Drawing on the results of research

Last weekend I found some highly relevant articles and websites that report on the results of research into subject guides, created using LibGuides, that universities have completed. It was great to find these sources, as previously I had found lots of resources that outlined guidelines on creating subject guides, but the recommendations did not seem to be backed up by research.

One of the articles that I found was a pre-print: Little, J. J., Fallon, M., Dauenhauer, J., Balzano, B., & Halquist, D. (2010). Interdisciplinary collaboration: a faculty learning community creates a comprehensive LibGuide. Reference Services Review, 38(3). It describes a project at the College at Brockport where faculty members and librarians collaborated to create a LibGuide on research methods. The guides were then used during seminars and a survey was used to gather feedback from the students. The feedback was mainly positive but also included some suggestions for improving the guides. For example students indicated they would like more information on using databases.

Some of the other articles and websites that I found that report on research conducted by librarians include:

• Foster, M., Wilson, H., Allensworth, N., & Sands, D. T. (2010). Marketing research guides: an online experiment with LibGuides. Journal of Library Administration, 50(5/6), 602-616
• Gonzalez, A. C., & Westbrock, T. (2010). Reaching out with LibGuides: establishing a working set of best practices. Journal of Library Administration, 50(5/6), 638-656.
• Usability in the Library: LibGuides Reports, from the University of Michigan: http://www.lib.umich.edu/node/22138
• Research Guides (LibGuides) Usability Results, from MIT Libraries http://libstaff.mit.edu/usability/2008/research-guides.html

While it is out of the scope of my project to conduct usability testing or survey students, I hope that I will be able to draw on the results from these previous studies to create better subjects guides.

I am just about to begin writing up my literature review. I might add to it in the coming weeks, but I think that I have completed enough research at this stage to begin writing.

Tomorrow morning I am flying to Brisbane to attend ALIA Access 2010! It will be interesting to see if anyone mentions LibGuides or subject guides in general.

Maintaining subject guides

I am still doing research for my project and have been searching for articles and books, reading, doing copious amounts of highlighting and taking notes. I found another fantastic book on engineering resources yesterday: 'Using the engineering literature / edited by Bonnie A. Osif' http://cat.lib.rmit.edu.au/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=580271 which was published in 2006, and have been taking notes from that today.

During the week I read an article while on the train: Tchangalova, N., & Feigley, A. (2008). Subject Guides: Putting a New Spin on an Old Concept. Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, 9(3), http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/tchangalova_n01.html. In one section it explains how some libraries have used databases to construct subject guides. The database holds information on specific resources, and then web pages can be created dynamically based on parameters that the user selects. This presents a way to create guides that are customised to users' specific needs. Another approach mentioned uses Server Side Includes to combine multiple HTML or text files, that contain information on individual resources, into a single library subject guide Web page.

While I will not be able to use these exact techniques in LibGuides, these approaches got me thinking about the importance of creating guides that are easy to maintain and keep up-to-date. The database or Server Side Include approaches allow the guide editor to have a single place where they edit the information on a particular resource, i.e. either in the database or in a text or HTML file that can then be used in multiple guides. So far when I have been creating guides I have just been writing (or hard-coding) all the text and links into LibGuides boxes. But this means that if one of the links or the text has an error or becomes out of date I will have to fix the problem in multiple places.

After doing a bit of investigating, I think there are a couple of LibGuides features that can help with this problem. When you use a 'Links & Lists' or 'Web Links' box to create a list of links, you can choose to reuse an existing link from another LibGuide. This means that you can create and edit the links in a single guide and then use them in lots of other guides. See this LibGuides FAQ page: http://libguidesfaq.com/a.php?qid=2476 and help page: http://help.springshare.com/content.php?pid=101296&sid=761160 for more information. A similar feature allows you to copy boxes from other LibGuides and choose a 'link' option, so that any changes made to the original box are reflected in the copies: http://libguidesfaq.com/a.php?qid=2651. I now plan to create a master or template engineering guide containing all the links and boxes that contain content that I want to use across multiple engineering LibGuides, so that I can edit the content in a single place.

I also noticed when reading this article: Yang, S. Q. (2009). Subject guide 2.0: a dream or reality? Journal of Library and Information Science, 35(1), pp. 90-98. Retrieved from http://140.122.104.2/ojs/index.php/jlis/article/view/528/522 that it mentioned that LibGuides had a link checking feature (see: http://support.springshare.com/2008/09/25/link-checker-function-in-libguides/)! I had not noticed this before, but am very excited by it as I hate finding dead links on websites. You can click a link in your 'My Admin' area and it will show you a report of the broken links for your guides or for all the guides created at your institution. The report is updated every two weeks. One drawback is that it only checks the links in certain types of boxes:  Web Links, Links & Lists, Dates & Events, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, Books, User Submits, and Polls. Therefore I think it will be important to use these types of boxes whenever possible when I create links.

I have been using LibGuides since last year and thought I knew a lot about them, but these discoveries have made me realise that I need to carefully check the LibGuides documentation, FAQ and help websites so that I don't miss out on some of the powerful features available.

In other news my supervisor approved by 'Project Design & Charter' document yesterday!

An unexpected discovery

I have been doing lots of research towards my information project over the past couple of weeks. I’ve mainly been searching for journal articles on the topic of library subject guides so far, but after quickly searching the catalogue at work, I found a great resource yesterday in reference section, that I didn’t realise the library owned:
http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=b2946649~S30
‘Information sources in engineering’ edited by Roderick A. MacLeod and Jim Corlett.

It is one of the funny things I have found about working in a library, I am surrounded by great resources and am involved in promoting and recommending the resources to patrons, but I don’t always remember to use them when I am doing my own work.

The book seems really useful as the first chapter discusses the information needs and seeking behaviours of engineering and subsequent chapters outline the different types of resources that engineers use, including:

• Journals, e-journals & e-books,
• Reports, theses & research in progress,
• Conference proceedings,
• Patents, standards & product information,
• Abstracting & indexing services,
• Bibliographies & reviews,
• The Internet,
• References sources and
• Information from Professional Societies.

It seems that engineers use a fascinating mix of different types of information and can’t wait to find out more about the specialised and harder-to-find types of information, such as patents, standards, conference proceedings and research in progress or ‘gray literature’.

I think ‘Information sources in engineering’ will also be valuable as it has chapters on the different engineering specialisations such as Chemical Engineering & Civil Engineering. The only problem is, it is in the reference section, so I can’t borrow it! It is also a little old, published in 2005, so it would be great to find a similar, newer book.

My plan over the next few days is to make a start on my project charter and to continue with my research. I think I really need to map out an overall plan for the project very soon, as I am concerned about running out of time! There seem to be lots of relevant useful information sources for my project and I think I am experiencing a bit of information overload at the moment. So I will try to focus on only the most relevant resources and set others aside.

Getting started

I have decided to write a blog in order to fulfil the requirements to reflect on and evaluate my experiences during the completion of the subject: LIBR1026 Information Project. I will need to reflect on the research experience and on what it means to be a practitioner-researcher in the field of information and knowledge management.

In my current position at work, as a Library Professional Cadet, I have been required to reflect on my experiences at work since April last year. So initially when I found out that I would have to reflect on my experience while completing this project, my heart sank. But after completing an online module on the Blackboard page for this subject on reflective writing, I learned about different methods of reflective writing and am hoping to try the different techniques. I found one of the readings particularly inspiring: Watson, M. 2008. 'Reflective writing, building your portfolio: The CILIP Guide', London: Facet, pp. 21 - 30. It explained that reflections can be a useful resource that you can dip into later as needed, like Dumbledore's Pensieve in 'Harry Potter'. I also liked that it explained that it isn't enough to gain experience and reflect, you actually need to apply what you have learned in another situation.

It has also been a goal of mine to start writing a blog for professional development, but I never seem to find the time. So maybe, after the project is completed, this blog will eventually morph into a more general blog about my professional experiences and development.

It is the end of the second week of the semester and I am pretty pleased with my progress so far. I submitted my project proposal on Wednesday and my supervisor has approved it, which is fantastic. The topic of my project is to create a series of online research guides for students studying engineering at the University of Melbourne, using the content management application: LibGuides. I plan to create one guide for each of the departments in the Melbourne School of Engineering that will outline the key resources and sources of information relevant to the department, as well as information or tutorials on how to conduct research.

I have started researching the topic of subject guides, but I think that I need to do a lot more research. I am keen to do a thorough literature search, so that I can gain an understanding of the theory behind and main issues to do with creating subject guides. As part of the project proposal I listed resources that I intend to use to locate further literature on the topic, so my plan at this stage is to systematically go through those resources.

I am a little unsure of how thorough my literature review needs to be, and how current the sources I include should be. I will need to clarify this with my supervisor. I am also unsure as to how to go about sharing the results of my research with my supervisor. I am thinking of creating an EndNote library and using that to keep track of resources that I might use and to organise them.

I will dive into the literature search now and report back on my progress!