Cort Egan
For those of you in search of Mike Ridley’s column, Open Content, it has, like all good things in life, come to an end. This space has changed. Mike will be starting a two year sabbatical in January and, while he will continue to be active in a university environment, it will now be in the role of a student.
During Mike’s term as Chief Librarian and CIO, the role of the library on campus has changed. The University of Guelph Library was one of the first to introduce a Learning Commons, it was among the first to embrace the concept of library as Academic Town Square, and it was quick to forge active partnerships with other groups on campus such as the Mathematics and Statistics Centre, the Branch Research Data Centre, the Data Resource Centre, and the recently opened Physics Learning Centre, Chemistry Learning Centre and Science Commons.
Mike’s life in the stacks has changed the stacks. In view of Mike’s departure, we’ve decided to change the focus of this column to the library user. How has the library changed for you? How would you like to see it evolve? What’s working well? What can we improve?
Every two weeks we’ll discover someone in the stacks and find out how that person is using the library space and what improvements we can make to better suit the needs of students and faculty. We’ll also report back on what we’ve done to make the improvements that you’ve requested.
Paulina
Location: PN 686 (4th floor stacks); section on Arthurian Legend.
Paulina, originally from Newmarket, was working on an essay on King Arthur’s effect on British life (an unusual topic for a Zoology major with a German minor). When I found her she was clutching copies of Arthur’s Britain by Leslie Alcock and Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters, edited by J. Barrow and A. Wareham.
“I like to take a few arts and humanities courses,” Paulina explained. “It stops me from going too crazy and offers a nice counter-balance to my otherwise heavy science workload.”
Paulina betrayed an impressive knowledge of the library. She easily rhymed off several of the key collections in the archives– the Scottish Collection, the Lucy Maud Montgomery Collection, the Canadian cookbooks collection and the theatre sets. She was familiar with the Learning Commons having used Writing Services (which led to a conversation on the oxford comma, and not the song by Vampire Weekend) and taken a course with an SLG leader. Coincidentally, she was given a tour of the place by Mike Ridley last year in preparation for some fundraising work she did for the Archives. Paulina is also on the CSA exec, which may explain why we found her working in the library on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
When conducting research for zoology courses, Paulina primarily relies on electronic journals which she’ll discover either through Primo or Pub Med; with her arts and humanities classes she might start her research with a quick Wikipedia search to find a starting point, and then troll the stacks. Using the stacks as a search tool gives her a wide perspective on a given subject without relying on Google searches or having to worry about credibility. Paulina will then read bits of information from the various resources she finds, determine a thesis topic and then narrow her search. Most of Paulina’s early research habits were formed by the TAs in her classes – she has never asked for help from a librarian other than when her bar code would not work on her card.
For Paulina, the main role of the library is to provide students with a quiet, comfortable space to study and access resources, which she says we’re doing fairly well. What we’re not doing very well is mapping out how to find resources and how to make sense of the cataloguing system, which can seem somewhat arbitrary at times. It took almost a year for Paulina to learn that we actually carry popular fiction.
The Library is in the process of replacing and updating all of the building’s signage. We are also producing pocket-sized floor maps that should help students find resources.
If there are other improvements that you would like to see the library make, send a note to the Ontarion at oneditor@uoguelph.ca with “Life in the Stacks” as the subject line. Your comments will get to us and will be published in the next column.
Cort Egan is the Communications Manager for the Library and CCS.
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