Volume 17, Number 4     April & May 2008

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Campus Colleagues -
Librarians and Faculty Onward Together!

by Lily Griner and Susan White

Campus Colleagues – Benefits of Librarian and Faculty Collaboration. This is the core of a presentation by Librarian Lily Griner and Finance faculty Susan White to be given at the Lilly- East Conference on College and University Teaching at the University of Delaware this April.

Research assignments can be frustrating to students, librarians and faculty. Students find them frustrating because they're not sure what topic to select and how to go about collecting the often specified number and type of sources. Librarians are frustrated because the students just want to find the sources, without learning or thinking about research strategy. Faculty can be frustrated by the results.

Lily and Sue have been collaborating on class projects for several years, with both benefiting from the partnership. Sue teaches BMGT 340, Business Finance, required for all business majors and Advanced Corporate Finance (BMGT 440 for undergraduates and BUFN 758B for MBAs). She has developed projects for both courses, which require library resources. Using resources in the library, and VBIC ( Virtual Business Information Center ) in particular, Lily and Sue have collaborated to develop classes and exercises that instruct the student in using research resources to solve project problems. Their

session at the Lilly-East conference discusses the benefits of partnerships between librarians and faculty, educational goals for course related research assignments, and the characteristics of effective assignments.

The goals of their session at Lilly-East include: discussing the benefits of partnerships between librarians and faculty, exchanging views on educational goals for course-related research assignments, and outlining the characteristics of effective assignments. Students need to understand the differences between print and electronic sources, web sources and scholarly electronic databases, e-journals, e-books, online catalogs, etc.

The session's first activity will be to develop assignments, each with library components, using a topic everyone is familiar with, Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet.” Bloom's Taxonomy describes a hierarchy for categorizing the level of abstraction in questions and learning goals, moving from the most concrete to the most abstract goals – knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. For example, knowledge in Bloom's taxonomy concerns observation and recall of information, knowledge of major ideas and mastery of the subject matter. Questions testing student knowledge might include asking students to list, define, tell, describe, identify, show, examine, name, etc. An assignment fitting this component might be to find out biographical information about Shakespeare. Comprehension in Bloom's taxonomy concerns understanding information, translating knowledge into a new context, interpreting information, and comparing and contrasting. Questions testing student comprehension could involve summarizing, interpreting, contrasting, predicting or discussing. An assignment involving comprehension could ask why the Capulets and Montagues were feuding and research how this story has played on in modern stories such as the musical, “West Side Story.”

Finally, session participants, through a series of mini cases, will discuss common problems that arise in the use of library resources in course assignments. The discussion will emphasize ways to most effectively integrate library instruction and research into course instruction and assignments. Issues to be addressed include library/faculty collaboration in assignment development, assignment goals, and library instruction content, timing and logistics.

Mini Case: A Library and Business School Information Partnership

Sue and Lily had been colleagues for a couple of years when they first started working together to provide information services to Sue’s students.  Sue teachings Business Finance, a large lecture class – 500 students split into two sections of 250 students.  The class meets for lecture twice a week, and then students meet with teaching assistants for 50 minute Friday sessions with an MBA student. 

Sue’s students are divided into groups in their Friday sessions.  Each group is assigned a large, public company for their group project, due at the end of the semester.  The project requires students to perform an industry and economic analysis, finding out how their company is poised to take advantage of – or not – expected economic conditions.  Then, they perform a financial statement analysis and ratio analysis for their company – how has their company been performing over time?  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  And, finally, using original sources, they must calculate the cost of equity for their company, following the methods outlined in their textbook. 

In partnership with the business school, the library has a data base of data bases called VBIC, Virtual Business Information Center.  While having all of that information easily available, both from any university computer and from students’ home computers, is wonderful, one could argue that there is so much information, that it is sometimes hard for students to find exactly the piece of information that they need.  To address this need, Lily and Sue have met multiple times, dissecting the project into its component parts, while Lily has researched the best data bases from which to obtain this information.  Lily developed a series of exercises for the students – data hunts that will help them seek and find some of the many pieces of information they will need for their semester-long projects.  Sue’s 12 sections, with 35-40 students per section, go to the library during one of their regularly-scheduled 50 minute Friday sessions.

Now that Lily and Sue have addressed the basics – what information is needed and where to get it – they are working on some of the more subtle problems that have cropped up with their partnership.