Comparing the effectiveness of alternative investigation methods for library environmental evaluation

The use of new technologies and the merging of our libraries have led us to think about marketing our library services. At the same time, Belgian universities in the French Community decided to conduct the LibQual+ survey. We participated in the working group responsible for data analysis of this survey regarding our institution. This gave us an initial assessment of the level of user satisfaction in our library, pointing to general library strengths and weaknesses and highlighting several questions to be investigated further. We searched for alternative evaluation methods that could help us to validate the LibQual+ conclusions and to explore further certain issues regarding different library user groups (students / researchers / clinicians / academic professors). Methodologies for conducting focus groups, semi-structured interviews and participant observations are largely described in the literature. We propose to test and compare these methodologies in order to discover which method is the most appropriate for each type of user and how far these approaches may be complementary. We also want to verify whether these investigation strategies will lead to reproducible conclusions able to support strategic planning for the library. Lastly, we need to decide whether these methods could also be used to measure the impact of future marketing activities. It may be useful to share our working procedures, conclusions and experiences with colleagues involved in similar marketing challenge

Sharing inter-faculty teaching experiences for improved training in information literacy

audience: researcher, professiona

Conservation partagée entre les bibliothèques universitaires de la Communauté française de Belgique - Témoignage, bilan et perspective

Groupe de Travail pour la Conservation Partagée des Périodiques (GT-CPP

A Web-based interactive training for the selfacquisition of information retrieval skills targeting the PBL students

OBJECTIVE: To provide the medical students involved in Problem-Based Learning (PBL) with a remotely accessible training tool for the self acquisition of information retrieval skills. CONTENT: Access to the training tool is made trough a portal Web site. The tool is initiated with a clinical case. A selection of relevant electronic resources such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, textbooks, and bibliographical databases is proposed. Each resource comes with search examples achieved by librarians concerning the subject of the clinical case. Each step of the strategy is described, commented and illustrated with a screen copy of the original resource. To reinforce the realism, users are invited to click on the appropriate areas of the screen copy to progress in the search. A catalogue is created with the documents retrieved from the different resources. The catalogue is searchable independently and provides links to full-text when available. The technical support for the training tool consists of a set of related databases (FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Inc., USA). Data concerning the clinical case, including medical imaging, is contained in a first database. Description of – and links to resources are collected in a second database as well as basic user instructions. For every search example in a specific resource, a database is created from a template, containing all the searched terms and screen copies necessary to provide an interactive demonstration. The catalogue of documents constitutes the last database. The prototype must now be presented to teachers and students and evaluated for quality, performance and user-friendliness. Results will help us to improve the design and content of the training tool