Increasing Use Made of Instructional Program

To give a student a fish or teach that student how to fish? Reference staff do both at the reference desk. Their philosophy is not only to offer information resources to students, but also to teach them how to be independent locators, users, and evaluators of the vast array of sources available. For instruction beyond the basics at the reference desk, a variety of workshops and other options have been added to the library's instructional program in the last three years to aid patrons in developing information literacy skills. The offerings of the library instructional program are experiencing increasing demand.

2) Librarians are scheduling more teaching department meetings than in the past. This avenue provides an opportunity to demonstrate new electronic and print resources to faculty and generally to discuss how the library can serve faculty - and thus students - more effectively through its collections and instructional offerings. Meetings with each academic department are scheduled to occur at least every two years.

3) Reference librarians are also available for individual appointments with members of the Tufts community. An appointment, the most personalized type of instruction offered, allows a patron and librarian to work together at a computer or in the bookstacks to improve the patron's search skills and uncover the most relevant sources for a specific topic. Fall semester appointments (53) equal the total number for all of last year, a 100% increase. This service is proving especially valuable to seniors writing theses.

4) An ongoing series of drop-in sessions on topics ranging from the new version of the online catalog to using a growing number of full-text resources continues to attract small numbers of attendees. Those who do attend rate the workshops highly, and librarians believe the series offers some valuable topics, including how to evaluate web resources, connect to databases from off campus, and make effective use of search engines. These workshops are publicized via print and web calendars and e-mail messages, but faculty encouragement of attendance by colleagues and students will be appreciated. The calendar is at http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/calendar.htm.

The reference staff at Tisch are encouraged that the program is growing, with an increasing number of students and faculty taking advantage of the instructional services offered. Librarians will continue their efforts to meet the demand with an instructional program of quality.

Get Rid of Those Note Cards!

Tisch Website Improvement Underway

Many members of the Tisch staff participated as observers while users worked to solve ten general web questions. The users included undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty randomly selected by Tufts Institutional Research. Each user attempted to find the material requested, and the observer wrote down the web path taken, as well as any comments. The week following the usability testing, Institutional Research conducted discussions with three focus groups comprised of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty to further assist Tisch staff in identifying ways of improving the site. No library staff were involved in the focus groups, thus enabling participants to feel free to comment.

The staff gained very good insight into how users actually use the site and are looking forward to implementing suggestions offered. Tisch and Institutional Research staff enjoyed working cooperatively in this important project, and appreciate the cooperation so helpfully extended by the users involved.

Third Annual Berger Grant Awarded

This year's Berger Family Technology Award will fund the development of an evaluative guide to web resources in child development. Fred Rothbaum of the Child Development Department and Lyn Condron, Edward Oberholtzer, and Laurie Sabol of Tisch Library will collaboratively engage in this prototype digital library project. The WebGuide will be a comprehensive and organized collection of websites selected and rated according to standards to be developed by the team.

The guide is envisioned as an adjunct to the Child and Family News website created by Fred Rothbaum and Nancy Martland as a single location for interested journalists to use in collecting story ideas, names of experts, and reliable research information and material for child-oriented articles. The WebGuide will extend the appeal of Child and Family News beyond journalists to students and faculty here at Tufts as well as parents and teachers out in the community. It will draw together materials on children that previously were accessible only through a variety of different databases covering disparate fields such as psychology, sociology, education, and health sciences.

The creation of the WebGuide will allow the library staff and faculty members to develop skills in indexing and cataloging websites, as well as in developing objective criteria for evaluating materials on the web. The Internet, for all its vast store of information, remains a notoriously difficult environment in which to find reliable materials when doing research. Search engines for navigating through the ever-increasing number of websites remain both difficult to use and unreliable when used without training. The WebGuide will provide the Tufts student body with a resource that will offer trustworthy information in a convenient location and also serve as a model for the development of other guides in different interdisciplinary areas. In addition, the project library staff will present a workshop on evaluating websites to share this expertise with Tufts faculty who wish to create their own digital resources.

Exhibit case containing "5000 Years of Recorded History" and children's drawings of their favorite books for Children's Book Week

The Tufts community is invited to celebrate the millionth book milestone the afternoon of Thursday, April 6, 2000. Lois Gibbs, a nationally known environmental leader, will be the speaker. In 1988, Lois Gibbs's organization chose the Tufts University Archives as the repository for its records in recognition of the leadership Tufts has demonstrated in environmental affairs and citizen participation.

Laura Walters and Jo-Ann Michalak, attending from Tisch Library, heard presentations by faculty who serve as editors of important science journals and by representatives from such major scholarly societies as the American Chemical Society and the Institute of Physics. All the featured speakers are currently working with SPARC to foster competition in the scholarly market-place by publishing online journals that distribute research faster and at significantly lower costs to libraries than existing journals.

SPARC publishing partners are also committed to increasing distribution options and offering less restrictive copyright terms than those allowed by the traditional commercial system, where faculty must often transfer their copyrights to publishers, thereby forever losing control of any subsequent public distribution of their work. These restrictions apply to personal distribution for teaching and research purposes. Journals sponsored by SPARC, such as Evolutionary Ecology Research, allow the author to retain copyright to the work and to reproduce it for educational purposes such as reserves, interlibrary loan, and web archiving. Michael Rosenzweig of the University of Arizona received start-up money from SPARC to publish Evolutionary Ecology Research. The journal has a prestigious editorial board and is peer reviewed, indexed by all major indexing services, and available in print and online.

Organic Letters, published by the American Chemical Society, is another SPARC initiative that is both faculty and library friendly. The web edition of Organic Letters makes articles available online within 48 hours of being peer-reviewed, edited, and approved by its authors, allowing access up to five weeks earlier than the print edition.

Organic Letters' major competitor is Tetrahedron Letters published by Elsevier. Organic Letters is one-third the price of Tetrahedron Letters; it provides faster access to articles and allows broader distribution by libraries and authors for educational purposes. Prior to the publication of Organic Letters, Tetrahedron Letters had doubled in price every three years. With the inception of its competitor, the subscription price increased by only 8% in 1999.

SPARC and its members, including the Tufts Libraries, hope that the Organic Letters experience is an indication that faculty and libraries can begin to have a positive influence on the scholarly publication process. Involvement by faculty is critical in ensuring a publication system that meets the needs of higher education. SPARC encourages faculty to examine the pricing, copyright, and licensing agreements of the journals that they contribute to as authors, reviewers or editors. In the words of a SPARC participant, "This is your system--help shape its future."

Contributors to this issue:

Laurie Sabol

Connie Reik

Edward Oberholtzer

Lyn Condron

Jo-Ann Michalak

Laura Walters

Pauline Boucher (photography)

Editor: Margaret Gooch