Tag Archives: electronic resources

ETL505 – Describing and Anlaysing Educational Resources

Posted on by
Books on shelves in a library

jarmoluk / Pixabay

The ability to describe and analyse resources for a teacher librarian is crucial. This often-tedious task is relegated to staff within a school library who do not have an educational perspective in mind, which is the main perspective that users of a school library catalogue have. The usefulness of a library resource is linked to its ability to be located at the point of need. As the library users move through the five FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) tasks of finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining and exploring, their experience is affected by the organisation of the bibliographic records within the catalogue (Hider, 2018). In today’s modern school most users are accessing records remotely, the simple act of maintaining resource records to ensure that the electronic version of the text is included with the physical text record assists the users in finding the suitable resources for their needs.

Many catalogues use ‘lists’ to collate resources of the school library that will be useful for particular school assignments. Such lists allow the library staff to assist students and teachers by ‘pulling’ together resources for an assignment easily, so that students do not have to comb shelves or the catalogue individually to locate relevant resources. Although many may argue that this is not teaching students to use the catalogue effectively, some feel that this simple act ensures students locate and use published reputable information from books and hence become aware of the ease of locating quality information within a published text versus online scrolling. Inclusion of subject terms that reflect why a resource was purchased in the first place ensures that it remains useful when a specific ‘list’ or assignment is no longer relevant.

A well-maintained library catalogue that has been constructed with a curriculum focus ensures that purchased resources are not only useful but are used by the patrons they were purchased for in the first place. Cataloguing through describing and analysing resources following set guidelines ensures that users of your library can search within any catalogue in any library. This ability to transfer learnt search skills enables students to become lifelong learners.

Bibliography

Hider, P. (2018). Information resource Description (Second edition ed.). London: Facet Publishing.

Curation not Hoarding

Posted on by
Ask a teenage student to show you their desktop, or for that matter, ask a teacher. Without doubt in most cases you will see an assortment of files, links and short cuts dumped on their home screens. Welcome to the age of digital hoarding. The art of curation is a necessity for everybody in a digital learning environment and teacher librarians are best placed to instructional lead their institutions in best practice (Valenza, 2012).

Content curation has always happened at schools, but the digital information overload and the rate it is happening at is leaving some washed in its wake. We are both consuming and producing information at a phenomenal rate, and no more so than in an educational setting, where emails and communications fly.  Think of the information we collect – emails, documents, music, videos, photos. How can students cope with this influx unless we teach them the valuable skills of curation? Curation is the art of not only collecting but organising and adding value to those resources (Wheeler & Gerver, 2015).

When I picture well curated resources, strangely I think of Marie Kondo and her method of decluttering spaces called KonMari (Kondo, 2015). The KonMari method gets its’ followers to work out what you want to keep first – Does it bring you joy?  The second step is to organise by grouping. Finally, it is the storing and labelling.

Curation takes a very similar path. Before we can teach both students and teachers how to curate, we need to teach them how to declutter and decide what is worth keeping or curating.  A good curator will also ask key questions – do I need it? And is it worth it? Only the individual curator can answer the first question, need is very subjective.  The second question of ‘worth’ is one of evaluating validity. The CRAP method is a popular choice for students’ evaluation of sources, possibly due to its crass mnemonic.

C – currency

R – reliability

A – Authority

P – Point of view or purpose.

(Charles Sturt University Library, 2019)

Once a resource has been deemed worthy of collection it is time to organise it.  Where will you store it? Is it worth sharing? How will you label it – so you can find it easily when needed or so it has relevance to those you share it with? This is where folders, playlists, and tagging come into their own.  By labelling resources with key terms that will group it with other similar resources we improve our workflow.  Today’s digital affordance allows us to group, sort and store in multiple places for multiple uses, maximising our curated resource exposure. Through adding tags and grouping items we are adding value to the resource, ensuring its usefulness.

There are two types of curation:

  1. Personal Curation – finding, organising and labelling resources for your personal use. Some examples are:
    • Storing of personal files
    • Cataloguing of emails
    • Using bookmarks on web browser with folders
    • Signing into Youtube and creating private playlists or channels
    • Spotify/Music Online – creating playlists.
    • Images into albums on your devices.
  2. Collective Curation – The ability to curate resources together and comment on others’ curations. Some examples are:
    • Website Curation tools like Diigo, Pinterest, Pearltrees, Elib…
    • Openly sharing resources through networks and social media.

Collective curation builds collaboration and enhances communication.  Teaching students the ability to curate, and then engaging them in projects which utilise collective curation has the potential to deepen learning and create higher order thinking (Gonzalez, April 15, 2017). Mobile Digital Curation allows for learning to happen anywhere, anytime and breaks the walls of the classroom. Mobile devices have opened our ability to find, select, organise, create and share resources.

Students need the digital literacy skills that will enable them to do this well, and in the process curate themselves a positive digital footprint.

 

Charles Sturt University Library (Producer). (2016). How to evaluate information. [Online Video] Retrieved from https://youtu.be/hp5xasNuHL8

Gonzalez, J. (April 15, 2017). To boost higher-order thinking.  Retrieved from https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/curation/

Kondo, M. (2015). The life-changing magic of tidying. London: Ebury Publishing.

Valenza, J. (2012). Curation! (Vol. 29).

Wheeler, S., & Gerver, R. (2015). Learning with ‘e’s : Educational theory and practice in the digital age. In. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=1918927

 

 

Selecting your electronic resources (Forum 2.7)

Posted on by

Criteria for selecting electronic resources for school libraries incorporates the traditional criteria for selecting tangible resources with additional elements needed to be considered.  The nature of a library’s collection has dramatically changed to include both tangible and intangible resources and our collection criteria need to reflect this change.  Gorman (2000) redefined collection to include locally owned tangible material, tangible material owned in other linked libraries, intangible owned resources (eBooks) and remote intangible resources not owned but given access to by the library (Fieldhouse, M & Marshall, A., 2013, p 15).  Criteria such as audience, accuracy, curriculum and student outcomes consideration, as outlined by the Queensland Government Department of Education (2018) are common among many collection management policies.  These criteria remain important no matter what format the resource is delivered in if we are to maintain a collection that is both relevant and useful to our users.  What I found interesting was not the common elements, but the uncommon elements I found.

Peggy Johnson (2014) outlined several criteria I have not seen written about in such depth in any other list.  These uncommon elements when selecting e-resources included:

  • The provider’s business model
    • Is access time based or do you own the content?
    • How is the cost determined? Access based, site licence, or pay per view?
    • Do you have D.R.M (Digital Rights Management) to copy, print, save?
  • What is the persistency of content?
    • Does the content remain unchanged during license?
    • Do you have permanent access to content after agreement ends?
  • Functionality of User Interface
    • Will users be able to use it intuitively?
    • Can they search, bookmark, go to the table of contents?
  • Ease of Authentication – protects privacy and allows control, but needs to be simple
    • Username and password
    • Single Sign on
    • IP address Range
  • Accessibility functions both technical (will it link to other resources and be available on different devices) and design (disability features)
  • Local Service implications – Is there help or support?
  • Does it have URL compliance?
  • Output and delivery options – can you print, bookmark, highlight
  • Compatibility – Does it work with different devices?
  • Is it a duplication or a replacement?
  • Can you access data to measure effective use – COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) – econtent should be COUNTER compliant.
  • Deselection – can you switch out titles? Are resources available elsewhere?

All libraries are aiming for “affordable, practical, perpetual, or permanent access to content” (Johnson, 2014, p27).  To achieve this, within a budget, requires librarians to make decisions based on their particular library’s situation and the teachers and students who use it.

 

References

Fieldhouse, M., & Marshall, A. (2013). Collection development in the digital age. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Johnson, P. (2014). Developing and managing electronic collections: the essentials. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Queensland Government Department of Education. (2018). Collection development and management. Retrieved from http://education.qld.gov.au/library/support/collection-dev.html