After the conference ends, the real work begins

Terese Heidenwolf, heidenwt@lafayette.edu
Amy Abruzzi, abruzzia@lafayette.edu

Introduction:

Lafayette FYS (first year seminar) has had library/research component since 1992.

Three things to keep in mind about first year students using the library:

1. Not unusual for student not to have experience using the library for research
2. Most of them have never seen a scholarly journal article. Start with:
   
   • What is a scholarly journal article?
   • How do you find them?
3. Evaluation of sources – they interpret as biased vs unbiased information

Because they don’t have much experience beyond web searching, we start with that and then introduce library resources.

Instructor had students create bibliography without any instruction. Most submit web sites, and most are bad sources. Then during library session, they evaluate the sources and the students are very critical of the sites. Then the conversation moves to if these are bad, how do we find better sources.

Students get hung up with the idea of biased information and that certain perspectives are bad, not realizing that all things written from a certain point of view.

One common problem with students designing projects is that they develop their idea for the project then begin looking for data only to find the data doesn’t exist.

Challenge them to begin thinking first about: Who would collect the data, what they would collect and why they would collect this particular data set.

Popular press articles to spark conversation:

Roberts, Sam. "A Book for People Who Love Numbers." New York Times, Feb. 22, 2006, p. E1. Available via LexisNexis

Schwarz, Norbert. "How Question Order Affects Answers." Michigan Today, Fall 2001.

Simpson, Glenn R. "Educated Guess: Sampling Is Taboo, But the Census Does Plenty of Imputing." Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2001, p. A1.

Kulish, Nicholas. "The 2000 Count: Why the Census Omitted Some Intriguing Questions." Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2001, p. B1

Assignment ideas:

Annotated bibliography rather than long paper worked well. They had to think about the audience and assess the sources they were choosing.

Invited librarian in to help with citation and location of resources. Improved student work significantly.

Even short working exercises force them to apply their research skills, otherwise they really don’t understand.

Beyond Math:

Asking us to expand our horizons beyond our discipline. Forces us to go into other databases and sources for other disciplines to combine the math with the social aspect.

Expanded Academic ASAP

Exercise:
Social justice and cancer pulls up only 5
Look at the references for the articles to find common words to continue searching.
Use advanced search to search:

social or environment* (wildcard) AND
justice or equit* or inequit* or disparit* AND
cancer

WorldCat

Catalog of books, videos, manuscripts, and other materials held by libraries across the country. Doesn’t index at the article level.

Specialized databases:

Web of Science

Scans footnotes and will send alerts to you when an article is cited in a new article.

CiteSeer <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/> is free. Scientific Literature Digital Library incorporating autonomous citation indexing, awareness and tracking, citation context, related document…

Numeric data searches:
Race and Income:
US census http://www.census.gov/
Finest breakdown usually is released several years after collection

American community survey

National health surveys

Statistical abstract of the US
County level is smallest, mainly state and national
Tell for each table what document information taken from

FedStats http://www.fedstats.gov

Look to large research institutions

Lafayette’s statistics pages: http://ref.library.lafayette.edu/wr_home.htm

Additional search tips:

• Using AND, OR, NOT
• Select indexes to limit
• Limiting search

So where do we go from here:

Platform ideas

• Blackboard
  
  • Negative is that it’s difficult to get content out of
• Blog platform
• Wiki
  
  • Software allows anyone to edit anything
  • Examples:
    
    • Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org
    • Sensei’s Library http://senseis.xmp.net
• MAA special interest group
  
  • Sigma: special interest group of the MAA
  • Limits to mathematicians
• MathDL - digital
  
  • In need of content
  
  

Next courses of action:
Continue conversation: needs threads
Module development
Post resources
Search capability
Who is going to do what?
Who hosts (backend) of information?
Internal vs how we relate to the greater whole

Sharing from talk and listen:
Decisions we can make now, decisions we can make later
Blackboard: we know, can use now
Stay simple: keep with Blogger and then do sub groups for
People don’t stumble across Blackboard
Advantage that we’re familiar with it.
Link in Blogger to Blackboard?