On Slide Shows and Search Strategies

The February 14th blizzard and Carol being out sick on another occasion have kept me away from the Reference Desk and working more on projects.

Up to this point, I’ve been working on slides which run on a plasma screen near the Circulation Desk. The idea of the slide show is to highlight Library resources, services and events (the latter are often campus-wide.) For my President’s Day-themed slides, for example, I created a series of slides featuring print and online resources with information on Presidents, another with suggested subject headings for searching for Presidential information and one more for an exhibit of Presidents’ portraits at the University Art Museum.

I’ve been wondering, however, how much information these should contain to be truly effective (each slide is on the screen for about 5 seconds) and then how is the effectiveness actually determined. Are we expecting patrons to memorize or jot down the resource titles and call numbers on the slides and then go looking for them? It seems unlikely (although we did receive an e-mail which announced that some students had actually been requesting titles they had seen on the slide show.) Generally, I think they’ll serve to create awareness of the existence of resources and services in specific areas. A slide I created with a series of screen shots guiding users on how to access an online biographical encyclopedia was probably too detailed for this medium (unless the Power Point document is made accessible through the website.) I’d like to follow Carol’s suggestion to informally poll patrons by the plasma screen to see if and how they are finding the slides to be useful.

On my time away from the Desk I also attended an orientation on searching in Minerva. Even though I’ve already been through similar versions of this orientation through the internship and classes, I always pick up something new. A useful strategy I made note of this time around was using the Notes field in searches for individual plays and stories included in anthologies as the 500 field oftentimes includes the list of contents. This would have come in handy recently when a student at the Reference Desk was looking for some plays.