LAPTOP SOUP: Serving up Research Tools where Students Need Them
| Author(s): | Bob Scott, Head, Electronic Text Service (scottr@columbia.edu) Sarah G. Wenzel, Head of Reference Programs (sgw2103@columbia.edu) |
| Conference: | ACRL Conference: Poster Session |
| Date: | 03/01/07 |
“Soup up your laptop” workshops
OUR CHALLENGE: meeting users in new settings, since they
- are working increasingly on their own laptops rather than our workstations
- sit wherever is most convenient for them (not necessarily inside a library)
- expect to find most of what they need online
- frequently want to help themselves (rather than asking a librarian)
- don’t always start research on library pages or licensed resources
- often sit with others to collaborate in new ways with new tools
OUR RESPONSE: Added new workshop "Souping Up Your Laptop for Research at Columbia," to help users configure that laptop environment to ensure the most effective research experience and the easiest [a seamless?] interaction with the libraries.
- Focused on:
- Hardware and software security
- Most effective use of the campus wireless system
- Printing through the campus network
- Software for managing bibliographic citations, accessing specialized resources, and working with digital materials
- Browser enhancements to provide direct access to key resources
- Strove for brevity – no more than half an hour
- Created page of links to relevant information & plugins: www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/services/workshops/laptops.html
- Publicized through departmental emails and some print flyers.
- Targeted two specific user groups
- (Generally older) undergraduates in the School of General Studies
- Masters & Ph.D. candidates in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
- Chose venues carefully
- Students’ home turf (e.g., General Studies and Graduate School Lounges)
- Traditional in-house setting of library classroom
LESSONS LEARNED
- Meets a genuine need: attendee response was quite enthusiastic
- Clear benefit to coming out of our traditional spaces, but identifying the ideal alternative venue is not always as easy as it might seem – each user community has its own culture
- Need to move beyond familiar computer working environment – for example, while our own workstations are almost exclusively Windows-based, the majority of our attendees were Macintosh users
- Need to move beyond our library-locked-down, IT-secured environments to be able to understand configuration issues our patrons face and to demonstrate the steps they need to take
- Student priorities not always what we would expect – printing was clearly the most popular item, followed by downloading EndNote
- Requires
- Considerable preparation
- Flexibility
- (ideally) participation of several librarians if widely varying individual needs of the attendees are to be quickly and effectively addressed
HOW WE WILL DO IT DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME
- Closer collaboration with IT
- Survey students (before & after) to get a fuller sense of their needs
- Consider the addition of more library tools and links, e.g., Zotero
- Address other user groups
- Fine-tune publicity and venues to match specific dynamics of each user group
