The library produces podcast library tours in many languages: Swahili, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Malay, and Portuguese. We are working on one in Arabic now. Students can download these and listen with their own ipod. We also provide an ipod for check-out.
http://www.library.ohiou.edu/podcasts/?page_id=14
International students will be able to learn about the Library before their English language skills are strong.
Students studying those languages will have a listening exercise which will probably also introduce them to facilities and services they didn't know about.
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The Code Game was designed for first year students as a fun way to introduce them to Library facilities and services. First year students especially, but all OU students, were invited to solve a series of nine challenging puzzles about the library and the university. For every correctly completed challenge, they got another chance at the grand prize, $100 in book store gift certificates. Smaller prizes were offered along the way. Each clue was picked up at the Learning Commons desk. The Code Game was challenging enough that we didn't get as many players as we had hoped. 158 students completed the first task and 60 students solved all nine tasks. Altogether, over 1,000 tasks were completed. This year we plan to simplify the game and make it virtual.
http://www.library.ohiou.edu/newstudents/codegame.html
(In general, I think) We regularly survey graduating seniors about Library use, including the Class Librarian Program.
We added a question to the SAILS assessment that we gave to first year students this fall to ask whether the respondents had played the Code Game. We found that those who had played the Code Game did not have significantly higher scores. Since the goals of the game were so much narrower than the competencies measured by SAILS, we decided not to be particularly discouraged by this fact!
We are building a new set of short tutorials to be used in lieu of "live" instruction or to reinforce instruction. These are much shorter in nature than earlier tutorials, none more than three minutes long. We have also created longer tutorials for more advanced databases, and screencasts for some of our more complex business databases.
http://www.library.ohiou.edu/tutorials/
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The Biz Wiki is a collection of business information resources available through Ohio University Libraries. It is designed to assist business OU faculty and students in finding the best resources for their business-related projects or topics. The Biz Wiki contains articles about business reference books, databases, websites, and other research guides. Nearly all of the resources are available to current members of the Ohio University community, as many of the resources are subscription databases or local reference resources. The business librarian also has a meebo widget embedded on the Biz Wiki homepage and his other contact information. The primary target audiences for the Biz Wiki are the faculty and students of Ohio University's School of Business. In actuality, it's also heavily used by librarians at OU and across the country. As of 3/24/08, the homepage of the Biz Wiki had been accessed 100,717 times.
http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki/index.php/Main_Page
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The engineering toolbar is a Mozilla Firefox-specific application that has been developed by OU's Engineering Librarian, Michael Wilson, to make it possible for OU faculty, students and staff to access Alden Library engineering resources without going to the Library's website. (An Internet Explorer toolbar is under development.) The toolbar has two pull-down menus. The first connects to useful library pages such as “My Account”, “Document Delivery and Interlibrary Loan” and the InfoTree resource page for Engineering. The second pull down menu is for databases. There is a chat feature which allows patrons to contact the Engineering Librarian (no chat client is required). There is also a search feature which allows them to search many subject specific databases (Compendex, Inspec, Science Citation Index, etc.). We're piloting the toolbar concept with the Engineering resources. In the future, we may develop a toolbar for general resources and additional subject oriented toolbars. http://www.library.ohiou.edu/toolbars/engineering.html
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