F LIPPING THE F IRST Y EAR E XPERIENCE : U SING MOBILE SCAVENGER HUNTS TO ORIENT STUDENTS TO LIBRARY RESOURCES Presented by Jennifer Collins Reference and Instruction Librarian SUNY Delhi

W HAT WAS THE PROBLEM ? SUNY Delhi wanted to create a new library tour for new student orientation and freshman seminar classes. Old tour was boring for students AND librarians

S OLUTION Create a scavenger hunt where students will work in teams in order to orient themselves to the library resources.

L IBRARY T OUR N EEDS Orient students to the Resnick Library and Learning Center Group based and active Able to scale for large and small groups Cover the same talking points as the traditional tour Create opportunities for students to get “face time” with multiple librarians and staff members Scale for both short and longer amounts of time

D EVELOPING THE HUNT What are other libraries doing? Found multiple examples of non-traditional library tours. QR codes Video tours Self guided walk-arounds Scavenger hunts North Carolina State University has a mobile scavenger hunt that was used as a template for the Resnick Scavenger hunt.

R ESNICK H UNT VS UCSU Uses Twitter and student owned smart phones to submit answers Has students use Evernote and library owned iPod touches to submit answers Scores kept in real time using google spread sheets Faculty have a variety of different discipline focused scavenger hunts to choose from Faculty can request one standard scavenger hunt for their students Two librarians – one on-site and the other online keep score and interact with students One librarian facilitates the scavenger hunt Librarians meet with faculty after the scavenger hunt to discuss results Unsure what UCSU follow-up is Team based

S ETTING UP T EAMS

K EEPING S CORE

D EVELOPING Q UESTIONS … T HE ORIGINAL T OUR B ULLETS

D EVELOPING Q UESTIONS … H UNT Q UESTIONS M ARC 1

D EVELOPING Q UESTIONS … H UNT Q UESTIONS M ARC 2 MARC 2

D EVELOPING Q UESTIONS … H UNT Q UESTIONS M ARC 3

D EVELOPING Q UESTIONS … H UNT Q UESTIONS M ARC 4

D EVELOPING Q UESTIONS … F OR D IFFERENT D ISCIPLINES Since starting the basic scavenger hunt we have also added options for Veterinary science, Nursing and Culinary students.

S OME EARLY ISSUES … Students had trouble signing onto twitter Students had issues getting into group Students had difficulty formatting questions correctly Question #: Answer) In large groups it was hard for a single librarian facilitator to track student answers, correct false answers and offer further information and interactive feed back to students

S O …. Another librarian, based online, was brought on to work in tandem with on-sight facilitator

E VERYONE LOVES A GOOD TUTORIAL ! A power point tutorial was created to be shown at the beginning of each scavenger hunt session. Teams were also required to post a “test tweet” and could only begin the hunt once they had received a successful reply tweet from the online facilitator.

S OME THINGS WE ’ VE DISCOVERED What faculty prioritize for students to learn from the tour is often different from what the librarians prioritize. No matter how many points we award for the reference section question students rarely answer it. The questions students answer tend to dove tail with our statistics about the library services they use most often. Students sometimes come up with infinitely creative answers.

S OME IDEAS FOR ASSESSMENT Offer a pre test and post test on library resources. Try and track freshman seminar students who did the hunt and see if they return for reference sessions.

A NY Q UESTIONS ?