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Guest commentary .....How
the Library Works for Me As we faculty scramble to put together our course plans, we (at least the less organized ones, such as myself) sometimes reinvent the wheel or fall short of the specificity that might be ideal in articulating our expectations to our students. I am increasingly finding Parkland Library to be a great resource where so much of what we want our students to know and to access is already centralized and available for us. For instance, in recently surveying faculty (in my capacity as General Education Academic Assessments chair) about the extent to which they teach students to evaluate their sources (especially the most convenient of sources for our students, the online ones), I realized how under-utilized Parkland’s research tools and source evaluation information are. By clicking on Subject/Course Guides at the Parkland Library site, and then clicking on Evaluating Your Sources, we find a good, concise (one-page) set of tips for evaluating sources. Faculty are welcome to print this out and include it in our course packets—I think it is relevant to and would benefit most courses at Parkland to have this automatically included in our course packets. There may also be many faculty who have not browsed through Parkland’s Articles and Databases. The Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (reached through the "Articles and Databases") could probably make many faculty’s lives easier, as the site contains an exhaustive list of issues that faculty teach about and often ask their students to do extra research on. My sense is that in our information age, Parkland Library will increasingly serve as a repository for much of what we faculty wish to be transmitted to and available to our students. Their classroom/lab (R-227), the librarians, access and technical services staff, their book and video collections (ever-expanding, as we faculty make our requests), their links to a wealth of other sites and resources, and the information (such as the source evaluation page) that is available to us for use in our classes and as handouts, are all top quality. Seth Mendelowitz is a faculty member of the English and Critical Studies Department.
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