Growing Partnerships

Jo-Ann Michalak, Director, Tisch Library

Cooperative Collection Development

Collection Development: The Importance of Collaboration

by John Brooke, Professor of History

For those of us who have been here more than a decade, the improvements are obvious. Books central to the development of any given field arrive in an orderly stream, thanks to the library's approval plan program. In addition, through consultation with the faculty, the library has used the annual supplemental funds and endowed accounts to purchase retrospective print materials and to buy primary source microform collections. The library has been able to maintain its print journal holdings, and it has greatly expanded its electronic holdings to over 1500 online journals and indexes. In the meantime, ongoing improvements in electronic access (if occasionally annoying to those of us used to older systems!) have radically sped up the process of research.

A wonderful teaching library providing an exellent basis for research:

In my experience, this half-decade of change has made Tisch Library simply a wonderful teaching library. Teaching in both early American history and global environmental history has given me a perhaps unique perspective on the changes at Tisch. Quite simply, only very rarely do I find that significant recent books have not been added to the collection, in fields as diverse as Civil War politics, supercyclic geology, the early modern novel, or the prehistoric rise of agriculture. When I started teaching environmental history six years ago the holdings in environment studies could be contained in a couple of shelves; now they fill range after range.

Given the nature of Tufts, Tisch can never be a true "research" library, but it is certainly an excellent base for research, and can make a real contribution to the wider research consortium of Boston-area colleges and universities. One of the hidden secrets of the Tufts Library is its holdings in early American history, grounded in nineteenth-century beginnings, and developed over decades of active purchasing. In the recent past the largest acquisition for this field was actually a modernization of a long-held collection. In the 1960s Professor Robert J. Taylor was instrumental in purchasing the Early American Imprint series through 1800, a microcard collection of every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in the United States before 1801. By the 1980s the cardboard cards were getting hard to read, card-readers were breaking down, and card-printers non-existent. In 1995, the library staff used funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities to replace this card collection with microfiche and to purchase cataloging records to be added to the library catalog. These records now mean that every item printed in the U. S. before 1801 is immediately accessible at Tisch! With the new digital reader-printers recently purchased by Tisch, hard copies of any of the microfiche can be printed out in a matter of minutes.

This purchase and others, such as the fiche version of the Landmarks of Science collection, were not so much a new acquisition as a maintainance of an old acquisition. Library collections, as institutional bodies of knowledge, require both maintenance and growth. The united efforts of administrators, staff, and faculty over the past decade to maintain and to develop the print and now electronic collection in Tisch provide one of the great success stories in the recent history of Tufts.

Faculty are urged to contact their subject bibliographers to discuss their library collection needs. Building collections that support the curriculum of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering is best facilitated by a true collaboration between faculty and library staff.

The bibliographers are:

Head of Collections & Reference: Laura Walters, 72098, laura.walters@tufts.edu

Engineering: Wayne Powell, 72095, wayne.powell@tufts.edu

Humanities & Arts: Christopher Barbour, 72398, christopher.barbour@tufts.edu

Music: Michael Rogan, 72846, michael.rogan@tufts.edu

Sciences: Miriam Allman, 75455, miriam.allman@tufts.edu

Social Sciences (including history): Edward Oberholtzer, 72094, edward.oberholtzer@tufts.edu

Berger Grant Partnerships

Contributors from Tisch, Child Development, and TCCS Create Child and Family News WebGuide, a Website that Evaluates Websites

by Laurie Sabol, Reference Librarian

At one of these meetings, they and I began talking about ideas to enlarge the mission of CFN. Several conversations ensued, and the group, along with Ed Oberholtzer, social sciences bibliographer, and Lyn Condron, head of cataloging, developed a proposal for a Berger grant.

At the heart of the project is the belief that expert intermediaries should be available to direct students and the general public, especially parents, to current, reliable, and authoritative web resources. Toward that end, in spring 1999 a Child Development class taught by Martland learned effective strategies for finding and evaluating web resources in several library sessions that Martland, Oberholtzer and I jointly developed. The best of these sites were subjected to a rigorous evaluation by a board of child development experts and were then mounted on the CFN WebGuide. As this was happening, Condron and other members of the group were busy creating a system to catalog the websites and to allow users to search the site effectively. Ranjani Saigal and Anoop Kumar, from TCCS, provided much-needed technical expertise for the project.

We all hope the Tisch/Child Development relationship continues and that the model can extend to other teaching departments.

Note. More information concerning the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment and the collaborative projects it has funded will be found at http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/Berger/bergerhome.html. For a listing of reference librarians assigned to teaching departments and more on faculty-librarian partnerships generally, see "Cooperative Endeavors with Faculty" at http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/classes.htm#ce.

Partnerships for Library Instruction

Librarians meet in ERC to view newly acquired databases, prior to introducing them in library instructional sessions.

by Regina Raboin, Reference Librarian, with added faculty comments

Professor Terry Haas and I have collaborated twice for his Windows on Research advising groups, first for the one investigating "Energy for the 21st Century," and this semester, along with Professor George Smith from Philosophy, for the one exploring "The Chemical Revolution." These library sessions have focused on basic research skills and on using/evaluating print, electronic and web resources.

UEP graduate students are helped by a library tour and an online bibliography (at http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/ Subject/uepkk.htm), which I developed. Early in the fall, Professors Julian Agyeman and Molly Mead work jointly with me as they bring their Foundations of Public Policy and Planning class to the library for instruction in library research. Students who feel they need additional assistance are encouraged to schedule a one-on-one reference consultation. Several other UEP courses have taken advantage of these services.

Doing graduate-level research in an interdisciplinary field can be challenging and at times frustrating. UEP students are frequently called upon to conduct research across all types of resources including government documents, online databases, electronic journals, websites, and microforms. How to choose the right resources, how to formulate, focus, and organize their research, and how to get needed materials from elsewhere are just a few of their concerns.

Another interdisciplinary program that has been extensively involved with library instruction is Community Health. When preparing for a paper or presentation, these students need to know how to find and use resources such as government and health statistics, information about state and federal community health programs and agencies, and journal and print indices covering medical, nursing, and other allied health information. Professors Edith Balbach, director of the program, Charlene Galarneau, and Bonnie Chakravorty have all brought their students to the library for research assistance and consistently encourage them to build these lifelong learning skills.

Comment by Edith Balbach, Community Health:
Instructional sessions that are most successful take advantage of seminar-length classes in which students have a basic introduction to library resources and then have the remainder of the class period to work on their projects. Both the librarian and the faculty member are available to help students with their topics. This combined expertise can help students in both finding and understanding material. Such sessions help students understand how extensive use of primary and secondary sources can improve the quality of their work.

Comment by Charlene Galarneau, Community Health:
Hands-on sessions in the Electronic Resource Center which give undergraduates the skills for independent research are critical to the quality of their learning. In the Religion, Health and Healing seminar, students learned how to access the broad landscape of relevant resources as well as received help in identifying specific resources for their particular research topics. These sessions often give students their first experience of working with a reference librarian, and thus they learn that the library offers human as well as electronic and print resources for help with their research.

Comment by J. Michael Reed, Biology:
I have been taking my classes to the library for your instruction for years, and find it invaluable.

The information sharing continues.

For History
by Howard M. Solomon, Professor of History

I always devote a regularly scheduled class period to the workshop, and I always participate actively in it; it is as important as any other meeting of the seminar. Connie usually begins by discussing the printed bibliographies and topical research guides in Tisch, demonstrates how to access electronic-based research materials, and then addresses students' specific questions as they each begin to use the computer to search for materials. By the end of the session, students are much more confident about developing their proposals and doing their research. They also know that Connie is available for one-on-one help as they get into their projects.

The quality of the papers has improved considerably since I've integrated the library workshop into my senior research seminar, and students routinely identify the workshop as one of the highlights of the course. I now schedule library workshops in my foundation seminar course -- designed for students beginning their history major -- as well.

by Pauline A. Boucher, Reference Librarian, and James M. Glaser, Associate Professor of Political Science

James Glaser:
The introductory American politics course is very large -- 130 students this semester, and with so many students, it is important to have some active learning experiences. I assign my students to write two small research papers involving the original analysis of primary sources. Students must analyze a contemporary issue and compare how it has been treated by at least two branches of government, using the comparisons to draw conclusions about how the institutions differ, how they relate to each other, or how they relate to the public and interest groups. The assignment would not work without the bibliographic sessions that Pauline Boucher holds for my students.

Pauline and I have been working together for almost ten years. In 1991, she and I had to haul stacks of reference books in a cart to a room across campus. It was an ordeal! Now, with the Electronic Resource Center in the library and with so much material available on the web, the bibliographic sessions are certainly easier, but ever more valuable.

Editor: Margaret Gooch