drew a venn diagram
on the board to explain that the databases serach all of these terms together and filters only those
search which include all three of these search terms (the center overlapping area), not just one or
two of the terms. This really helps to narrow your search results if you really know what you’re
looking for at the beginning. If not, it would probably be really frurstrating as one of your serach
words may not be quite right, resulting in the “no results found” message. That’s why she said
it’s important to generate a list of search terms in case one doesn’t work; for this topic, she
suggested “IRA*,” “defined benefit,” “definied contribution,” “expens*,” “fiduciary,” “401(K),”
and others.
Her recommendations for contemporary news articles, included CQ Researcher and InfoTrac
Newsstand. CQ researcher is where journalists and professionals in the field write detailed
weekly reports about a contemporary issue covered in from all sides (pros and cons). She said it
was best to go into advanced search and search by find in “report titles only.” InfoTrac
Newsstand indexes the full text of more than 2,500 newspapers and radio/TV news transcripts
from some of the main national and international newspapers. She went into detail to use
multiple concept keywords to search within the “document title” and to turn off the search assist.
You can also limit the date range and document type to assist in your search. Some of her
searches looked like: (retire* OR pension* OR IRA* OR 401(k) OR 403(b) OR “defined
benefit” OR “defined contribution”).
In regards to finding business articles, she suggested Lexis-Nexis for law reviews and Business
Source Complete. Lexis-Nexis searches over 500 law journals beginning in 1982. She
recommends using advanced search to search within the article title and then limiting the serach
dates or specific areas of law only if necessary. For instance, if you were researching
immigration policy, you could select to search “immigration law” specifically and then type
“summary(immigration law)” in the search box to find these words if they appear in the article
abstract as well. You can also search specific court cases by typing in things like
“Summary(“jones v. harris”).” Business Source Complete searches over 1,100 peer reviewed
business publications. Most of the same search techniques apply here. She did want to emphasize
not selecting to limit search results to full text as it will eliminate articles that the library has full
text access to through non-EBSCOhost databases.