New Ways to Reach Students

The University of Kentucky Libraries have completely revised the way we do library orientation (part of UK101). Last year, we created an orientation video, "Saving Student Brian," to replace an orientation PowerPoint. It was well-received by students and even recognized by librarians. This year we're launching three new elements to the program:

Question of the Week
Each week students are encouraged to answer the Question of the Week (the first one's a gimme) in order to be eligible for some terrific prize drawings. The first drawing, on September 29, is for 8 GB flash drives. Drawings later in the semester will include a Nintendo DS Lite and a Wii. We're hoping this will be plenty of incentive for students to stick it out and hopefully learn a few things about using library resources in the process.

Passport
To encourage students to visit various library service points across campus, the Passport game requires students to visit five service points in the Young Library and a choice of three branch locations. Students who return a completed Passport by October 30 are eligible for a drawing for a Sony PSP.

Your Research Tool Box
Finally, the biggest project: we moved from our version of the TILT tutorial (FindIT!) which we had been using for several years to a completely new tutorial we created in-house called "Your Research Tool Box." The tutorial consists of four parts:

	Getting Started What's a Research Strategy? print version (pdf)
	Beyond Google InfoKat: The Library Catalog print version (pdf)
	Beyond Google Periodicals Databases print version (pdf)
	Choosing the Winners The Best Information Sources print version (pdf)

The first part of the tutorial is a combination of video and narrated PowerPoint. The other three parts are all PowerPoint with voice-over. I think all four balance information and humor pretty well--it's hard to be funny when talking about your library catalog, but I think our writers succeeded!