Poster Sessions, 4:30-5:30 pm
Involving Reluctant Patrons in Web Use and Development
Leroy D. Smith
Humanities Liaison Librarian
Tutt Library, The Colorado College
Robin Satterwhite
Social Sciences Liaison Librarian
Tutt Library, The Colorado College
Susan Brown
Interdisciplinary Librarian
Tutt Library, The Colorado College
For the past two years, librarians at Colorado College have been involved
in attempts to engage library patrons (students, college staff, and
faculty) with the World Wide Web. Initial efforts were directed at
involving them as users of the web; more recent efforts have been made to
involve them as contributors and producers of the college's own home
pages. In many cases (particularly with regard to some of the faculty),
we found a rather difficult audience, either because people were leary of
the technology and what it had to offer or simply because of their
different learning styles.
As a result of our experiences, we've developed a number of approaches,
techniques, and tools useful in engaging reluctant users on a variety of
levels and in varying degrees of depth. These include:
- simple one hour sessions introducing users to GUI browsers
- more advanced sessions introducing users to text-based browsers,
available search engines and hierarchical directories useful for locating
information
- weeklong courses in incorporating Internet skills in general library
research
- "quick and dirty" resource page workshops where, in 90 minutes,
participants learn to convert a Netscape or Mosaic bookmark into a home
page to annotated links related to a particular topic
