04 Wednesday Dec 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
We have a student project to share with you today on the LibBlog! Two sociology students here at Kirkwood, Camden Roeder and Angel Franco, have created a one-page study habits guide. In their research they found some quick and easy ways students can boost the effectiveness of their study time. Take a look and try out some of their suggestions as you prepare for your final exams. And the best of luck to you in your last days of classes and finals!
19 Tuesday Nov 2019
Posted in digital resources
Back in October the Library had trial subscriptions to three different databases, all requested by Kirkwood faculty. We are pleased to announce that we have decided to subscribe to two of these, and both will be available beginning in January 2020.
Please welcome the newest additions to the Kirkwood Libraries Databases collection:
This database provides a collection of scholarly and popular articles on film and television topics. It strives to be comprehensive and balanced, and as the title suggests contains the full-text of indexed articles. Besides the obvious uses in film studies, this content could also be used by students writing research papers in any number of different courses where a film or series is used as source material. As a bonus, this database is contained in the familiar EBSCOhost interface.
This collection of short educational and training films contains mental health simulations, and includes assessment tools related to DSM 5 and ICD. We heard positive feedback on this content from faculty in psychology, human services, and nursing & allied health.
Thanks to all the faculty who recommended these databases and gave us feedback on their potential usefulness for our students. Check the library website in January to try them for yourself!
16 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in digital resources
Kirkwood Library Services announces subscription access to an extensive set of consumer health reference books. These 82 (and counting) books cover a wide range of health topics, including stress, cancer, women’s health, men’s health, sexual health, dental, depression, diet & nutrition, and many more.
All titles contain basic, authoritative information presented in language understandable to non-experts. They provide background information on each topic, as well as in-depth discussion of treatment options and prevention, key statistics, and sources for further research. This database is updated regularly as new editions are published for each topic. It’s the perfect resource for a student researching a health topic for a speech or essay.
These titles are full-text searchable directly from the Health Reference Series database, and searchable by subject keyword through the Library’s WorldCat Search. As with most of our subscription databases, this is available to all Kirkwood faculty, staff, and students, on or off campus, by logging in with your k number and password.
25 Wednesday Sep 2019
Posted in digital resources
This fall your Kirkwood librarians have lined up trials for 4 different databases that have been suggested to us by faculty over the past semester. The first of these database trials is already underway!
Health Reference Series by Omnigraphics is actually a long-standing book series with in-depth and authoritative consumer health information. The Health Reference Series Online database simply takes the chapters from this book series and makes them searchable, readable, and downloadable online. We often recommend these books to students in composition or speech classes who need some good, solid information on a disease, disorder, or other health matter, but don’t want the highly specialized information a nursing or allied health student might need.
So if you have a minute to spare and an interest in trying out this database, please check it out, and let us know what you think! Also: stay tuned to this blog for information on Database Trials: Round Two, coming the first of October.
21 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in digital resources
Project MUSE, a well-known non-profit provider of online scholarly materials for academic libraries, has worked with a number of publishers to provide free access to a collection of eBooks and online journal articles on gun violence. In a statement accompanying this release they stated “the goal is to encourage the broadest possible engagement with current research and expertise on [gun violence] as the latest round of gun policy debates and discussion continue in the wake of shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio.” Project MUSE provided a link to the collection, which is free and open to the public. Please make use of these high quality materials and share widely.
http://bit.ly/MUSEinFocus-Gun-ViolenceEMMA
14 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in digital resources, faculty
Welcome back!
Over the summer there have been some mostly-minor changes to our online information resources, including all the Gale-owned databases, PsycArticles database, and the Credo Instruct tutorials collection.
Remember you can find out about all the resources and services the library provides to faculty over at our Faculty Services LibGuide. Best of luck in your new semester!
06 Thursday Jun 2019
Even before the term “fake news” gained widespread use during the 2016 election campaign, Kirkwood faculty widely agreed (72% of those surveyed in 2015) that students need to do better at evaluating information sources used in their research.
We at the Library often get requests from faculty to help teach students how to effectively evaluate information sources, so we are always on the lookout for the best ways to teach these important skills. We have used tools like the CRAAP Test, which does a good job of guiding us to dig more deeply into a source, past its initial appearance. However educator and researcher Mike Caulfield has found that this deep dive to interrogate a source — an approach that serves us well in the world of academics — does us a disservice when we try to apply it to the overload of information in our daily lives and on our social media feeds. What this world of attention-grabbing, misleading headlines, and outright lies needs is a simple and quick approach that is easily understood and learned by students (and teachers and librarians!) of all ages.
Enter “Four Moves and a Habit”, a process adapted from the work of professional fact-checkers to quickly gauge whether a particular news story, website, or piece of information is worth the time needed for the “deep dive”. Caulfield published an extensive (and free) online book, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, describing this approach in great detail back in 2017. Since then he has been developing teaching materials and testing the method out on college as well as younger students to fine tune it. As of now these are the tools I recommend for teachers to learn for themselves and use with their students:
10 Wednesday Oct 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
There is a funny (to my mind) misconception that many people have about the work of librarians, and that is that we often sit around reading. This may be true of many of us librarians when we are not working, but one of the great tensions of our lives (well, of mine anyway) is that we are surrounded each day by books that we have little time to read.
Well, October is National Book Month, and this made me pause and think back to why I was pulled to the profession of librarianship, and I can tell you it was all about the books. Surely others have expressed their love of books or the importance of reading in their lives more eloquently, more passionately, more analytically, more humorously, more engagingly than I, more deeply than I, but nevertheless I want to share.
I loved to read when I was very young. I’m sure I was read-to very often as an infant and toddler, but I mostly recall wanting to do the thing myself. I wanted to hold the book, and I wanted to decipher those symbols, to discover their meaning with my own eyes and mind. I remember sitting one day in the back of the car on a family trip, holding “Horton Hears a Who” in my lap, turning through the pages and telling myself the well-rehearsed story, when I suddenly realized that I knew what each word said, that I was actually doing the thing! I’ve been hooked ever since. But it was several years later at age 9 that I was browsing the book shelves at home and found “Danny the Champion of the World”, a book that had been given to my older brother (who shares the title’s namesake), and that quickly became my very favorite book in the world. I remember reading it, getting to the end, and immediately flipping the book back to its front cover and starting it again, from the title page and dedication all the way through to its exciting, dramatic, and touching conclusion. Ah! I can still feel that excitement and anticipation of a great story masterfully told, with complex, engaging, and troubling characters. I couldn’t have put it in words at the time, but looking back there was some mystery behind the story that I wanted to solve. How did this Roald Dahl, this name typed on a page, captivate my attention? How did he make me see Danny and his father in their caravan eating their dinner so vividly, how did he make me gasp when trouble descended, and laugh with them as they plotted one of the most satisfying revenge stories ever told?
Kate (Kirkwood librarian) and her daughter, with author Michael Chabon in Minneapolis, December 2016. Five hour road trip? Totally worth it.
That mystery is what keeps me reading voraciously to this day; it’s what keeps me up past midnight with a story I can’t put down; it’s what makes me drive for hours to a faraway bookstore where I can meet a favorite author and have them sign my book on the title page that retains my 9-year-old’s magical sense of the author as a person with miraculous abilities somehow tucked in behind that name typed at the front of the book, present but invisible within the words of the story. Author Haruki Murakami said recently that between author and reader “there is a special secret passage between us, and we can send a message to each other.” He too knows this magic that I sensed as a young reader and continue to feel today.
So thank you to all the authors, editors, and publishers that make books possible. And thank you to the librarians and booksellers who make those books available to us. At Kirkwood Libraries we have lots of great books to choose from in our Popular Books collections, and we hope you can find that perfect magical package of printed words on paper that gives you just the story you need.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
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One of the “secret menu” services Kirkwood Library Services offers to faculty is support in locating and using OER (Open Educational Resources), and one of the main challenges faculty report is in searching for these specialized resources. There are so many different ways to search for OER, and none of them involve using Google, everyone’s comfort-zone search tool! Enter Milne Library of SUNY, a leader in OER promotion, education, and adoption. Librarians at SUNY have developed a new search tool just for OER, and it promises to be just what so many faculty have been hoping for. Here’s a clip from their press release:
OASIS offers users worldwide the ability to search a range of OER materials including textbooks, courses and corresponding materials, interactive simulations, public domain books, audiobooks, modules, open access books, videos and podcasts on a variety of topics — from anthropology to zoology. OASIS also is the only tool that allows users to limit searches by creative commons licenses or by faculty review.
“One of the fundamental ideas behind OER is creating better and equal access to course materials for students,” said Rawlins. “The benefit of OASIS is that faculty can now find different types of OER all in one place using this search tool, with nearly all materials being in the public domain or openly licensed. Before, we would have to point faculty to the individual search tools from each source that are all now listed in OASIS.”
Thank you Milne Library and SUNY for investing in the people and the technology that made this tool happen! Try it out and bookmark it — we’ve just added it our Kirkwood Faculty OER Adoption Guide too.
22 Wednesday Aug 2018
OER (open educational resources) have been gaining more and more interest and use over the past several years. These open licensed and free-to-use information resources are high quality supplements or replacements for traditional textbooks, and many faculty at Kirkwood are already using them as their required course textbooks. We at Library Services have been supporting faculty identification and adoption of OER for several years now, and this last spring we surveyed our faculty to learn more about their use of and interest in OER. Here’s what we found out:
We would definitely like to lend a hand to faculty who want to adopt OER, and help problem solve the issues you run into. Here are some examples of solutions to common problems:
If you’re a Kirkwood faculty and you’re interested in OER, please contact me to discuss the possibilities! (kate.hess AT kirkwood.edu)
