Journeying to the IL Land of Confusion; or "Hey! Why Didn't I Know About This Tutorial?"

Here beginneth my travelogue recounting today's journey to the Information Literacy Land of Confusion.

In Lorenzen's latest posting, he discusses an article about Kutztown University's information literacy online tutorial and discusses the tutorial at Central Michigan University. Both the KU tutorial and the CMU tutorial are based on Western Michigan University's open source SearchPath tutorial program.

Curious, I went to CMU's tutorial and went through the first several modules (at least, until I got bored). I then read Flatley and Jefferson's article on KU's experience with the tutorial, which basically concluded that students thought the tutorial was very informative and useful, but also very long and dry.

"Wow!" I thought. "This is a good idea. We should have one of these tutorials on our Web site!"

Which is when, after a little bit of digging, I discovered that we actually do have a tutorial on our Web site. And not just "a" tutorial, but "the" SearchPath tutorial.

So why didn't I know this tutorial?

Could it be because freshman are shown this tutorial at orientation or UGE 1000, but transfer / graduate students are not? Possibly (but, I'll have to look into this point more thoroughly).

Could it be because the link to our tutorial is well hidden within the depths of the library's Web site? Oh yeah.

To get to the tutorial, from the home page one must go to the library services page and follow several links. Alternately, one can click "For Students" link (which is cleverly hidden below the picture on the right-hand side of the page), and then the "getting started tutorial" link. To me, this seems a little excessive.

If I, who spends a lot of time on the library's Web site, somehow missed our online tutorial, I suspect many others are missing the tutorial as well.

This is a shame, because while KU's surveyed students found the tutorial a little long and boring, they also reported that they better understood the difference between types of resources and how to best search for information in these resources.

While many of the patrons who come to the desk don't seem all that interested in learning the finer points of searching the catalog and databases, a few do and I would have directed them to the tutorial had I known it existed.

Thus, I would suggest that the tutorial needs to be more prominent. On the library's Home page. With the text "How to Find Stuff in the Library." In big red letters. Possibly with arrows pointing to it. And an audio clip of applause when you mouse over the link.

Since the tutorial is a set of six modules, I also think it would be a good idea to advertise the modules on relevant pages on the Web site. For example, the library could put a link to Module #4, "Finding Articles," on the Articles and Databases page. Or even better, the library could put a link to the module smack dab next to the "Finding Articles and Databases" text on the library's home page.

The library has placed a link to the library tutorial page on the library catalog's search page (at the bottom), but the text reads "Need more help? Try Searchpath." I would argue that the text should be more specific, such as "How to find stuff in the library catalog," and that it should directly link to that module.

Why do I think the library should go to the trouble of posting these extra links to the IL tutorial? First, it's not obvious from the start that there even is a tutorial. Second, even if they knew there was a tutorial, people are basically lazy (myself included) and may not go to the trouble of searching through the library's site to find it.

Well, them's my two cents. Here endeth my travelogue of today's journey into the Information Literacy Land of Confusion.

****Extra Special Bonus Observation****
When I ran Blogger's SpellCheck feature, why did it want to replace "beginneth" with "paginate"? And if SpellCheck has a problem with "beginneth", shouldn't it also, by association, have a problem with "endeth"?