Refworks at the Steacie Library York University

By Laura Walton

June 11, 2009

Struggles

• How to deliver required readings to Masters Distance Education Nursing Students

• They are mature students• Not located on campus, many will not visit campus during

the term• They have often been out of school for a long time• Varying degrees of computer literacy• Working full time

• Distance education nursing students are sent a handout showing them how to look items up in our catalogue

• They work from home, potentially with slower computers and internet

• Peers are contacted by chat• There is little opportunity for personal interaction• We needed to try to make the searching as

simple as possible• While information literacy skills are important the

goal was to get the readings to the students as efficiently as possible

• The syllabus provided by the professor has the readings broken into study areas

• The readings are presented in the course syllabus in proper APA format

• The students had a lot of difficulty navigating the catalogue to find the readings as we sort by title and the syllabus sorts by author in APA format

Our Catalogue

• With refworks I was able to break down the readings into modules and sort it in author order

• A catalogue record for each study module was created

Some courses divide the readings by week, as well as modules

• I created a library catalogue record that was a link to the refworks file (one refworks file for each study module)

• An alternative would have been to link to one refworks file for each course with different folders for each study area, but it was decided to try to reduce the number of clicks needed to get to the information so a different refworks file was created for each module

• All readings were sorted in author order just like in their course syllabus

• With some difficulty I was able to place the link for each article or book on the initial screen

• A properly formatted article reference will not show the link in the first screen

Dilemma

• It was cumbersome to have to open the detailed screen of each article to get a link

• When the link was present, it only went to the journal, not the article

So we bent the rules

• Journal articles were entered as electronic journals so that the links would display on the initial screen in refworks

• Links were created directly to the article, not the journal

Alterations to Refworks

• The goal was to get the articles sorted by module in author order

• Because I had changed the format of the citation to get the links to appear on the initial screen, the articles were no longer in the correct format

• Refworks allowed me to customize my share options so that the students wouldn’t be able to download my citations to create a bibliography

Conclusion

• The method of using a catalogue link to required readings in refworks has been very successful

• Students find it easy to use and it allows the information to be organized in a logical manner