Experiential Learning Project A For this assignment, I split my time

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.