Putting Reference Skills to Use is an independent study conducted in your own library. The purpose of this course is to provide you with an opportunity to follow up on FirstSearch and EBSCOhost training with real-life questions from your own patrons. You will use a series of worksheets to judge the effectiveness of four techniques – resources in your own library, the World Wide Web, EBSCOhost, and FirstSearch – for five reference questions.

Print out each of the worksheets, and make 5 copies of each worksheet, so you have a copy for each question.  Use "real life" questions that your customers ask, and complete the worksheets for each question as you go through the process. Choose questions that appropriate to this process; questions such as "What is the population of Canada?" are less useful to this course.  

You may choose to not do all this work while the customer is waiting, as the process can take awhile but you will want to do worksheet 1 while doing the reference interview, and you may do worksheet 2 while the customer is there.  Or, your customer may not even know that you are doing this--until the end when you hand him/her the results and perhaps some of the worksheets which evaluate the resources.

So, for each of five reference questions, you will complete worksheets throughout the reference process, evaluating the specific resource at each step. Click on each of the worksheets below to display the worksheet, then use your browser's "Print" button to print each worksheet.

You may wish to share a few of the completed worksheets with your patrons who asked the questions originally--it's a chance for you to help them understand the searching and evaluation process; information literacy is a critical skill in today's world!

When you have completed the process for all five reference questions, mail the worksheets and attached printouts to Karen Burns at the SWILSA office:

Southwest Iowa Library Service Area
427 E. Kanesville, #404
Council Bluffs, IA 51503