Just before spring break, the Blough-Weis library hosted a group of high school students from Mifflin County High School. Ashlie Crosson, a 2011 SU alumna, wanted to give her students a chance to experience firsthand the breadth of resources housed within university libraries.
While some high schools still require students to visit their library for research, other school districts are doing away with research assignments –or worse yet, doing away with the library altogether. As high school libraries change and shrink, fewer and fewer students come to college with a good idea of what role the library can serve in their undergraduate career. Even those that had a library may not realize the vast difference in the amount and type of content between a high school library and a university library. For example, the Mifflin County High School students only had access to a handful of databases through their library, while SU students have access to over 200 databases.
In addition to teaching students about research, they also went upstairs to explore some of the print collections. They spent about half an hour with Special Collections Librarian, Meg Garnett, getting a tour of the Rare Books Room.
By allowing high school students to visit the library before they attend college, it alleviates some of the anxiety they may feel when its time for them to use the library at their college or university. To acclimate this student group, we chose to do three activities with them. All the visiting students were currently working on either literary or rhetorical analyses for their AP English classes, so Rob Sieczkiewicz, Library Director, and Amanda Boyer, First-Year Experience Librarian, spent an hour teaching them some basic research skills that will be helpful when they go to college. They started with an ice breaker, using Mentimeter, to help the students think of keywords. They gave them a few broad topics, like “social media” and “climate change,” and had the students suggest related or narrower terms that fit within these general topics. Then, they demonstrated how to search with keywords in both a general database and a subject specific database, and they discussed how different databases serve different purposes during the research process. After the students got an introduction to library research, they spent time looking for sources that would pertain to their papers for class.
They also spent some time with Tracy Powell, Public Services and Cataloging Librarian, and Brianne Dort, Systems Librarian, learning about Library of Congress call numbers and how to locate books on the shelf. The students even got to race to see how fast they could find a book on the shelf by its call number.
Hopefully, the students left with a better sense of what the library can do for them in college, and hopefully, the workshops and activities helped them realize librarians are eager to help students with their research. Perhaps as high school libraries change, more high schools will seek out local college and university libraries as a great resource for their students.
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