NELIG Meeting - 8/10/2001

NELIG Meeting
Friday August 10, 2001
University of Rhode Island, Providence
Number attending: 21 

Agenda  

Esme DeVault the current chair called the meeting to order and introduced our speaker, Patricia Flanagan from MIT. Pat gave a presentation, "Ask Us! -- Live: real-time online reference in the MIT libraries". She described the planning, selection of a product, testing and implementation of a virtual reference service at MIT. Librarians attending the program peppered Pat with questions and described similar programs at other libraries. Since NELIG is an instruction group, participants were particularly interested in how such a service could tie into instruction efforts. 

After a short break, a summary of the Annual NELIG program held this past June was given. 110 librarians attended the event held at Brandeis. The majority of respondents rated the program a 4 or 5 (the highest ratings) on their evaluation forms. There was much positive feedback from the speakers. 

Esme solicited topics for future programs as well as going over topics suggested on the evaluation forms. Some of the suggestions were: team teaching, teaching students with disabilities, instructing faculty, techniques which can be used for assessment, the role of administration in supporting information literacy, effective teaching techniques, partnering with high schools, beyond the first year experience, non-traditional students, partnering with faculty, effective teaching in computer classrooms and/or how to get out of the computer lab. Much of the program planning will take place on the NELIG listserv or from the NELIG web site. 

In other announcements:

A new special interest group for ACRL has started called LOCI. This group will focus on the library use of courseware such as Blackboard's CourseInfo or WebCT. Their next meeting is scheduled for September 26 at Boston College.

The ACRL/NE fall program is scheduled for November 9 at UMass Boston. The topic has yet to be decided.

NELA will hold a meeting September 30 -- October 2 in Burlington, VT.

The next NELIG meeting is tentatively set for November 16. 

Peer observation teams are a new NELIG initiative. We hope to form small regional groups to observe each other teach. These groups will probably be best organized through the listserv. It is hoped that 1 or 2 groups will be able to report back by the November meeting and explain how this effort is going. 

Carol Gordon described work she is doing at BU. With funds from an internal grant, she is working with the Instructional Technology department to develop an electronic tutorial titled "Show Me".  The focus of the effort is to develop a program, which is self-diagnostic, self-directed, and self-assessed. FlashÒ software is being used and Wilson has given permission for incorporation of their databases. The finished tutorial will be a required component of a course.

Julie Whelan distributed abstracts from articles she encountered recently dealing with assessment of information literacy efforts in medical education, especially the evidence based medicine movement. In addition an article by Katherine Chiste, Andrea Glover, and Glenna Westwood ("Infiltration and Entrenchment: Capturing and Securing Information Literacy Territory in Academe". The Journal of Academic Librarianship. May 2000 p 202) was recommended to the group for its colorful metaphors and lively discussion of tactics.

At Emerson College the use of a pre-library instruction activity has been successful. Students complete a card on their research topic and then this card is used as a basis for their next class in the library.

A NELIG presentation and a recent article in College and Research Library News, (Willen-Brown, S., & Vigeland, B. (2001). An innovative first-year instruction program at Hampshire College. College and Research Library News, 62(7),717-719), describe a Hampshire College instruction program, where large numbers of students make individual research appointments. Discussion followed on how to manage requests for large numbers of individual appointments, and if this is impossible due to staff size, what can be substituted. Suggestions included computerized tutorials, assigning under grad students to work with graduate students, or giving each student a "librarian advisor" when they enroll. Experiences from UMass Dartmouth are that even with appointment sign-up sheets in the computer classrooms, these appointments become very difficult to schedule and manage. On the same campus, use of the chat software, Live PersonÒ, to offer distance education students an opportunity for synchronous communication with a librarian have failed because students were not available to participate at the hours librarians could be available.

The University of Massachusetts system is creating a digital library for all of its distance education students. Students from all 5 campuses will use this collection. There are many difficulties still to be solved especially related to licensing, staffing, etc.

  When teaching in classrooms with wireless technology, difficulties have been found with the ability to have all students search the same database simultaneously.

  The meeting adjourned at 12:20.

A portion of the group then walked to the Providence Public Library for a tour conducted by Shirley Long, Assistant Director for Library Services. 

Respectfully submitted,
Julie Whelan, Secretary