Moffett Library officials are hoping to boost student involvement by offering tours and workshops. The tours are designed to help students learn how to navigate the library, making it easier for them to find what they need, especially during stressful times like midterms and finals.
In the past, the library has only offered two or three library tours per semester. Librarians said attendance was always low, sometimes with no one participating in the tour, and there was an obvious need for a change. This time, the library staff has decided to offer a range of dates and times available to students.
“In past years, we’ve had a one-shot approach,” Allison Breen, reference librarian, said. “We’re now doing some scheduling to try to increase attendance.”
Breen said the library is working to get the word out about the tours and workshops, sending e-mails to professors who then pass the word on to their students, sometimes offering extra credit for participation in the tours. The library staff will also be sending out a mass e-mail to all students with an MSU email address.
“If you’re writing your first big paper, and you didn’t do great on the first paper, maybe you got a C, and you’d like an A on this one, the first lectures will help you a lot,” Breen said. “We’ll tell you how to pick a topic and evaluate sources.”
Ryan Samuelson, information literacy librarian, has already given two library tours this semester and will be giving more in the coming weeks.
“A lot of the time, students are unaware of the services we provide,” Samuelson said. “Not everything is available online. There are still a lot of things students need. We are more than happy to have one-on-one instruction with people. We are more than glad to have people come in here and ask us questions.”
In addition to the tours, the library will offer a series of workshops from Oct. 2- Oct. 31. The workshops will cover three aspects of writing a paper: how to choose resources, avoiding plagiarism, and citing sources.
“Those three things are things that both professors and students have told us the underclassmen need to learn,” Samuelson said.
