Embedded Files
Spring 2014
Spring 2014
Simmons GSLIS West
Simmons GSLIS West
Instructor: Eric Poulin
Final Grade: A
Course Description: Covers reference services, searching, and sources. Introduces reference concepts and services, such as the reference interview, customer service, evaluating the reference collection, management, ethics, reference philosophy, service in different institutional settings and for diverse populations, and the assessment of reference services. Students learn how to search in digital and print sources, including full text information retrieval in subscription services and the freely available web. Students become familiar with over two hundred core, fundamental print and digital sources.
Reflection
Reflection
At the time I took this course, I had different intentions for the course of my career. I planned to move, at some point, from working as a reference librarian in a public library to a position in a community college. I knew that I wanted to move into the field of education, but I thought at the time that I would prefer working with older students. I was not on the school library "track" at Simmons. As a result, my coursework in this course focused on resources and aspects of librarianship that have been somewhat less useful in my day to day work as an elementary school librarian.
That being said, I practiced and refined questioning skills in this course that I use all the time. Getting to the core of an information need, whether it is a student looking for a book to read or a teacher looking for resources for a unit they are designing, is a key skill in librarianship. We acted out reference interviews during this course, and not only participating in the questioning but observing others and critiquing their performance was a powerful experience.
This course also provided an opportunity to explore and compare a wide variety of different catalogs and sources. This was important, as in my professional experience I had only had reason to use a limited set of catalogs and sources. I still use WorldCat on a regular basis when I need more information for a resource I'm cataloging or to locate a particular book or article. This experience also made the transition between one library work environment and another simpler---managing a new catalog was less of a learning curve as I had spent significant time exploring a wide variety of them. I use the skills I built looking at print reference sources with much less frequency. In fact, I have weeded much of the reference book collection at my school library because it is simply not being used. Outside of practicing core skills in using a dictionary, thesaurus, atlas, and encyclopedia (and we do this one with an online encyclopedia now!), students don't need to use print reference sources anymore---they need to learn to find reliable information online.
Work Samples
Work Samples
This paper is an interview with a librarian whose job I aspired to at the time I was taking this course. It was interesting to get a peek inside her day to day work, and to refine my understanding of what the work constituted. Had I continued to live and work in the area, she also would have been an important professional contact.
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