The agenda is tentative at this point, but a few questions and ideas for discussion include:
Academic Reference Issues: How many hours are librarians spending on the reference desk?
What kinds of questions and challenges are students presenting at the physical desk?
What methods of e-ref are CJARL members using? How are these methods working? Have any best practices been established?
Library-sponsored research awards -- (Is anyone doing this?)
2 comments:
One thing that I'd like to discuss briefly is students who are "reverse engineering" their papers. This is the first semester where I've had a noticeable number of students coming in towards the end of the semester telling me that they have finished their papers (or are almost done) and they need to find some articles/resources on their topic.
It sounds like they're writing their paper first (probably using more web resources than their instructor would allow) and then are padding their bibliography with library resources.
Are others seeing this? Is this on the rise or is it just new to Mercer?
See you all on the 18th.
I see a lot of that at UCC. It's not new, particularly. I think the solution is for profs to require more process writing steps. If you have to supply a copy of the article, summarize and analyze your sources, it becomes less attractive to cheat. Profs take the short cut of not visiting the library with their classes, and then are surprised when students take the short cut of not using library resources.
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