February 2004 Site of the Month
Authors: Ann Jacobson, Jeff Rothal and Bryan Stoneburner
(Dudley Knox Library) and Doug Nelson (Kinection - http://www.kinection.com)
Interviewer: Cassandra Osterloh
Description:
The Dudley Knox Library Orientation is a web-based orientation to
the Library's services, resources and facility, and to the basic
searching concepts and skills that will help Naval Postgraduate
School students take full advantage of them.
Interview with tutorial author:
Q: What was the motivation for creating creating
the Dudley Knox Library Orientation?
A: The Naval Postgraduate School has a growing number of
distance-learning programs, and we felt this would be a good way
to provide students in those programs with information about our
Library as well as some basic research and searching skills. We
also wanted a "just in time" solution for providing library
information to resident students, faculty, and staff.
Q: How is the tutorial currently used?
A: It is used on an as-needed basis, other than one library
class for faculty for which it is a mandatory prerequisite. It is
very visible from our Library home page and from various obvious
entry points on the NPS Blackboard site.
Q: How was the tutorial promoted or advertised?
A: We use a variety of methods to promote and advertise our
online tutorial including small, visually attractive fliers (for
resident students and faculty), bulk e-mails to faculty and students,
links from key library and institutional web pages, and a brief
description and URL that are included in the e-mail sent to all
new distance students with their library account information.
Q: How has the tutorial contributed to or influenced
your library's instructional services?
A: While it has not replaced any of our formal instruction
sessions, it has been helpful to be able to inform students that
it is available as a refresher at any time they want or need it.
For the faculty class session mentioned above, we have been able
to establish it as a "prerequisite" so we can assume a
certain level of knowledge when the faculty arrive and can move
right in to more substantial material.
Q: What were some of the challenges (technological
or other) that you encountered?
A: We were extraordinarily fortunate to have a contractor
handling the technological aspects of the project, so I can't really
speak to those. Some of the other challenges that we encountered
were: 1) The project took longer than any of us anticipated (more
than 18 months), and it was a challenge for all of us to stay motivated
and engaged for such an extended period; 2) the tutorial was designed
(and the screen size and graphics were optimized) for the Blackboard
learning environment. It was only very late in the project that
we discovered that Blackboard wasn't going to meet our needs, so
we ended up putting the tutorial on our web site and creating two
entry points to it, one in Blackboard and the other on our web site
; 3) our tutorial was originally intended to be a basic orientation
to the Library similar to what we would present in a fifty-minute
presentation for new students, and it was a constant challenge to
stick to that concept and not keep adding more; and 4) working with
an off-site contractor presented an interesting challenge in that
there was little opportunity for serendipitous conversations and
synergy to develop.
Q: If you were to do it all over again, what would
you do differently (or the same)?
A: I would recognize that putting together a comprehensive
tutorial such as ours is a very large commitment of staff time (even
when working with a contractor) and would try to make sure that
staff had adequate time to allocate to the project so that it could
be completed fairly expeditiously. I would also give more thought
to how to track usage by our user community. We can track the number
of hits on our orientation launch page, and occasionally someone
actually fills out the feedback survey, but it would be helpful
to have more data than that. Ours is a fairly small library, and
one thing I would definitely do the same in spite of its challenges
is work with a contractor. There is absolutely no way with our small
staff that we could have produced such an attractive and comprehensive
product without that support. I also think our approach of personalizing
the tutorial with two real students representing resident and distance
students was an excellent way to attract student interest and make
the information appear accessible and relevant.
To contact the authors of the Dudley Knox Library
Orientation, please write or call:
Ann Jacobson
Research Assistance and Instruction Manager
Dudley Knox Library, Naval Postgraduate School
Phone: (831) 656-7732
E-mail: ajacobson@nps.navy.mil
