Collection Development for My Random Life.

Attending: ‘Using Technology to Reach More Students in Tough Times’ which has 5 semesters of data regarding teaching information literacy online.

Bibliographic instruction sessions (aka the one-shot) has some challenges. For example, too much info in too little time, what impact does it really have, etc.

At WSU like BSU the only place students are guaranteed to attend one of these is in their early Eng 101/102 courses.

If one-shots are flawed can they act as a doorway to information literacy not necessarily the whole piece.

Wow, WSU has used at least 4 different course management systems (i.e. blackboard). Currently, using Angel. Didn’t know you universities could flipflop around like that with course management systems.

Beginning to talk about using Angel to reach students with info lit information BEFORE they get into the one-shot.

WSU has an Information Literacy Education Learning Environment (ILE) which is homegrown. They used students to code it for them. (Students can build cool stuff like this if we let them) It is not simply a tutorial but a space where students take quizzes/essays after watching particular online materials. ILE flips the script. Instead of building assignments from the content of tutorials, they select tutorials from the web (or elsewhere) to support the class assignment. As you connect tutorials for the assignment it pulls from banks of questions which assess information literacy. (Hopefully I am explaining this correctly).

Pretty cool stuff.

Really interesting presentation of web page data. The interpretation of the data is interesting. For example PSU has 80% of users residing mainly on the top level pages perhaps due to their emphasis on everything being 3 clicks away while OHSU has a longer tail that people interact with webpages that are “buried” on the site which seems fine for their needs.
There is a call for benchmarking data for the different types of libraries since there seems not to be anything specific for libraries as unique webpages as compared to commercial websites.
Web statistics are fuzzy and getting the data is a real challenge.