Developing a Course Page
There are many forms of reference work, of varying degrees of media richness: synchronous forms of reference (e.g., face-to-face, telephone, chat / IM, etc.) tend to be richer than asynchronous forms (e.g., email, paper mail, etc.). All of these forms of reference, however, require some form of interaction between the user and the librarian, even if that interaction is at a physical and/or temporal remove. These forms of reference are referred to as direct reference. Indirect reference is an equally important form of reference, however, and involves no interaction at all between the user and the librarian. Indirect reference involves the proactive creation of information resources by librarians for users' use, either with a librarian's assistance or by self-serving. For this assignment, you will produce one specific type of tool for indirect reference: a course page.
The librarians in the UNC Libraries Instructional Services department develop Course Pages for individual courses, upon the request of the course instructor. These Course Pages are tailored to the course content and assignments, and the students' information needs in the course. Course Pages are aimed at students at a range of levels, and each one contains types of resources most appropriate for the subject matter of the course. Course Pages currently exist for a range of academic departments and topics; see the page of Course Pages on the library's website for examples of existing Pages. Creating Course Pages is still a fairly new offering from Instructional Services, so existing Pages are still mostly for high-enrollment courses; the ultimate goal, however, is to create Pages for every course at the university with a research component.
This assignment has two parts: the Course Page, and a report.
You will create a Course Page for a specific course. Early in the semester I will present you with a list of courses for which Instructional Services needs to create a Course Page, and you will choose which you want to work on. You will work in groups of 2 (± 1, depending on class enrollment). Your group will work directly with the Instructional Services librarian who has primarily responsibility for your Course Page; you will not work with the faculty member for whom the Page is being created unless the librarian recommends that you do so. Your group will make collection development decisions about the categories of resources, and the specific resources in those categories, to include in your Course Page. Your first deliverable for this assignment will be a final draft of a Course Page that is ready to go live on the library's website: your deliverable is a draft because your librarian contact must make a final approval of your work before it goes live.
The Instructional Services department has a template for Course Pages, so you do not need to learn HTML to do this assignment. That said, I believe that every information professional today should have some proficiency with scripting and programming languages for the web. However, that is way beyond the scope of a Reference course, and there are other courses in the SILS curriculum that cover those topics.
It is of utmost importance that all of the information provided in any of these bibliographic products is correct. Check all references and links that you include. Of course links rot constantly: your links must be accurate up to the date when you submit your subject guide assignment, after that all bets are off.
Your Course Page will reflect a great deal of work and many selection choices that are not evident in your final product. To provide a better indication of your work on this project and your decision making criteria and strategies, you will write a report in which you explain and justify your selection and rejection criteria, your organization of the Course Page, and your choices of materials and categories of materials. Indicate why you have chosen particular sources over others, and discuss the process you went through in compiling these sources. Of course, you need not discuss every single item you rejected if this is a very large number or if you included everything you found due to a scarcity of material. In most cases, however, you will want to discuss three to four significant sources that you rejected in favor of other items. In short, this report should take a conceptual approach to explaining the logic of the Course Page, illustrated with examples. Your second deliverable for this assignment will be this report. This report will be separate from the Course Page, and written for my benefit. That is, the Course Page should be constructed with the course instructor and students in mind, but the report should be written with the intention that only I, and not library users, will see it.
You are being given this assignment well in advance so that you can plan your time flexibly. It is always best to start on this work early. You will need to review materials in order to make collection development decisions, and this can be time-consuming. Also, your workload in many of your classes (including this one) will increase as the semester goes on, so plan accordingly. Please feel free to discuss your project with me at any time. I welcome drafts and will be happy to give feedback on them. Also consult with your Instructional Services librarian contact.
Your deliverables for this assignment are (1) a Course Page, and (2) a report detailing your creation of your Course Page. To submit this assignment, you will: (1) post a link to your Course Page in the Course Pages discussion board forum, and (2) submit your report in the Course Page Report Drop Box by the date specified in the Schedule.
Grading
The Course Page assignment is worth 20 points. Your Course Page and report will be evaluated together: that is, it's 20 points total for the report and Course Page as a unit, not 10 for each.
There are 3 sources of criteria that I will use in evaluating your work on the course page:
Not all of the evaluation criteria from the library literature will be appropriate for evaluating Course Pages, so I will select the appropriate criteria, and evaluate your work according to those. Feel free to suggest which criteria you think are most appropriate, and why, illustrated with examples, in your report. There is inevitably going to be a bit of subjectivity in grading this assignment, since some of it is based on other people's satisfaction with your work, but I will keep that level of subjectivity to a minimum.