More on Subject Headings and Information Literacy

Our reading this week began with the essay, Information Literacy: the Partnership of Sociology Faculty and Social Science Librarians (Caravello, Kain, Kuchi, Macicak, & Weiss, 2008). This essay introduces the reader to information literacy as it applies to the sociology student, and the ways in which faculty and librarians can work together to ensure that these information literacy requirements are being met by the sociology curriculum.

Like other essays on the topic of information literacy, we learn that what is meant by IL is the ability of individuals to identify their information need, access the relevant information, critically evaluate the information, digest and incorporate the information in order to perform some specific task, and to use this information ethically and legally (pp. 9).   A sociology student's definition of IL gets more specific to their research with the addition of understanding the relationship of social structures and information.  This involves understanding social inequalities, access to technology, and the social structures that are generally responsible for the creation and dissemination of information. The reference librarian, in the field of sociology, should have an understanding of these needs and work with faculty to ensure that students are aware of these aspects of IL.

But, the library is made up of more than just liaisons, reference desks and reference librarians.  Before anyone can access a resource, it first needs cataloged so that that resource is discoverable and accessible to students.  The way in which this is accomplished will effect access to the resource and can make the difference between a resource being missed and a resource being found.

While exploring the web site of the ANSS (Anthropology and Sociology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries) I was surprised to find the way in which the ANSS addresses the problem of accessibility of library resources for sociology.  Like any other field in academia, sociology is not a static field.  Rather, it is constantly in flux. New knowledge is constantly being added. New knowledge means new theories, new research fields, new research questions, and new terminology.  In terms of access, this means that subject headings are constantly being added in order to ensure that resources are findable using up-to-date terminology.

University libraries mostly use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in order to describe the subject of a resource. Using this kind of controlled vocabulary is a way of ensuring consistency and formality to subject analysis, and gains the benefit of uniformity and predictability for the end-user. The LCSH is not a static set of subject headings, rather, it, like knowledge itself, is constantly in flux. They update in order to keep up with the changing nature of resources, experimentation, research, and discovery.  By keeping up to date subject headings, the LCSH remains relevant, and catalogers are given the tools they need to describe new resources.

But how is a cataloger suppose to keep up with a constantly changing database of subject headings that cover virtually all areas of knowledge that appear in resources from monographs to music and movies?  The answer that the ANSS has adopted on their website is to include a section on New Subject headings (http://anssacrl.wordpress.com/publications/new-subject-headings/). It is here that a catalog librarian can keep updated on what new subject headings were added to the LCSH in the fields of sociology and anthropology in order to describe new resources (or even update existing records of old resources) so that they are current as to how researchers will look for the resource.

This list benefits researchers, students, and reference librarians as much as it benefits catalog librarians. By checking the list of new subject headings, any researcher can have an idea of what new subject terms she or he may use while conducting a search.  Even by casually scanning the list, a researcher might be inspired to look into a given new heading to see if their library has any items on the subject.

Out of my own interest, I decided to test some of the new subject headings from the list on KentLink to see if Kent State University has yet made use of  any of these new headings. In a very non-scientific way, I chose some subject headings at random and ran a subject search in KentLink

2014 headings:
Jewish Morning Customs - None
Melodrama, Polish - None
Ethiopian American Art - None
Cell phone users - None.

2010 headings:
Aleut literature - none
Pets and older people - none
College student parents - none
Coming of age - 16

2007 headings:
Custodial parents - 1
Transgender prisoners - 1
Social gerontology - 3
Punk culture and art - 2
First responders - 47


This raises some interesting research questions:

• How long does it take a new subject heading to go from being added to LCSH to being widely used?
• How does attention in media effect the usage of a subject heading?

Caravello, P. S., & Kain, E. L., & Kuchi, T., & Macicak, S., & Weiss, G. L. (2008). Information literacy: the partnership of sociology faculty and social science librarians. Teaching Sociology (36). pages 8-16.

Online tutorial at University of Leeds

With last week's focus on embedded librarians, and this week's peek at librarians creating tutorials for distance education students, it is becoming all more obvious just how much of an active a role that librarians are taking in creating information literate students.

In the article, Creating an Online Tutorial to Support Information Literacy and Academic Skills Development, Sara Thornes (2012) discusses the process that librarians at the University of Leeds undertook in order to develop a tutorial to help acclimate distance learners to information literacy skills.  An important theme in this article, as with articles from last week, as well, has been that librarians work very closely with faculty in other departments in order to ensure that resources are responding to needs of the actual students and professors.  This is important, so that all the departments in a university are sending the same message to students, and to ensure that actual problems that are coming up in class work are being addressed by these library initiatives.

In the case of designing this tutorial, librarians were in close contact with professors from the School of Geology, as well as learning technologists (pp. 85; 89).  The tutorial was designed to ensure that students had a one-stop resource for learning and reviewing information on topics that stressed planning searches, advanced searching tools and techniques, evaluating sources, writing and note taking for research papers, and citations (pp. 86).  These topics form the basic core of information literacy of which we have been learning the various ways in which librarians have been working to find innovative ways to instruct students on.

This tutorial was designed so that students did not have to sit through a linear lecture, but rather, could choose the sections that they felt they needed the most help on and to repeat any section as many times as they needed.  In addition, student learning was enforced and evaluated through the use of interactive quizzes and exercises during each module (pp. 87-88).  This kind of flexibility is one of the advantages that this kind of electronic learning object offers that can not be found in a typical workshop.

An important take away from the lessons of embedded librarians, librarians creating online tutorials, and LibGuides is that computer technology offers a unique challenge to librarians in an academic setting. A common fear is that Google is being too heavily relied upon, and that students no longer use print resources at the library. As a result, it is assumed that libraries are becoming only social venues where students fill up on coffee and socialize between classes.  It is important to recognize the changing environment of the library, and to realize that to some extent these observations are not entirely fabrications. However, this is not, in itself, driving librarians from their jobs. On the contrary, students still need resources to help develop their information literacy skills, both with print media and with electronic resources as well.  The librarian's job still remains much the same as it previously has been, only now with more challenges and new tools at their disposal.

Thornes, S. L., (2012). Creating an online tutorial to support information literacy and academic skills development. Journal of Information Literacy, 6(1), pp. 82-95,
http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/LLC-V6-I1-2012-3