River Campus Libraries Location, Location, Location … Inserting Library Resources into the Course Syllabus Stephanie Frontz, University of Rochester ARLIS/NA Annual Meeting Houston, April 3, 2005

Location, location, location…  CoURse Resources, a relational database of major library resources and course offerings  Collaboration between faculty and librarians  What about WebCT? Relationships with other UR IT departments  Usability Testing  Formerly used Subject Guides…students didn’t think of themselves as “art historians”, etc.

UR Homepage

Library Homepage

Usability findings  Students cannot find articles  Students overwhelmed with database names, contents, and search protocols  Students insist on search simplicity  Library needs to eliminate the complexity of information retrieval  Technologies exist to make it simpler  Politics exist to make it complex  Be there, where the students are…connect to Course Syllabus

CoURse Resources and Reserves

Select Instructor/Dept.

Select Course

CoURse Resources Page  Link to online Course Syllabus

Course Syllabus

Links to e-reserves

CoURse Resources Page  Link to online Course Syllabus  Link to Course webpage (if avail.)

Course homepage

Course Resources Page  Link to online Course Syllabus  Link to Course webpage (if avail.)  Link to faculty

CoURse Resources Page  Link to online Course Syllabus  Link to Course webpage (if avail.)  Link to faculty  Photo/link to librarian’s

CoURse Resources Page  Link to online Course Syllabus  Link to Course webpage (if avail.)  Link to faculty  Photo/link to librarian’s  Links to library resources

Article databases

Websites

Journals

Books

Media

Staff Resource Manager

Resource Association List

Course Associations

Ask a Librarian

Results  Students USE CoURse Resources pages for access to syllabus  Students come into the libraries requesting assistance from subject specialists by name  Librarians receive directly from students asking for assistance

Writing on Art Coursepage

Future Plans  Incorporate course clusters for easy database searching  Work with federated search vendors to produce results in relevance order  Include a “blog” tab for student comments on resources, etc.  Continue to work with ITS to gain access to WebCT coursepages

The Google challenge  UR Librarians enjoy reengineering librarianship in a Google world, and will continue to explore new approaches and applications…

Technical information  CoURse Resources/Reserves software is Open Source and available at: Demo available—contact Susan Gibbons  Event Recording Software = Morae

Contact us