Finding Your Way around the Engineering Literature: Developing an Online Tutorial Series for Engineering Students

The typical graduate student in engineering or computer science excels at learning technical skills, but has had little exposure to library resources in his or her undergraduate program. Sometime in the first year of graduate school, most students are asked to do a literature search for a class, or are beginning to look at prior work as they decide on a focus for their thesis, dissertation, or Master‟s project. At that point, they realize that they will not be able to find everything they need with their current set of Web-searching tools and skills. Engineering librarians are challenged to engage with these new students at just the right time. Properly marketed, online tutorials may provide part of the solution. This paper explores how the author used citation analysis and discussions with faculty, students, and colleagues to design a set of tutorials that teach graduate students both how to find what they need, and why they need it in the first place. Introduction Unlike their counterparts in the liberal arts, engineering students rarely have the opportunity to read journal articles and conference papers in their field during their undergraduate years, much less synthesize and build on them to create new information. On their first day of graduate school, most students do not yet know to what extent they will need information found only through the library and its subscriptions. Science and engineering librarians generally agree that the only realistic goal of in-person orientation sessions is to let new students know they have a librarian, and that person is here to help them. They will need to know much more, but they most likely do not realize it yet. Clearly, graduate students need ongoing instruction in what types of literature are available in their fields, why they might use items of each type, and how to find appropriate materials within those types. Online instruction provides a way to inform and guide students when they need it. Not only do graduate students prefer online instruction for its time efficiency 1 , but also a number of studies have shown that students learn just as much (and in some cases more) by completing an online module as attending in-person workshop 2,3 . In October of 2009, the author participated in a month-long online ACRL training course, Instructional Design for Online Teaching and Learning. The outcome of that course was a design for the central module of a tutorial, produced using the ADDIE instructional design model (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate). 4 The design was refined enough to begin talking to other librarians and faculty about it, but remained just an idea. In December 2010, a six-week professional development leave provided the time necessary to produce a working prototype and to develop the technical expertise necessary to complete the project. Groundwork: What do students need to know? Every August, science and engineering librarians at the University of Minnesota are asked to give presentations at orientations for new graduate students in their assigned departments. Time given varies: Last August, one department allotted 20 minutes, another asked for one hour with P ge 22714.3 the subject librarian and another hour with the university‟s copyright librarian, and a third dropped library orientation from the schedule entirely. Providing new graduate students with a consistent introduction to all the library has to offer is, in short, difficult. New graduate students typically have some familiarity with what a librarian might call secondary literature. Mildren 5 divides engineering literature into primary and secondary categories. Mildren‟s secondary literature list, proposed in 1976, includes: Handbooks and manuals Trade journals and catalogs Standards Abstracting and indexing journals