A library guide for finding Current Event News Online Library Skills Tutorials

Project rationale (1) Students are often unable to attend physical classes that are designed to develop their library research skills. A Springshare libguide was developed to provide online access to some of this library instructional material.

Project rationale (2) Online delivery ensures this material is available to all students, including those studying externally. Online delivery also allows students the flexibility to choose the specific content they wish to explore and to do so at a time and pace convenient to them.

Design overview (1) The content chosen for the libguide was drawn from a physical class designed to teach about searching for current event news resources. The guide was broken down into a number of pages, including an introduction, a page for each database explored, as well as a page for useful news websites and another for RSS feeds from news providers.

Design overview (2) Each database page included learning objectives. Instructional videos were created to explore each objective. After feedback received during the final ALTC class, PDFs were also created as an alternative presentation method for each learning objective. Camtasia and Camtasia Relay were used to capture the screen manipulations and convert this to streaming video. Poll questions were included on the database pages to collect feedback on the relevance and helpfulness of the PDFs and videos. Students can comment on all content in the guide.

The professional context The development of the guide fitted well with the need to provide effective library skills materials to students and provide this equitably. The resources required for the guide, including the Springshare libguide platform, and Camtasia and Camtasia Relay, were available to library staff. The completed guide, with regular review, can enable the library to provide ongoing assistance to students with finding current event news.

Link to video PDF download Polls Student comments Tab linking to page of RSS feeds Web 2.0 technologies and interactivity

Feedback and review The polls and comments will allow student feedback. The libguides also keep usage statistics for each page and on each video and PDF. This will measure the popularity of pages and resources. The combination of usage statistics and student feedback will help to determine which areas of the guide need to be removed, replaced or redesigned to better meet the needs of the students and to ensure the guide remains useful.