From the issue dated March 21, 2003
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New Allies in the Fight Against Research by GooglingFaculty members and librarians slowly start to work together on coursewareBy SCOTT CARLSON Ronald J. Granieri is doing what he can to keep his history students out of the quagmire of misinformation known as the World Wide Web. Two years ago, when he
"Students have this idea that there is no difference between searching on the Web and searching in the library," says Mr. Granieri, an associate professor of history at Furman. He hopes that making the link between library materials and his course site -- a locus of research activity for his students -- will introduce them to new and better sources of information and help wean them away from search engines. With library resources linked to his course pages, "it has become much more likely that students are going to look at journal articles," he says. The goal is "to make sure they understand that the library is still relevant." "It helps to get the library involved," he adds, "and to realize the full potential of course software." Mr. Granieri is out in front on an issue that has become important to a growing number of professors, instructional-technology experts, and librarians: finding ways to include library materials in course Web sites. Soon, these librarians and academics hope, a typical course site won't be just a syllabus, a discussion board, a course roster, and readings on reserve. Instead, it will be a portal through which students will get a list of databases especially recommended for their discipline, as well as contact information for a librarian who specializes in their field, style sheets for term papers from the Modern Language Association, or a bibliography of sources available at the library -- and a button that will place those books on hold. Such features are already showing up on course pages created at smaller colleges and at colleges where the librarians are in charge of managing courseware. Some colleges have created special software that allows faculty members to add library resources to course pages on their own, without technical support. But at most colleges, progress is slower. 'Separate Silos' In education these days, "it's all about content," says Susan E. Metros, deputy chief information officer and a professor of design technology who supervises course-software development at Ohio State University. When she arrived there a year ago to work on course software, she sought out the library first. "The library is really good at vetting and organizing published content, while the educational-technology groups work with faculty with their unpublished content. And yet students need both at their fingertips. We don't want them just going to Google." Melding diverse sources of content in courseware requires collaborations among departments, yet many institutions are bureaucratically segmented, and departments are short on time and talent. Groups of instructional-technology experts, librarians, and professors have just started meeting at Ohio State to figure out how to beef up their course pages. "Unfortunately we're still in our separate silos," Ms. Metros says. Indeed, librarians have been talking about integrating library databases and other materials in course sites for several years, both in journals and at conferences. David Cohen, the dean of libraries at the College of Charleston, was one of the first academics to write about the absence of good resources on course Web pages. In an article in CLIR Issues in 2001, he fretted that libraries would be marginalized as courseware and commercial supplemental-content packages became more popular. Mr. Cohen says he no longer worries that information from libraries will be edged out by commercial supplements. He is more concerned about the gobs of free information out there -- for research, students are known to go to Google before anything else. As more professors adopt software like Blackboard and WebCT, course sites stand to become a more popular and important online destination for students. "As a student, that's where I'm going to look for my academic information," he says. "If that is where the action is, the library has got to be there." His cause may finally be finding sympathetic ears outside the library -- even among the courseware companies he criticized in his articles. Barbara A. Ross, chief operating officer at WebCT, says that in the past several months her company has seen more librarians on committees that are involved in purchasing courseware at colleges. Meanwhile, she says, her company is phasing out the deals with commercial content providers that had concerned Mr. Cohen and other librarians. Greg Ritter, the business-development manager for Blackboard, says the company has recently tried to make more contacts with libraries. "The course-management systems have realized that we can't imitate what libraries do," he says. "We don't want to set ourselves up as competitors with libraries." He points out that Endeavor Information Systems, a company that produces online catalogs for libraries, is developing a search engine that would connect from a courseware page to the college library's catalog. A student could type "Shakespeare" into a Googlelike box on a Blackboard page, and Endeavor's software would return lists of materials related to the Bard in the college's library. Small-Scale Collaborations But for now, the connections between library resources and courseware are being made simply, through old-fashioned liaisons and friendships between faculty members and librarians. Sarah Hall Sternglanz is the undergraduate director of women's studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Before the Internet was widely used, she would march her students down to the library each semester and point out the stacks, the journals, and the reference materials. She encouraged her students to use them all. Now, she realizes, students prefer to work online, and her course site reflects that. With the help of Barbara B. Brand, a Stony Brook librarian who specializes in women's studies, Ms. Sternglanz added dozens of links to library databases and reliable Web sites that can help her students. There are general resources, like the library catalog and JSTOR, the journals database, but she also guides her students to journal indexes and databases that specialize in women's studies, like Women's Resources International and Gender Watch. The page helps students identify the relevant databases among the dozens the library subscribes to. "Anything you can do to make their access to the library easier will hopefully encourage them to use it more," she says. If she didn't put the links in her course pages, her students' work would be more "hit or miss" in terms of whether they found good articles and primary research materials to work with. "The weaker students would be much more lost." However, Ms. Sternglanz is one of only a few faculty members at Stony Brook who put library resources on course sites. In part, that's because Ms. Brand, the librarian Ms. Sternglanz works with, is one of the few library staff members at the institution who knows how to add such links. In fact, most courseware administrators at institutions contacted by The Chronicle are not putting library resources on course sites, although the notion of doing so has occurred to many of them. A lack of time and energy is often the barrier. "We're so eager to get the faculty pages up that we overlook the library," says Wayne Twitchell, who sets up Blackboard course sites as part of his job at Grinnell College. "Our people aren't inside the library. We actually have to go out of our way to deal with librarians." John Shank, a librarian at Pennsylvania State University's Berks-Lehigh Valley College who has an article about courseware and library resources in this month's issue of Information Technology and Libraries, says that cultural and bureaucratic divisions on college campuses often prevent librarians, instructional-technology experts, and faculty members from working together to make course sites more robust. At many institutions, courseware is run by the information-systems office, which has less interest in academic materials. "Librarians have a culture of their own, faculty have a culture of their own, and to some extent information-systems people have a culture of their own," says Mr. Shank. If the three groups aren't working together and talking about what to do with courseware, scholarly resources will probably get left out. "From the research I've done, that kind of situation is pretty pervasive." Some institutions are striving to get around those divisions by using software that allows professors or students to add their own links to library materials, without the help of a librarian or computer specialist. After administrators at Macalester College, in St. Paul, balked at the price of commercial courseware, the college created its own and called it Lester. Last fall, the college added various pull-down menus that allow students or faculty members to customize course pages and add links to databases and library catalogs. "It was an idea that had its genesis in the library," says Sara Collins Suelflow, Macale-ster's Web coordinator. "We included some of the things that have the most benefits to our staff, which include library resources." Last fall, American University started using a program called Linkmaker, developed by the Washington Research Library Consortium. With some training, faculty members can use the program to place permanent links to journal articles on their course pages. (Many searchable scholarly databases create links in response to specific searches, but such links expire quickly.) "It's a great option," says W. Joseph Campbell, an assistant professor of journalism who is one of the first to use Linkmaker. He has been using it to post book reviews from newspapers on his course site. There have been some bugs in the system -- some links never worked -- but over all, he says, "I think the idea is great." "I see the value of having the articles posted electronically," instead of having them distributed as reserved reading, he says. "It improves the access." Setting up links through databases is also wise from the standpoint of following copyright law, says Claire T. Dygert, a librarian at American who specializes in electronic materials. The law restricts the use of photocopied or scanned reserved reading, but articles from databases can be used easily, because the university has purchased them through subscriptions. Linkmaker comes with some limitations. Only six of the library's databases have or can generate permanent links that will work with the program. And the library's contracts with some of those databases put restrictions on the number of people who can use the database at one time. If links on course pages become a popular feature on campus, students could find bottlenecks and traffic jams when trying to look at an assigned reading. At the moment, that's merely a theoretical problem. Mr. Campbell is one of only a handful of faculty members who have adopted Linkmaker so far. "But those who do use it, love it," Ms. Dygert says. "They can add 10 journals to a course in an hour, and it takes advantage of the investment we made in these very expensive databases." Faculty members who have added library resources to their course Web pages say they have no way of measuring how often students take advantage of the links, but they're sure the students are using the resources enough to make them worthwhile. At Stony Brook, Ms. Sternglanz says Blackboard allows her to track some of her students' activities on the course site, but that tracking feature doesn't apply to the library-resources page. "That's a frustrating thing for me," she says. "But I'm guessing from the papers that students are giving me that they are using them." http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 28, Page A33
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education