Final Blog Relections

One of my goals in blogging about my experiences on the reference desk at Woodward was to use the blog as a way of reflecting on my experiences and revisiting interesting and/or challenging questions to get as much benefit as possible from my experience.

Another course I am taking uses the content-performance matrix (pictured below) to distinguish among the five levels of content and two levels of performance. The matrix was created to help trainers develop materials that focus on the application level, rather than the remember level.

Much of what happens at the reference desk falls into the category of “perform a procedure” and “solve a problem/make an inference”. This has application to both the learning I’ve been doing in LIBR 534 and the training we do as librarians, both formally in instructional classes, and informally when patrons ask us questions. The aim is to produce searchers who can not only remember what we teach them, but actually apply it when faced with a reference problem that is different from the practice examples we have used in instruction.



Working on the reference desk this term has provided weekly review lessons in applying the various concepts, processes, procedures, and principles we’ve studied.

Interdisciplinary Questions

Some of more interesting questions at Woodward come from students who are writing essays for mandatory English courses. Often these are referrals from Koerner because they are to do with medical topics. The focus is generally non-technical, as they're writing for a general audience, although they need to use articles from refereed journals. Recently, I had a student looking for articles on the psychological effects of second-hand smoke. This sounded relatively straightforward, but most of the articles we found in PsycInfo were about the psychological effects of quitting smoking and PubMed returned articles about the physiological effects of second-hand smoke.

Google Scholar was most useful this search (as it often is in these cases) and after some digging we found a study done in the UK where they used a Likert scale to evaluate the feelings of study participants who were exposed to side-stream smoke.

More catalogue quirks

I had one of those teeth-grinding encounters with the online catalogue today. A patron came and asked if we have the Journal of the Entomological Society of British Columbia. I typed the title in from the abbreviation she gave me, but got no hits (not an uncommon occurrence). I went to Google and found the home page of the Entomological Society of British Columbia, copied the journal title and pasted it into the Journal/Ejournal box. Still nothing came up.

Finally, I did a keyword search using the journal title and up it popped. Why didn’t it show up under a journal title search? It had been catalogued --
Title: Journal [Now why didn’t I think of that?]
Author: Entomological Society of British Columbia

Just for fun I went back and searched for “Journal” under Journal/Ejournals. It returned 3,801 hits – not the most productive way of finding what you’re looking for. However, had I searched with “Entomological Society of British Columbia” as the author, I would have found what I was after.

Cataloguing a journal with its parent institution as author seems somewhat opaque, especially if you don’t also catalogue it under its full title as a journal. I tried searching for the Canadian Medical Association Journal by listing the CMA as author. It came up, but was record 111/118.

Antibacterial Resistance

I had a young woman ask for information on the antibacterial resistance of organic substances, specifically against e-coli and staphylococcus. When I asked from which discipline she was approaching the question, she said she was a high school student working on a science project comparing the antibacterial effect of garlic oil, tea tree oil, and olive oil.

I didn’t feel I did a particularly good job drawing out exactly what she was looking for. When we searched PubMed looking for antibacterial resistance of organic substances, the results were drug-related (not surprising given the source). I did find an article that looked at the direct her to the reference section on traditional medicines, which I know has resources that cover garlic, tea tree, and olive oils.

I went back over the search after, but suspect the reason I wasn’t able to find anything particularly useful was that the term “organic substances” is too general. Had I pressed her to give me a specific organic substance that she was looking for, we might have made better progress.

Any suggestions?

Collection Development

I had a patron come by today and suggest that Woodward purchase Primary Care: Balancing Health Needs, Services, and Technology by Barbara Starfield. The patron said she is a heavily published author and seemed disappointed that we had only two copies of her book.

I was tempted to quiz her and find out what her academic background was and why she was recommending it, but as I don’t have any say in the purchasing decision it seemed rather presumptuous. I did pass on the information to the librarian who is responsible for primary care. I looked up Starfield’s books we do have and one was published by Oxford University Press, the other by Johns Hopkins, so she would appear to be a reliable author.

This raised the question of how much the health science librarians rely on suggestions from patrons for collection development. Dean and Greg, how many books would you say you purchase a year based on patron recommendation?

Cluster B Diagnosis

While on the reference desk the other day, I had a phone call from someone who identified himself as a professor in the psychiatry department. He was looking for information on a patient with Cluster B diagnosis, something he had never heard of. He recommended I look in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also known as, DSM-IV-TR. I took his phone number (he didn’t have an e-mail address) and told him I would call him when I found the information. I found the book, but had to Google “cluster B” to find out that it referred to anti-social personality disorder. I was able to find the information he wanted, but was unable to contact him from the reference desk because it was long distance.

Fortunately the library was not busy and I was able to catch a “real” librarian who was able to call him long distance from her office phone. He wanted her to dictate the 4 pages of the diagnosis over the phone. She declined, and in the process discovered he was not affiliated with UBC. The solution to his problem turned out to be having him contact the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia Library, which will mail out reference information to physician members.

It was a good introduction to DSM-IV-TR (I realize we mentioned it briefly in class a few weeks ago) and reminder of the reference services offered to members of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia.

Boy are you ever dumb!

I had one of those moments where I say to myself “boy are you ever dumb” (referring to myself, not a patron) today. Saturday I was working on the reference desk and got a phone call from a student who was having trouble accessing the full text on EBM Reviews. He was clicking on the UBC E-link button and not getting anything. I tried it and encountered the same difficulty, but came up with what I thought was a brilliant workaround – go through Google Scholar (the influence of my mentor, no doubt!).

I mentioned this to a classmate, Bill, who said, “Don’t you just click on the EBM Topic Review link?”

The only mystery is how I accessed EBM Reviews for our expert searching assignment . . .