The Journey Through Information Literacy and Reference Services

Before starting this course my interest in resources was more about fiction and meeting teacher’s curriculum needs with non fiction books to help students access information they needed,either when researching or to help expand on the learning outcomes teachers were working on.

Encyclopedia use was not very prolific as was the use of atlases, dictionaries, almanacs and even some of the other references, as some of these resources were already in classrooms and teachers are now collecting all the topic books for their classes for use and going to computers much quicker for their students to collect additional information. When the students come to the library it ‘s usually to sign out books for their personal use.

My journey has turned out to be a rethinking of my role and the way I think about reference services. I am much more open to the idea of reference services being provided through technology especially after some of the discussions and searches I done to learn about electronic resources especially encyclopedias. I have really thought about the expense of print and how we can resolve the issue by giving students more interesting resources that draw them into a subject as many online encyclopedias use multimedia aspects to present the content. As to the use of databases and indexes I personally do not have control over this area as it has to be a district decision to purchase the services. I can hopefully be a more informed advocate of these services and give reason why this change would benefit the district’s schools.

For my role as a TL I do not really have time to work with the classes in terms of doing research. Our Superintendent has talked about wanting more TL time for schools and hopefully with a school our size it would mean a .4 or .6 rather than the .2 job as it is now, allowing for some collaboration between the TL and classroom teachers. I really feel that working with some of the teachers, we can find the time to incorporate information skills which have not been taught by the TL in the past few years due to time factor. In my TL listserve I found an interesting research statistic that says there is a growth in new information of about 66% each year. Through collaboration, students will be taught information skills that help students effectively find information and evaluate the appropriateness of it for school and in their lives. Teachers have so much to teach, that they don’t spend the time needed to help kids find material in other sites other than wikipedia and google. The TL can deal with these skills and teach students the skills to evaluate sites use different resources such as DVD’s, print and other sites that are more appropriate to work through the research process with the students.

I still have more to learn. I feel that my searching technique can personally become more effective and effortless which will carry over to helping students search more effectively. I do need to look at the reference section of the library and promote this information to teachers for there are many sources that they can use with small groups and their classes that still have good information. I am going to use the encyclopedias for a lesson I read about in Library Media Connection to help younger students find information quickly by opening encyclopedias at the beginning, middle and end using the second letter to show them the progression of words in an encyclopedia.

In this job I find I always have something to learn which always make for an exciting interesting job.