Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Question 2
I think librarians are in student's lives to help guide them through their studies. Their studies might consist of researching a topic, writing an essay or argument or simply looking for the perfect book to help them find the right kind of information, or even a good book for pleasure reading. Librarians are people who will take the time to give help hints and advice to students about topics such as plagiarism. This awareness librarians help provide is extremely important not only to the student but to our society as a whole in respect to the values. It would be really cool if librarians could have their own personal online websites that students could easily get access to late at night while stuck on writing a paper or just have a question about a topic or book. These websites could also have an area to blog about different subjects such as book reports or ratings. These personal, but professional websites would be cool because students would have an “online” library in some sense but all the time. Having an “online” library would be useful especially to those students who may not own a computer or simply have questions or need to express their ideas to someone who will be willing to listen. In the future, the picture of a library will change tremendously. Unfortunately, I think there will be fewer books and more computers and other electronics. I say this because books are slowly becoming less favorable for research especially because many people have found websites such as 'Google' more efficient because of the easy and quickly accessed. Though, libraries will still be a quiet place to study and a still very useful atmosphere.
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Kristina—I love your idea of librarians having their own personal online website to provide help for students late at night. We actually have something kind of similar to what you described here at the Health Sciences Library, and they are called “Research Guides.” We currently have one for 1st year medical students and Cacari Ultrasound students, and many more will be coming, including one for Pre-Collegiate students. They’re not quite as effective as the one in your vision that has a librarian available to assist late at night (but for that, you could use something like Ask Colorado, which is a 24/7 online librarian assistance service) or a place bounce ideas off of a librarian in real time, though. Ours would have a delay in responses if it’s outside of librarian hours, which is 8-5pm. In the meantime, think of the Library Research class wiki as the personal website for now. I’ve been considering allowing students to post questions or assignments and stuff, and will definitely look into it for next year’s students. I love your ideas so much that I’m going to pass it on to the library’s Web librarians to toss around. I think at one time we wanted students to be able to create their own “home page” on the library website where they can gather together all the resources and tools that they find most helpful and essentially create their own online library, but I’m not sure whatever happened to that project. Thanks for sharing your ideas—they’re simply fabulous!
ReplyDeleteTina M. Moser, MLIS
Access Services Librarian
Health Sciences Library
University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus