Economics is something of a brave new frontier for this aspiring librarian. I would say that I would feel very uncomfortable being a reference librarian in economics as it is something that I have never really thought about too much and involves a lot subjects that I am not particularly fond of. How this problem could be bridged for me is probably much the same as any student who would be new to this subject. The resources for becoming familiar with economics are not profoundly different from any other subject area. This was somewhat confirmed in the literature this week.
In the article "Information Overload," Pauline Melgoza, et al. (2002) discuss the various information habits of social science and economic students attending Texas A&M University. Their interest was in figuring out the preferences of different kinds of library users in order to update their collections to reflect these preferences. It should probably not come as a great surprise that users were interested in accessibility, convenience, ease of use, and accuracy as key considerations, along with speed of retrieval (pp. 34). From that, it should also come as little surprise that free Internet services reigned supreme as a tool for information resources and retrieval (pp. 35), this is, after all, the age of Google. Unlike our historian group that we reviewed last week, the economists seem to have more trust in electronic journals, although, much like almost any other group, the study shows that users prefer print books to e-books (pp. 35-6).
In other words, in terms of being a reference guide to economics students, it seems that our general resources are not incredibly different from guiding students in any other discipline. This is part of what makes being a librarian interesting is that, in theory, when you understand the lay of the land you should be able to help patrons orient themselves to library services and resources despite your own knowledge on the particular subject. Although, in order to truly excel in the field and be of a valuable service to your patrons, the sooner you begin to understand the literature of the discipline, the better.
One of the positive aspects about economics as a subject is that it is a subject with a rather broad appeal, since it is so elementary in other political science majors, as well as having a large impact on ever day life for everyone, academics or not. In this regard, there are more mainstream, or popular, resources out there that discuss economics. This can be in the form of popular periodicals, like the Wall Street Journal, or it can be in the form of television shows on news channels, or in the form of pod casts, such as econtalk.org that we explored this week. These resources are great because they are highly accessible to anyone who has an interest in the material existence of contemporary culture and an examination of the political, historic, and economic factors that make it possible. There is a large range of topics within economics, so that there is likely to be something that appeals to just about everyone. There is little ability for any topic to escape the gravity of the economy.
The Libguide that stood out to me the most this week was the one put together by UNT, available at http://unt.v1.libguides.com/content.php?pid=348363. This Libguide is very user-friendly, and even offers PowerPoint presentations on using the library and electronic resources provided by the library. The Libguide offers a list of free Internet sites that serve as convenient places to begin research on economic topics, as well as a top 10 databases list. The Libguide also offers different lists with recommended resources based on accomplishing different tasks, such as places to go to look up company profiles, costs of living, and government information.
Melgoza, P., Mennel, P. A., Gyeszly, S. D., (2002). "Information Overload." Collection Building. Volume 21 (1), 2002. Pages 32-42. DOI 10.1108/01604950210414716
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