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What a lot of instructors forget is that books often provide the best overviews of topics for students and that journal articles can be much too narrow in scope. We just recently did a little video about books versus videos for our students at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o2xDg_5XEA It's not perfect, but it does capture some of what I try to convey to students at the reference desk.
Best,
Susan
On 2/24/11 2:51 PM, "Brush, Denise A."
Freshman composition instructors at my institution often insist that I skip showing students how to use the library catalog in my orientations, in favor of focusing exclusively on the use of databases to find articles. The instructors for the upper-level discipline-specific courses have the same focus, meaning that most of our students are never introduced to the catalog. In my view, the focus on journal articles is appropriate for the upper level research methods courses, but not for freshman writing classes.
I understand that freshmen are often overwhelmed with the complexity of using a college library and their instructors want to make library orientations manageable, but I don’t see why teaching them about library databases (a pretty complicated process, frankly) is the best solution. Personally, I used books almost exclusively for my college papers. For the majority of students, who will not go on to do graduate level scholarly research, learning how to find books will be much more useful to their future information needs than using library databases, because books will still be available to them in public libraries (I hope) after graduation, while article databases will not because they are too expensive for most public libraries to purchase.
I am quite concerned that this de-emphasis on books will cause students to de-value books so much that public support for libraries (academic and public) in future decades will be non-existent. It won’t be long until students just purchase databases directly with their technology fees, bypassing libraries entirely. I believe that we are contributing to our own demise by pushing databases rather than books.
Denise Brush
Science & Engineering Librarian
Rowan University Library Services
Glassboro, New Jersey
(856) 256-4977
