by Michelle Thornton
Editorial Director
Workshops are now being offered at Wilson Library to teach students how to use all the electronic resources that are available to them.
“It is an awareness kind of thing to make better use of electronic resources that we have,” said Dr. Marlin Heckman, head librarian.
A computer lab at the rear of Wilson Library has sat unused for some time because neither Academic Computing department nor the library’s staff – including workstudy students – could supervise it
Several computers once housed there were relocated to other areas of the library, but five or six computers remain in the lab to serve as a training devices.
Six workshops are being offered in both March and April. This is the first semester that the library has led these workshops, but so far the workshops have been full with mostly faculty and staff.
Each day deals with only one workshop, and students must sign up for them because space is limited.
Workshops include basic and intermediate internet skills, searching on the LEOpac and several workshops on how to use the CD-rom to access databases for specific fields.
For instance, they teach students how to use ABI and PAR which are periodicals indexes for all fields. This database gives access to 4,000 journals and more than 2,000 full text articles.
“A lot of people do not know how to get the most out of their search,” said Dr. Heckman, of students’ lack of knowledge on search strategies when using the LEOpac.
Designed to be hands-on and more detailed than sessions held for classes, the workshops are more one-on-one and last between an hour and an hour and a half.
A projector is used to display the process as it happens on the instructor’s screen to allow students to learn the process themselves.
