I should note that this plea for space was sparked by an announcement from the California Digital Library that the WorldCat Local instance for the entire University of California library system would have a chat widget in it. The announcement isn’t quite accurate, as the chat widget itself is not embedded in the interface; instead, there’s just a graphic (albeit, a nice one) that says “Chat with a librarian” and that when clicked, opens a pop up window with their chat widget. At that graphic is only on the search results page (it should probably also be on the search page too).  I think it would have been much cooler if the widget was actually embedded in the page, as our chat widgets in EBSCOhost can be.

I expect I’ll still be posting items here at Digital Reference, but will also be active over at my other blog, Beating the Bounds, which is where I go when I want to talk about scholarly communication, open access, fair use, copyright, information literacy, databases, social media, and user experience.

(cross posted at Beating the Bounds)

This guide is meant to appeal to libraries of all types, although some might see a bias toward the needs of academic libraries. If you have any suggestions about links or changes in terminology that would broaden the appeal the guide, I’d love hear about them.

Sunday, January 9
10:30 am – 12:00 pm, San Diego Convention Center, Room 24 A
Building a National Reference Service
Libraries provide virtual reference services locally, with local library staff, and—in some cases—regionally or statewide. While many countries have national reference services, the US does not. Join us for a discussion of what a national ‘ask a librarian’ service could look like, and how it could be accomplished.

I have been aware of some of the discussions over the past few years, but they only seem to take place at ALA events. Is anyone else writing or talking about this someplace else?

Experimenting with using growl as a paging notification system for roving librarians. The patron can push a button on a touch-screen display on the service desk and a “growl” will be blasted out to all available librarians. Uses growl (http://growl.info/) and growl for windows (http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/)

More recent images on Blyberg’s Flickr account offer a better glimpse at what they’ve been cooking up in Darien.

Chad and Peter had to leave after a half hour of recording, which left me to ramble on at the halfway mark with the show hosts about why I find Joseph Bizup’s model for teaching source types to students so powerful, a topic I recently blogged about here.

Specifically, he recommends divvying up source types into four categories:

1. Background: sources in which you want to assert that something is a fact and which can contextualize your claims
2. Exhibits: sources that you offer an analysis or interpretation of
3. Arguments: sources that are part of the discourse about your topic
4. Method: sources that you use to delineate the method of analysis you will use or the terminology you will employ

Put more succinctly, Bizup wants us to teach students that “[w]riters rely on background sources, interpret of analyze exhibits, engage arguments, and follow methods” (76). As a mnemonic aid, the system is referred to as the BEAM model. Not only is this model useful in getting students to think about how they will use their sources in their paper and whether they have the right number from each category, but is also useful in teaching students how to analyze a source critically. In his classes, Bizup asks his students to read a source and, following the BEAM modelm, to indicate to what use each source is put.

As a librarian, I can recognize immediately how this model will help me when I do workshops and teach my own 3-credit course in research. But I can also see how it might help me in reference interactions where I am hoping to widen the student’s sense of what might work as a source in their research projects. All too often, students assume that sources are to be used solely as support for the claims they are making and, relatedly, that those sources must be precisely on their narrow topic (e.g., “I need to find a source that talks about the role of mothers in this poem by Dickinson and this play by Brecht”). With this model in mind, I can work with students to look at what sources they have found and whether they have found enough from each category to make the claim they want to. In particular, I think I will be able to employ Bizup’s maxim about getting started with a research project, where he states that “[i]f  you start with an exhibit, look for argument sources to engage; if you start with argument sources, look for exhibits to interpret” (82).

I would recommend that any librarian who does reference work or who teaches in classrooms take a look at this article.

When first asked to participate in this little project, I imagined it would mostly be an exercise in relationship building. I never imagined that I’d be helping the reference desk out by fielding so many questions.