Subject guides: an undervalued resource

Library bloggers like to write about big ideas. Academic freedom, the digital divide, and intellectual property are popular topics in the biblioblogosphere. Today I want to discuss something a bit more mundane but certainly relevant to academic librarianship and hopefully interesting as well. Today I want to talk about subject guides.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a subject guide is a list of resources that are appropriate for doing research on a given topic. The list is assembled (and sometimes annotated) by a librarian, and it is usually presented as a webpage. For an example, you can take a look at the McGill Library’s subject guides.

Subject guides fascinate me because librarians put their blood, sweat, and tears into creating them and value them as essential research tools, while most students are entirely unaware of their existence. From the perspective of a librarian, the importance of these guides is clear. Especially for students who have little experience with research, the guides are the perfect place to start, and in many cases could help them avoid a trip to the reference desk (not that I would ever discourage a student from going to see a reference librarian, but first of all subject guides are available 24/7, and secondly it can be embarrassing to approach a librarian and say “I have no idea where to start.”). After spending some time working on these documents, a librarian may begin to wonder how students ever performed research at all without them.

Looking back on my own academic career, however, I had certainly never heard of subject guides until I started library school, and I believe this is a common experience for undergrads. This past spring, I held a focus group for students to gather their thoughts on subject guides and found that most of them were unfamiliar with the concept (some had also never heard of liaison librarians, but that’s another issue).

It can be incredibly frustrating to work so hard on something that most students will never even notice, so how can we resolve this situation? One option would be to scrap the guides altogether, but I don’t think most librarians are prepared to abandon such great potential. Another possibility would be to make the guides more “hip” instead of the usual boring HTML pages (LibGuides comes to mind as an attractive, Web 2.0-ish alternative), but although students might prefer this type of guide, it does not help with the problem of students being unaware of the guides altogether. I believe the best way to encourage students to use these resources is to make them part of the school’s culture of research. A good start would be to make them available (and prominent) through the Course Management System or Virtual Learning Environment (e.g., WebCT, Moodle, etc.). From there, librarians should work with professors, especially in first and second year undergrad courses, to promote the guides, and when librarians make presentations to classes they should always highlight the appropriate subject guides.

Have you worked on subject guides at your school? How have they been received by students? What are your suggestions for promoting them? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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