— John Dupuis, Head, Steacie Science and Engineering Library

Most of the literature research skills sessions I do are for large Natural Science classes.  That usually means standing in front of at least 100 students, and occasionally over 300, talking about how to find the scholarly sources that their profs want them to use in their assignments.

When I do these kinds of classes, there are a few things I really like to get across to students:

• To remember what I talked about in terms of the most efficient way to find the materials they need, be it books, ebooks, scholarly articles or historical newspapers
• The impression that these library resources are easy to find once you know where to look
• That I'm there to help them, that I'm approachable and easy to reach

Most of all, I need to get their attention for a few minutes and demonstrate a few key specialized search engines or databases that are relevant for them.

Up until a few years ago, I would create a web page for each course for which I taught a skills session,  and put all the links I needed on that page.  I created the pages with FrontPage and used them as link sheets during my sessions. The links would be to the library catalogue, article databases like IEEE Xplore, Jstor or Canadian Newsstand.  I'd also link to useful tools like RefWorks or the Citation Machine, and include various notes and tips I had given during the session as well as my contact information.

A couple of years ago, inspired by a session at the Ontario Library Association, I tried setting up a Wordpress blog to host the pages.  You can see it in its current incarnation here. Fortunately, it was very easy to import the HTML code from the old Frontpage pages to Wordpress, making the transition painless that first year.

Advantages

The main advantage to using Wordpress is that the page editor is very easy to use.  Wordpress is also very good at search engine optimization — virtually all the pages I've done are in the first few hits in a Google search for the course number.

Check out this one for NATS 1840!  The page I created is the very first hit in Google.

Left: NATS1840 blog

Other tools

I’ve added some other great tools to my blog:

• I can set up Google Analytics on the various pages to see which ones are the most used and how students find the pages.  For example, the various pages have gotten over 11,000 hits since September 2009.  The Natural Science 1840 is the most popular with almost 3000 hits, over 1100 of those coming by students simply Googling.

• I've put an Instant Messaging widget called Meebo on the page. With that widget, I can chat with students while they're visiting my page.  During busy weeks in the term, I'll be involved in several chats with students talking about researching for their course. At the beginning of every session, I demonstrate how Meebo works along with all the students using laptops in the class. They all visit my page and we chat for a couple of minutes to get the class started. It's usually pretty silly and amusing, but it gets their attention and engages them.
• I can use the page to host fairly detailed notes and instructions for RefWorks, the citation management tool that can save students hours preparing their assignments. Probably half of the questions from students via email or on Meebo are about RefWorks.

Overall I've been very pleased with my blogging experiment and I think it shows that blogs have a lot of potential to engage students in the classroom and beyond.

I've written quite a bit more about this project on my blog here and here.