Spring on the way!

Monday, spring break will be officially over and the last 6 weeks of Winter 2012 will begin. As you return to class and find you need to begin really researching for assignments, don’t forget to contact the library with any questions. For remote students, we have the library chat service found on our home page or at http://librarysubjectguides.svsu.edu/help or within many of our library subject/research guides. Looking forward to helping!

The Fall Semester Begins!

With Labor day break over, the Fall Semester is rolling full speed ahead. I’ve already completed 9 library sessions to date and even made one trip to the Macomb Center. I really enjoy meeting students during their class time. It gives me a chance to at least meet them face to face once for the term (if it is an online class) and share what is new at the library. I think the best part of these face to face sessions is that they provide a foundation for online and remote assistance. At least that has been my experience over the years.  It is kind of like an ice-breaker, I’m hoping students get the sense that I’m ready to help both in person at the library or online via email or VSpace or chat.

I’ll be sharing some new options for assistance in the next few posts as well as new library resources available to students, faculty and staff.

 

Fall Semester Approaches

The Fall Semester is the term that you see and feel the start of a new academic year on a college campus.  Although it technically started June 27th with Summer term here,  it is the sheer rush of the student population coming back or just starting on August 29th, that makes Fall impressive.  It is a great time to be a librarian at an academic institution.

Everything starts over, new faces, new dreams, new experiences await not only the students but library staff as well.  It’s a chance to become energized again, to try new approaches and ideas.  Along with that comes getting organized and prepared for library instruction sessions, reference desk schedules and procedures, marketing online course support, creating new resources,  the list goes on  and on. And thank goodness it does.  All this is done in hope that students that use the library and its resources and services become information literate forever. It is a great time to be a librarian.

Database selection

This week I’ve been working on compiling stats from our database pages for last academic year (2011). Although I’m only half way through this project, I can now identify the top 50 databases selected from our pages. This in no way is a scientific measure since it doesn’t account for librarian uses during library instruction or reference assistance, but it at least gives some idea regarding user selection from the main access point to our databases.
The top 5 databases based on link clicks from the database page (using LibGuides to track link clicks) are:
1) Proquest
2) JSTOR
3) CINAHL
4) WilsonSelectPlus
5) Science Direct

I’m pleased to see that three of the top five are scholarly databases. I was a bit surprised by this as I thought sure all the top databases would be the general, multi-subject databases (which two of the three are). It will be interesting to see if this database listing matches stats generated by the vendor.

Introduction

This is my introduction to the world of blogging.  Although I’ll mostly use this blog to keep the SVSU community aware of library resources and online assistance, I may also share insight on this librarian’s struggle to provide the best online assistance. I hope you find this resource useful.