[The Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship just released its Special Issue: Part 2: Information Literacy (2012, issue 1). By spring break I hope to blog about some of those articles.]

Monday: four sections of MGT 309

I wrote about MGT 309 recently. These four sections (9am, 10am, 11am, and 2pm), taught by the same new instructor, have a term project on international business culture. I had them use my Country Research for Business & Marketing guide. We meet in their normal classroom where the students used their laptops or tablets. Each section has between 26-30 students.

The most interesting thing about these workshops is that I had no research strategies to introduce. Instead I had the teams very quickly get to work on my worksheet, in which they go to certain sites (ex. the Country Commercial Guides) or reports (ex. the Political Risk Yearbook in Business Source Complete) and answer specific questions about their country. For example, “review the etiquette section [from this source] and identify two ways you could apply those guidelines to running a business meeting”. I spend most of my time circulating around the teams to answer specific questions.

Do I ever feel guilty (or like a bad teacher) that I don’t begin with an intellectual discussion about research strategies? Yes. But the feeling passes. Still, I would love to hear how other folks would design a research workshop for a topic like this.

Tuesday: MKT 426 at 9:30am

My co-teaching class. Professor Williamson is still leading discussions on the theories and core concepts of international marketing; the research-intensive days are coming up soon. So I don’t contribute too much this morning. Thursday’s class will be different.

We did have a discussion with the students about hard it seems now to land a host concern. Many of the teams still haven’t found one this semester.

Tuesday: BUS 105 at 2pm

This is an “introduction to college life and the business school” class. In the fall semester, there are lots of sections, but only one in the spring. The student teams have an assignment to learn more about a Bryan School major and its career prospects. We met in a business school computer classroom. 23 students.

After introducing myself and reviewing their assignment, we needed to discuss connecting an academic major to a resulting occupation. We gathered on foot around the big whiteboard with each team contributing to our brainstorming with its own pen color. It was challenging linking “entrepreneurship” (for example) with a career defined by the Occupational Outlook Handbook. This exercise was the best part of the workshop.

After that, I talked briefly about the tracking of occupation trends through the BLS and NC Dept. of Commerce and then had the students start researching their career using my worksheet.

Tuesday: Reference Intern Training at 4pm

Part one of a two-hour introduction to marketing research for our interns, all LIS graduate students. After a ten hour orientation to general research and tech skills, the interns get weekly training on specific types of research. I usually spend two hours with the new interns on company and industry research, and two hours the next semester on market research. The veteran interns have already had an introductory workshop on numeric data, led by Lynda Kellam, our sharp data services librarian. (I used to teach that topic before we hired Lynda. Sniff. That was fun to teach. But yes, I’m very glad that Lynda is here.) There are five second-semester interns. We met in the library staff training lab using laptops from the laptop cart.

Part one of “Marketing” focuses on concepts and strategies rather than tools. Actually, we really began with discussing their capstone research project, due a few weeks after the second marketing session: the interns have to research three NC towns to decide which one would be the best location for a new bed and breakfast. I charge the interns to consider demographics, consumer spending trends, psychographics, market and industry trends (can’t forget Mintel and IBIS), and the regional competition.  As long as they demonstrate basic competence with those types of research, I don’t care what which city they pick nor how they frame their data and conclusion. (One intern joked about writing how none of them would be good choices — I told him that would be great, as long as he used data to back that conclusion!)

So we discussed concepts and looked at some marketing research questions I’ve saved over the years. I told them that given our limited time, we will focus on U.S. consumer marketing research. We discussed where demographic, consumer spending, and psychographic data come from. Next time we will get into more narrative-based sources like Mintel, but I really push numeric sources in intern training, since non-business librarians historically can get so anxious about data sources and concepts. And I don’t think library students learn much about data in their LIS reference/research classes.

This series of training workshops is another topic I would love to discuss with business librarians sometime: namely, if you had 4 hours across two semesters to teach “business research” to a small group of smart LIS students, what would you teach, and what exercises and homework would you assign?

Wednesday

No classes today. I got caught up with email and entertained a few consultations. The most interesting event was an afternoon talk by the Karen Mills, Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, recently promoted to a cabinet seat. Her talk was titled “Path to Entrepreneurial Success: Capitalizing on Opportunities and Resources.” This was a good event at which to be seen, at the least.

Thursday: MKT 426 at 9:30am

This time I was the lead teacher. We met in the library’s computer classroom for an introduction to trade data. We covered commodity codes, bilateral v. global data, and the basics of using PC-TAS, the CD-ROM version of Comtrade.  (We do subscribe to Comtrade, but the CD version provides XLS downloads with the layout of data the students need to perform their split-share analysis.) The lab was crowded (38 students with 25 computer stations), but Professor Williamson wants the kids to be in the library for this topic, the first major research project for Export Odyssey. The prof was actually sick, so Sam Troy, the b-school’s Executive in Residence for International Education, and I taught the class without him.

Thursday: ENT 336 at 6:30pm

A long day! This class normally begins at 6pm, but there was another entrepreneurship speaker event (a local this time) at 5:30pm for which many of the students got extra credit from another ENT class to attend. We met in the library lab, where my day began. ENT 336 is “Opportunities to Action: Business Plan”. ENT 300, “Ideas to Opportunities: Feasibility Analysis” is the required class for 336. I meet with both classes each semester, so I treat 336 is a capstone. 22 students.

The students by now should be familiar with sources like IBIS, Mintel, DemographicsNow, and SimplyMap. So for 336 I focused on the financial data for their business plans, using sources like BizMiner, RMA, and the Economic Census (just a little). The students’ proposed businesses weren’t too unusual: dance studio, gym, food broker (that was new), custom apparel line, pet shop, and solar energy installation and services. At the request of the prof, we also talked about demographic data and looked (rather quickly — it was getting late) at DemographicsNow and SimplyMap. The students got into it and were fun to work with, not always the case certainly! A nice way to close out my teaching this week.

How do others organize entrepreneurship research instruction?

Friday

I worked the Ref Desk for the first time since Sunday and got caught up on non-teaching work. Next week I just have MKT 426 as usual and 3 sections of MGT 309 (75 minute sections back to back to back).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sminor/4282353809/

Our morning focus was training in the Hoovers product (new from NC LIVE) with the full Duns national and international company records. Sara was our lead trainer. We also providing feedback for the successor database serving the public and academic library markets, expected to be released in the spring. Hoovers has contracted Mergent to provide support for Hoovers products for those markets, so Mary Scanlon of WFU, our new chair, invited Mergent reps to attend the training and solicit the feedback from us. Tim Rogers and Jill Morris, two NC LIVE directors, also attended and filled us in on the surprising contractual developments. Sorry, that’s all I should probably write about this!

After lunch we reviewed three new NC LIVE Ebsco databases (Entrepreneurial Studies Source, Small Business Reference Center, & Legal Information Reference Center) and discussed changing our social networking/communication platforms. We have been using a Google Group for a while, but are concerned with the functionality Google has steadily stripped from the Groups.

But the agendas for BLINC workshops don’t reflect one of the best things about our get-togethers: getting caught up with our business librarian friends, and sharing tips, resources, and ideas. That networking begins with the morning carpooling and doesn’t end until we get back home.

MGT 309 is a required upper-level speaking- and writing-intensive class for all business school majors. Each fall and spring semester there are usually 10 traditional sections plus 2 or 3 online sections; the summer semesters have a couple of online sections each. Each section has some sort of research project to generate content for the students’ writing and speaking. So MGT 309 is not a research-intensive class like International Marketing or the core entrepreneurship classes. For my first few years with MGT 309, the research project for all the sections was “should we invest in this company?” I had 2 concurrent class periods of research instruction for the 50 minute sections, and one period for the 75 minute sections. Thus MGT 309 is my core “research instruction across the curriculum” class. I have sat in on MGT 309 final presentations for assessment and expanded outreach.

More recently the standard research assignment has fractured: the instructors each semester now assign different research projects like:

• Analyzing public companies’ management practices;
• Identifying cultural differences in international work teams, depending on the countries involved;
• Investing in a franchise of a public restaurant company;
• Creating a basic business plan and making a pitch to angel investors.

Given the varying research topics section by section, I can no longer assume that every business school senior has (for example) experience mining 10-K’s for strategic information. I’ve relaxed on the 2 research sessions for the short sections since then; some of the research assignments didn’t really need 100 minutes of workshopping.

So MGT 309 for me now involves one-shot (on campus or online through Blackboard Collaborate) research instruction on public companies, basic business planning, or perhaps countries and their cultures. Not exactly embedded librarianship, eh? But before I became so involved with MKT 426, CARS, and our growing Entrepreneurship program (which just won the USASBE Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Program Award, woohoo!), the majority of my teaching stats came from the many MGT 309 sections. And besides being able to introduce myself to students I wouldn’t normally meet, like accounting students, I do sometimes hear from undergraduates that they first used library databases in MGT 309. It’s a one-shot program I’m still proud of. Our work as liaisons doesn’t have to be “embedded” to be worth doing.

The 2011 BRASS Publisher’s Forum from ALA Summer is now online. BizMiner, Business Decision, InfoGroup (ReferenceUSA), and SimplyMap all had a turn at the mic; the question & answer session was recorded too. I like how BRASS asked the vendors to illustrate their wares through entrepreneurial case studies. Even if you don’t have all these databases, it’s useful to see the research strategies employed.

This week I also read a number of ACRL conference presentations from last spring. (A good thing this conference is only biennial, or else I would never get caught up!) The four programs that I spent the most time reviewing included:

New Metrics of Engagement for Academic Libraries
“Expand your understanding of the measures that libraries can employ that demonstrate greater integration into research, teaching, and learning.” (PDF 1, PDF 2)
From Craig Gibson and Christopher Dixon of George Mason University

Show me the Data! Partnering with Instructors to Teach Data Literacy
“Trends for how teaching faculty are using data in their instruction, the nature of the support requested from library, as well as plans for developing and assessing services that increase students’ data literacy.” (PDF 1, PDF 2)
From Karen Hogenboom, Merinda Hensley, and Carissa Holler Phillips of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A Declaration of Embeddedness: Instructional Synergies and Sustaining Practices in LMS Embedded Librarianship
(LMS = learning management system) “Presenters will share tested, sustaining practices that enable even a small staff to collaborate with faculty, embed in their courses, and reach students.” (PDF)
From John Burke and Beth Tumbleson of Miami University Middletown

And the fourth program was:

Do Screencasts Really Work? Assessing Student Learning through Instructional Screencasts
“The presentation will introduce a potential model for assessment [of screencasts], and will also include an analysis of challenges that were overcome and share the best practices identified as a result of the assessment.” (PDF 1, PDF 2, PPTX)
From Jo Angela Oehrli, Amanda Peters, and Julie Piacentine, of the University of Michigan (my alma mater, Go Blue!)

So having just created some screencasts on business sources and strategies, I was particularly interested to read the U of M librarians’ assessment findings and suggested best practices. They tested two videos: Why Use Library Databases? and Finding Library Databases. Both videos are intentionally brief and targeted for new students.

Fifteen students (who had not been in a library workshop before) participated in a task-based usability study using eyeball heat-mapping software. The students tried to perform tasks involving finding a database, then watched a video about that task, and tried the task again. For the first task, the pre-video success rate was 13%; the post-video success rate was 100%. The other tasks showed similar improvements in results. The librarians concluded that “screencasts can indeed work when they incorporate instructional design principles and feedback from librarians, education specialists, and, most importantly, students who can benefit from this new technology.”

The Michigan movie makers suggested three best practices:

1. Keep it short. One concept? Then two minutes max. (And most of their other videos are indeed 2-3 minutes long).
2. “Create context and frame concepts in manageable chunks.”
3. “If the video is for beginner researchers, take more time for scripting and editing.” (I would have liked to learn more about their script rewrites and editing decisions.)

So good job, Michigan librarians, and thank you for sharing with us.

My turn

My new screencasts are different from the UM examples in a few ways:

1. The focus is on quite specific and sometimes complicated types of research.
2. They are, well, umm, considerably longer. My economic data video, which surveys five numeric databases, topped out at 11 minutes. Yikes. Maybe next summer I’ll chop the big ones into a series of smaller videos.
3. The videos follow Chad Boeninger’s excellent example of promoting public service and the liaison, as I wrote about last time. [Update: see the comments below for a link to Chad's how-to guide]

Regarding the length of the economic data video, I could have covered each database in a separate video, but then I couldn’t really make comparisons and establish linkages between the data. And viewers would have to make the effort to find all five videos. Following a good Chad example once again, I’m using thumbnails to make linking to the videos compact yet visual, but I don’t want to have a bunch of thumbnails on top of a page like http://uncg.libguides.com/eco. But still, I hope future videos are more focused and therefore shorter. We’ll see how long “benchmarking private company and start-up financials” ends up. (I plan on discussing how the benchmark data is created; that will take a minute or two.) Future videos for a class project (ex. “How to identify private company competitors for MKT 429”) will certainly be shorter.

So let me try to write my own best practices for screencasting as a liaison:

• Upload to YouTube (as Chad and the UM do) for easy embedding and for cross-platform viewability.
• Balance a rough script and planned searches with a friendly, conversational tone, as you would in a classroom.
• Emphasize human support with video introductions, and don’t be afraid to make it personal. Drop the names of professors, departments, or core research classes that students might recognize.
• Don’t zoom in or out too quickly.
• Use segments for each major step in the video. That way, for example, if your library homepage has a redesign, you only need to replace a 20 second segment showing the navigation path to your featured resource. Otherwise you would have to slice apart a longer segment, assuming there is natural pause in the audio where you need it.
• If possible, add comments, URLs, call outs, highlights, etc. Camtasia makes this easy. But don’t get too carried away (especially tempting at first, as I learned!)
• Provide your name and contact information in a slide. Remember that viewers can pause the video whenever they want to make notes.

Future work

I mentioned making class-specific videos.

Two MBA students have agreed to let me film them talking about how useful certain library databases have been to them for specific projects. I’m looking forward to providing a peer-testimonial video like that and hope it proves effective with other MBA students.

My market reports video begins with a discussion and examples of how expensive business research can be. That segment was inspired in part by a narrated presentation Hyun-Duck Chung created when she worked at NCSU. I might flesh that topic out to address the “socio-economic issues surrounding information” ACRL info lit goals (and further promote the value of library business databases).

And I’ll try to get some feedback, even if anecdotal, on the existing videos. I would love to hear what other liaisons are doing with subject-specific screencasts.

However, my library’s Instructional Tech Team has a house policy to begin any screencast with a voiceover reminder from Irma Minerva, our reference service avatar/brand, that you can always “Ask Us” for additional help.

Irma Minerva

Now, I agree that policy makes sense. In fact, it was some years ago when I became coordinator of our virtual reference service that I asked a temporary reference librarian to investigate new branding for our “Ask a Librarian” chat service, which resulted in Irma Minerva, with iMinerva as a username variant. (Yes, this was before the iPod came out.)

(Optional historical background: A former colleague, Lisa, began our chat service in January 2001, a few months before I got married, moved to Winston-Salem, and began working at UNCG. When my buddy Lisa got married and moved to the Midwest a few years later, I became the chat coordinator. By then the literature was pretty clear that “librarian” was not a particularly effective word to have in the name of a virtual reference service. So I asked Stephanie, the new temporary reference librarian who was looking for projects, to investigate new branding. Through a well-planned naming contest we ended up with Irma Minerva. (Minerva is our campus symbol — UNCG began as the UNC Women’s College.))

So is it better to promote the service desk brand or the subject specialist-as-brand? I certainly don’t want a business student who needs quick help but can’t find me online or in person to give up without trying the reference desk. (Although I do hear from a couple of students each year that whoever was at the reference desk or monitoring chat just punting his or her question back to one of my library guides, which the students had usually already consulted. Yes, business research can be intimidating.)

So as a compromise I decided to mention Irma Minerva/Ask Us in my short video clips. We really have to promote both brands, even if that weakens the marketing message.

So there weren’t any ACRL 2011 posters or roundtables focused on business, but there were many on information literacy, outreach and marketing, embedded librarians, the future of subject specialists, etc. Here are the ones that seemed most interesting to me and provided a detailed handout of some sort.

Liaison Teams, Academic Integration & Resource Council: A Collection Development Model for a Medium-Sized Academic Library (handout in DOCX) (chart in DOCX)

• From Villanova. It describes a “team and matrix approach” to collections, reference, and teaching.
• Lots of meetings! Although sometimes only the team coordinator has to attend.
• I would like to learn more about how the liaison teams function. Here at UNCG, liaisons are quite autonomous (except for collections), which certainly has its own strengths and weaknesses as an organizational model.

Subject Guides: Rethinking Approaches to Content & Interactivity (PDF)

• Oakland University grabbed an “opportunity to re‐envision delivery of content”.
• They surveyed 14 libraries’ subject guides and reviewed some articles.
• Page 2 of the PDF summarizes their new best practices. Nothing surprising, but it’s good to see other models. It looks like they use Libguides, based on the template provided. Makes me wonder what their course guides were like before. The University of Washington Libraries published a user study of their Libguides that we reviewed last school year.

Feeling like a Third Wheel? Leveraging Faculty-Student-Librarian Relationships for Student Success (PDF)

• From several universities.
• At first I was disappointed to see that there were no results from their work, but the questions for faculty in the table on page 2 are really good. I might use them sometime for some faculty whose classes I’ve never had much contact with.

“I already know how to do research!” Connecting with Overconfident Students through Evidence-Based Active Learning Techniques (PDF)

• By Amy Gustavson & Clark Nall of East Carolina University. Clark is the ECU business librarian and a past officer in BLINC.
• The techniques include “immediate feedback, implicit self-confidence tests, and warm-up exercises.”
• It certainly can be challenging to get people to recognize they aren’t as competent as they think they are.

Staying Genuine and Creating Connections: Networking and Involvement for Introverts (PDF)

• My favorite title. This was actually a round table discussion, but the handout is quite detailed.
• Interesting “Reality” point: “Introverts are leaders in all fields; some of them may be mistaken for extroverts by those who don’t know them personally.”
• Reality point number 5: “Introverts often like lists.” Hmm.
• The focus is on professional work and conference activities, not liaison work. But the suggestions for getting involved are useful to anyone.

Like most business librarians, I’m always interested in reading reviews of databases. But some types of reviews are better than others. Beyond a thorough examination of the content, search capabilities, and download/export options, what makes a really useful review?

1. Comparing the database to competing products;
2. Discussing how expensive a database is, even if stated in generalities like “surprisingly affordable” or “only for the best-funded libraries”.

One recent review article covers all of that:

Giglierano. J. (2011). Comparative review of IBISWorld Global Industry Reports, Euromonitor Market Research Monitor, and Mintel Global Market Navigator. Charleston Advisor, 13(2), 10-15.

Another recent one provides a comparison even if pricing isn’t covered:

Esler, A., Felver, R., & Sluzenski, K. (2011). Entrepreneurial Resources. Online, 35(6), 32-36.

This article compares ProQuest Entrepreneurship and EBSCOhost’s Entrepreneurial Studies Source.

I’ve enjoyed helping grade the presentations in those classes. It’s always valuable to see what students end up doing with the resources strategies and sources they (hopefully) learn about through their research workshops. Observing final presentations, like looking over final written reports, can be a useful form of assessment even if you don’t end up with quantifiable data afterwards.

So I examined the new information literacy special issue of the Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship with interest. The issue begins with a literature review, “Business Information Literacy: A Synthesis for Best Practices” by Ann Fiegan of California State University San Marcos. Ann’s article ends with a list of “Best Practices for Business Information Literacy Instruction Derived from the Literature, 1980-2009.” Many of the best practices should elicit immediate head-nods from teaching librarians who have been around the block a few times. One example: “Schedule in-class library instruction just after project start date and provide adequate time for project completion.”

I question the validity of another best practice, though: “Plan your MBA graduate instruction to the higher order information literacy competencies. MBA students are independent learners and knowledgeable evaluators. They are interested in the more advanced features of research tools.” MBA students are often working adults with families whose classes are centered on case studies. I haven’t seen too many research-intensive MBA classes, at least at UNCG. Meanwhile there are plenty of undergraduates and students in other business school graduate programs in research-intensive classes that necessitate strong growth in info lit skills.

Another article in the special issue is “”Course-Integrated Information Literacy Instruction in Introduction to Accounting” by Anne Kelly, Teresa Williams, Brad Matthies and J. Burdeane Orris of Butler University. I’m jealous of the required freshmen class the Butler librarians describe. All UNCG business school freshmen take BUS 105, “Introduction to Business Skills Development,” which includes a class session I teach, but the real objective of this class is to orientate new students to university life, not to teach business principles. So its research requirements are light. (Entrepreneurship and CARS students get into research early in required classes, at least.) More on this article in a minute.

“Broad Focus, Narrow Focus: A Look at Information Literacy Across a School of Business and Within a Capstone Course” by Diane Campbell of Rider University was the other article I’ve looked at closely. Diane discusses ENT 348, a feasibility class, and ENT 410, a business plan class. We have a similar pairing here.

Both the Butler and Rider articles describe multiple choice surveys used by the librarians to assess information literacy. Their survey questions fall pretty evenly into two categories:

1. Research strategies
2. Research sources or tools

For example, asking about industry classification systems or the purpose of trade magazines falls under research strategies; asking about the best database to cover topic X or what the library research guides are called (answer: Libguides) would fall under research sources or tools.

I find the questions the librarians chose for their surveys very interesting. Both libraries certainly had to think hard about what to ask. (Diane notes that “It goes without saying that these five questions leave many types of business information and many BIL skills still to be addressed” (p. 319)). It’s a very different thought process than designing graded exercises or worksheets intended to assess the narrow learning outcomes of a single class.

I wonder, though — if we really hope to develop lifelong learning in our students, should we ask questions about tools and sources, like specific vendor databases, that are probably not accessible to graduates?

Certainly we want students to become familiar with our business databases. (Five years ago or so a marketing major who went on to get a master’s degree in CARS once exclaimed to me and her classmates “I love Mintel!” It brought a tear to my eye.) But our field is one where the research the students do for class projects is very similar to the research they will have to do as entrepreneurs, marketing managers, or investors. This is unlike some of the other majors around campus for whom research means searching for scholarly books and articles to use in a paper, a type of research most students never need to do again after graduation unless they go to grad school. In addition to asking questions about business research strategies, there are the many free resources (Census data, SEC filings, BLS data, etc.) that students can use after graduation that would make good targets for information literacy survey questions. If we want to test for long-term learning, would it be more useful to ask students about those types of sources versus subscription databases?

Now I need to be honest and state that I’ve never tried to do an info lit assessment with statistical analysis like the Butler and Rider librarians have done. A big thank you to them for sharing their planning and survey results with the rest of us.

By the way, I would be happy to upload a guest blog post, if you are a business librarian with something to say. Just let me know.

At NCLA 2011 last month in Hickory (the foothills of the Blue Ridge), I was fortunate to participate in panel of four librarians called “Embedded Librarianship in North Carolina.” (It was sponsored by the Business Librarianship in North Carolina section.)

The other three panelists included:

Jennifer Ballance
eLearning Librarian, Central Piedmont Community College

Joli McClelland
Instruction and Web Design Librarian, Queens University of Charlotte

Allan Scherlen
Social Sciences Librarian, Appalachian State University

Around 40-45 librarians and LIS students were in the house and asked questions with enthusiasm. As you read through my summary, you’ll notice that the panelists present different models of what it means to be embedded. That was part of the fun.

Jennifer Ballance coordinated her library’s efforts to embed a librarian in every online class via Blackboard and LibGuides. This semester, she is the librarian for 14 online classes herself.  Jennifer talked about the goal of making online embeddedness scalable in order to cover the most territory. (CPCC has over 11,000 students taking online foundational courses, plus many students in on-campus versions.) In the process of embedding librarians in so many classes, Jennifer created best practices for online embedding in some many online classes.

One of CPCC’s best practices is to unpublish all class-specific libguides at the end of each semester. This forces the instructor to ask for the guide back, and provides the library a chance to update each guide as needed and to keep a librarian in the class each semester. Gutsy! I like that. Another best practice is to pay close attention to each class’ deadlines and to email relevant research tips and reminders of librarian support a week or so before the assignment is due.

Jennifer created a tutorial that all COM students (online and traditional) are required to take for a grade, even in sections that don’t have an embedded librarian.

Joli McClelland from Queens University and Allan Scherlen from ASU teach for-credit library research courses, as do many librarians, but their classes are based within the major and are required of all majors.

Joli helps teach PSYC 300, “Information Literacy for Psychology majors,” a required 3-hour class that leads into the required experimental methods and senior thesis classes. Joli discussed that faculty had been disappointed with the quality of student work. The psychology department added the info lit class to teach the students literacy skills. The course objectives were based on goals from the “APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major.” The librarians do most of the work; their activities include in-class instruction, consultations with individual students on their topics, and communication through their CMS. Pre- and post-tests indicate the info lit class is paying off.

Allan Scherlen teaches Philosophy 2800, “Library Research for Philosophy Majors.” His class is a required prerequisite to philosophy majors’ capstone research course. The class meets one hour each week and covers all five ACRL competency standards. Allan has been teaching it for three years. He emphasized that being a teacher in the philosophy department improved his effectiveness as a librarian through becoming part of the learning process and better understanding the needs of the philosophy majors.

I’ve written about my experience as a co-teacher of MKT 426. In Hickory I focused on the various roles I’ve found myself playing: teacher, counselor, cheer leader, team mediator, and textbook co-author — but not grader. A talked about avoiding that role in order to remain as approachable as possible, and later in the Q&A we had a discussion about the increased approachability and availability to students that librarians sometimes provide compared to that of the professors.

It didn’t take long until another liaison asserted in a collections management meeting that “we have so many business databases, and some of them are quite expensive, so we need to begin with making cuts there.” Sigh.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tgray/207860417/

Yes, business databases can be expensive. And, yes, we do have some business databases we could live without (not necessarily the expensive ones, though). One category for which some cuts would be more like pruning than amputation was specialized company directories. For example, a database that specializes in corporate structure have been useful for certain research needs, but other, larger company databases now also provide the functionality to identify subsidiaries or find the ultimate parent. Many of these optional databases were print reference serials once upon a time, but within the last ten years became available as a database. (I won’t be naming any products today, with one two exceptions below.)

But many other business databases we have cover an essential content category. Scholarly business articles make up just one category – and unlike some other academic subjects, business research requires more than just articles. So I decided I needed to list those content areas, describe how the content is used, and identify the database(s) that covers each one. My report ended up being 6 pages long. I emailed it to the small group of administrators that make the final decisions on our databases budget. (Database funding comes out of one budget. We liaisons just make recommendations — part of the fun of being a subject specialist in a general library).

The report also mentioned the campus-wide scope of some of these areas. Examples include Geography, Political Science, English (a “Writing for the Professions” class), etc., all of which have classes that require business research. I also described our interdisciplinary, campus-wide entrepreneurship program that has classes in 20 majors (including the arts, sciences, and Social Work) and still growing. The database committee knew those general trends, but it never hurts to remind them of the details.

I explained that my emphasis in database selection was covering the core content areas with at least one good product, and reducing duplication of content as much as possible.

These are the core content areas I came up with for UNCG:

• business articles (scholarly, trade, news, etc.)
• consumer market reports (U.S. and international)
• consumer market data/statistics (U.S. and international)
• U.S. industry financial benchmarking/ratios
• industry reports (U.S. and international)
• corporate financial data (U.S. and international)
• investment reports/analysis
• private companies (U.S. and international)
• accounting standards/AICPA/FASB/CPA stuff
• tax standards
• global trade data
• U.S. trade data
• U.S. state export data
• one-stop shopping business databases (the kind of database that provides a variety of company and industry research plus articles)

Some databases cover more than one area, and some areas have a U.S.-focused product as well as an international product. I ended up listing two sources for U.S. consumer market data: SimplyMap and DemographicsNow, since those two complement each other so well (comparisons of places by a single data point versus detailed profiles of demographic, business count, and consumer spending data for each place.)

Writing the report became an interesting exercise for me. It helped me determine the minimum breadth of business databases by content type the campus requires. If we receive another budget cut next year, I’ll know which databases to circle the wagons around as we begin our budget discussions, and hopefully I can be more persuasive as to why we still have “so many business databases.”