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0098-7913/02$–see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.PII: S0098-7913(02)00168-5

Teaching E-journals: Building a Workshop for an Academic Health Sciences Library

Stewart Brower

Prompted by survey results from users of the University at Buffalo Health SciencesLibrary, the Coordinator of Information Management Education created a work-shop about electronic journals (e-journals). Common reference questions regardingaccessing and using e-journals led to the development of specific course objectives.The workshop focused on the commonly held myths surrounding e-journals, and therecommended methods for accessing journals through the University at Buffalo Li-braries. This article details the process of building the workshop and suggests reasonsand methods for implementing similar instructional opportunities in other libraries.

Serials Review 2002; 28:88–92. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In the spring of 2000, the University at Buffalo HealthSciences Library (UBHSL) conducted a survey of faculty,staff, students, and other library users to determine theirlibrary education and training needs. The Coordinator ofInformation Management Education (IME) developed aquestionnaire that included possible workshop topicsselected from workshops that had been regularly taughtin the past as part of the IME program and also potentialtopics that the instructional librarians had discussedduring a brainstorming session. Respondents wereasked to check the titles of any workshops that inter-ested them.

Questionnaires were then distributed by campus mailto the University at Buffalo health sciences schools. Fivehundred twenty-six questionnaires were distributedamong the faculty and staff of the School of Medicineand Biomedical Sciences, the School of Nursing, theSchool of Pharmacy, the School of Health Related Pro-fessions, and the School of Dental Medicine. Sixty-ninequestionnaires were returned, giving a return rate of 13percent. Additionally, library visitors completed twenty-two questionnaires during polling sessions conducted atthe library entrance. In all, ninety-one questionnaireswere returned.

One of the workshops to elicit a high response ratewas simply titled “E-journals.” The idea for this work-

shop originated at the librarians’ brainstorming sessionand implementation had not yet been developed. Out ofthe ninety-one total respondents, thirty-eight indicatedan interest in such a class (or a little over 41 percent of allrespondents). Of those who selected “E-journals,” eigh-teen respondents were faculty in the schools UBHSLserves, and thirteen were students.

When the instructional librarians met again to discussthe survey results, they realized there was a strong inter-est in having a class that dealt in some meaningful waywith electronic journals (e-journals). What the class shouldinclude—the objectives, content, and instructionalmethods—were primary considerations. In the UBHSLIME program, one instructional librarian typically takesprimary responsibility for the development of a work-shop offering. In this case, the instructional librariansagreed that the Information Management Education Co-ordinator should develop the workshop and teach it inthe fall 2000 and spring 2001 semesters.

Literature Review

A survey of the literature, using the

Library Literatureand Information Science

database

1

and the citation in-dexes through ISI

Web of Science

,

2

uncovered nothingspecific about instructing library patrons in the use ofe-journals. These limited findings suggested that suchworkshops were not typically offered. Some articles,however, did address other elements of the process, in-cluding the role of libraries in user education regardinge-journals.

Brower

is Coordinator, Information Management Education,University at Buffalo Health Sciences Library, Buffalo, NY14214; e-mail: sbrower@buffalo.edu.

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Volume 28, Number 2, 2002 Teaching E-Journals: A Workshop

Even in the early 1990s, as libraries began adoptingInternet technologies, Mary Beth Fecko questioned therole of libraries in promoting awareness of e-journals.

3

Fecko’s questions were mostly technical in nature and in-volved looking at the role of the OPAC, union lists, andequipment needs. She also pointed out that training is-sues for library patrons and staff would affect both in-tellectual and technical access, suggesting that lack ofinstruction could impair usage of e-journals.

Esther Green Bierbaum wrote that training staff in theuse of e-journals was so vital to the profession that itshould be taught in three modes: formal graduate pro-grams, library in-services, and continuing education ses-sions.

4

Green Bierbaum touched on the issues of user ed-ucation and self-sufficiency, but did not address them indetail. Other articles have addressed specific methods forstaff training, including the establishment of experimen-tal e-journals for training purposes, but not methods foreducating library users.

5

Joe Barker suggested that undergraduates, in particu-lar, readily adapt to using e-journals, but he admittedthat the process of finding specific e-journals is inconve-nient and often frustrating for users.

6

Karen Hunter con-siders convenience as a motivator in the use of e-journalsby patrons and believes it should be a primary objec-tive in teaching users the best ways of finding relevante-journals.

7

These articles were of limited help becausethey talked around the issue of user instruction. Further-more, searching other health sciences library Websitesfor potentially similar workshops yielded little. Somehealth sciences libraries, such as Dartmouth, Stanford,and Yale, listed workshops on their Websites that in-cluded full-text resources such as

Harrison’s Online

and

MD Consult

. Very few libraries listed workshops focus-ing on e-journals except as in relation to specific indexingand abstracting (I & A) services or other full-text mate-rials, such as electronic textbooks.

8

The IME Coordina-tor developed the e-journals workshop without the ben-efit of other libraries’ experiences.

Workshop Development and Objectives

Much of the initial development of the “E-journals”workshop stemmed from the reference librarians’ expe-riences in helping users with e-journals. Discussions withthe reference librarians and the IME Coordinator’s per-sonal experiences at the reference desk identified severalquestions that were routinely asked by patrons:

• Why can’t I access this e-journal from home?• Why doesn’t the library subscribe to my favorite

e-journal?• Aren’t e-journals cheaper than print journals?• Aren’t all e-journals free to the public?• How do I find out which e-journals the library

owns?• Why do I need to search bibliographic databases

when I can search the e-journals directly?• Why is this journal not available in this particular

format?

Students, staff, and faculty clearly had questions aboutthe use, selection, costs, distribution models, and formatsof e-journals. These considerations helped in designingcourse objectives to answer these questions and to ad-dress the general myths surrounding e-journals and theiraccess, and the library’s selection and technical imple-mentation of UBHSL electronic subscriptions.

The IME Coordinator also consulted with the library’sHead of Collection Management Services (CMS) regard-ing the course design. The CMS Head provided informa-tion about specific UBHSL policies and procedures in theprocurement and implementation of e-journal subscrip-tions and offered documentation of inflationary journalcosts and their deleterious effect on e-journal selections.In the case of UBHSL, multiple subscription sources canconfuse users trying to find the full text of specific arti-cles. Along with institutional subscriptions to e-journalsdirectly from the publisher through their proprietaryWebsites, the University Libraries also subscribe to sev-eral I & A services that offer partial full text of selectedarticles, as well as aggregators such as Journals@Ovid.The library might have two or three possible full-text pro-viders for a single journal, each with varying degrees of cov-erage and in different formats (HTML, PDF, text as PDF).

UBHSL also has multiple points of access to e-journals.The University Libraries OPAC includes holdings for allUB libraries, including the Health Sciences Library.

9

Searching the catalog may bring up multiple biblio-graphic records for a single title, reflecting multiple loca-tions within the University Libraries’ system. Theserecords also include links to all electronic versions of thejournals, which can be confusing to users. The UBHSLWebsite has an alphabetical listing of over 1,000 selectede-journals.

10

While the list itself is usually very helpfulto patrons who want quick access to their favoritee-journals, it does not indicate which titles are availablein print or the local holdings.

From these discussions with reference librarians andthe CMS department, the IME Coordinator developed aone-hour workshop titled “E-journals.” The workshopconsisted of two sections: a thirty-minute instructionallecture on e-journal policies and procedures specific toUBHSL and a thirty-minute demonstration of the mosteffective techniques for locating and using e-journals.The instructor used Microsoft PowerPoint for the lec-ture.

11

Attendees received handouts of the slides andprinted copies of the UBHSL’s Web page “Tips forSearching for Electronic Journals.”

12

Learning objectives for the workshop were as follows:

1. Students will be exposed to some of the myths sur-rounding e-journals and their costs and capabilities.

2. Students will learn the best methods for locatingUBHSL e-journal subscriptions.

3. Students will learn to look for the common ele-ments that e-journals share, regardless of their for-mat, including table of contents information, ar-chives, and instructions to authors.

4. Students will learn the differences between specificelectronic formats for journal articles and com-pare their strengths and weaknesses.

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Stewart Brower Serials Review

Instructional Process

The IME Coordinator began the workshop with a briefdiscussion of the reasons why users appreciate e-journals,including accessibility, search capabilities, format, andthe perception that e-journals are free. Then participantsexamined some of the realities of e-journals offered byUBHSL, including increased costs, restrictive licensing,and limited archives for most titles. The instructor alsodiscussed some technical issues in accessing e-journals,including user registration, IP address restrictions, andthe lack of consistency between various publishers andtheir e-journal Websites. To help students decide whichformat would best suit their needs, the class was thenshown a slide with a side-by-side comparison of the ad-vantages of print journals and e-journals (Figure 1). Theclass discussed the costs of journals, specific to UBHSL,including the distinction between individual and institu-tional subscription rates, fees for e-journal subscrip-tions, and UBHSL collection policies regarding e-journalsubscriptions.

During the second half of the workshop the instructorfocused on the access to and use of UBHSL e-journal sub-scriptions.

13

Instruction included three distinct forms offull-text content providers: journal publisher or profes-sional society Websites such as ScienceDirect or theAmerican Medical Association, I & A services such asABI/INFORM, InfoTrac

OneFile, and content aggrega-tors such as Journals@Ovid. Demonstrations includedusing the UB OPAC to find both e-journal subscriptionsas well as print journal holdings; locating e-journalsquickly with UBHSL’s alphabetical list; and finding otherjournals on the Web with services such as PubMed Cen-tral,

14

FreeMedicalJournals.com,

15

and the ColoradoAlliance of Research Libraries’ E-Journal Miner.

15

Byexamining individual e-journal Websites in detail, theworkshop participants discovered the common featuresthat e-journals often share, such as tables of contents, ar-chives, search forms, and instructions to authors. Finally,participants compared the advantages of the Web’s na-

tive HTML document format with that of Adobe’s pro-prietary Portable Document Format (PDF).

The workshop was taught four times in fall 2000 andtwice in spring 2001. IME workshop times and dateswere staggered throughout the year to accommodate theschedules of as many of our users as possible. In all, thirtypeople registered for the six free workshops, and twenty-seven attended, for an attendance rate of 90 percent. Ofthe twenty-seven attendees, ten were UB faculty, six wereUB staff members, six were UB students, four were post-doctoral associates, and one was a non-UB guest.

Workshop Evaluations

For the four workshops taught in the fall 2000 semester,the IME Coordinator used a simple form for pre- andpostevaluations of the sessions. The “Before” sectionasked, “What is your personal objective for taking thisclass? What do you hope to learn?” The “After” sectionasked, “Did this class fulfill your personal objective?”Personal objectives for workshop attendees varied sub-stantially. Several attendees mentioned “access” as a keypoint. Other comments included the following goals:

• Obtain more information on how to actually accessand print e-journal holdings;

• Learn what e-journals are available and how to ac-cess them;

• Find resources (journal articles) on the universityWebsite that I can print out from my office/home.

One faculty member wanted to learn a better way toincorporate e-journals into the classroom. Another at-tendee was a self-described “report producer,” who wasabout to convert existing print documents into elec-tronic documents and wanted to see how e-journal pub-lishers set up their Websites as a point of comparison.Another attendee wrote, “E-journals are very new—andcontroversial. I can’t participate in the controversy inthe absence of information. It is that information I hopeto attain.”

The responses to “Did this class fulfill your personalobjective?” were uniformly positive, but a few responsesindicated some areas for improvement. One attendeehoped that the workshop would indicate whether therewere journals for which he or she would no longer needa personal subscription and left the workshop uncer-tain about canceling any personal subscriptions. Thefaculty member who wanted to incorporate e-journalsinto the classroom wrote, “It made me more familiar[with e-journals] to provide help to my students” butdid not indicate any other planned changes to his or herteaching.

In spring 2001, after some minor modifications basedon the above feedback, the standard IME WorkshopEvaluation Form was implemented to determine work-shop effectiveness. All five attendees either “agreed” or“strongly agreed” that the material presented was usefulto them, that they benefited from attending, and thatthey felt greater confidence in using the resources pre-sented during the workshop.

Figure 1. PowerPoint slide gives a side-by-side comparisonof the advantages of each kind of journal format

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Volume 28, Number 2, 2002 Teaching E-Journals: A Workshop

Conclusions and Suggestions

Based on formal and informal feedback, the “E-Journals”workshop at UBHSL was a successful endeavor. Theworkshop was well attended by faculty, staff, and stu-dents. Attendees felt that the workshop met their expec-tations and fulfilled their personal objectives for attend-ing. According to responses on the evaluation forms, thematerial answered the attendees’ questions and gavethem confidence in locating and using the e-journals.This kind of success leads us to ask, “Why don’t more li-braries teach an e-journal workshop?”

Perhaps librarians do not perceive the need for a spe-cific workshop on e-journals. Like Barker, perhaps li-brarians believe that patrons will simply catch on intu-itively or experimentally to the best way to find and usee-journals—that they are already computer savvy. Somelibraries teach users how to find and use e-journalsas part of workshops or classes devoted to full-textresources, including electronic textbooks and other sim-ilar resources, and do not see the need to single oute-journals for independent instruction. The survey ofUBHSL users indicated that there was interest in such aworkshop. The questions that reference librarians rou-tinely answer about e-journals further pointed to thisinformation need. Whether this information is taughtas an independent workshop or integrated into exist-ing curricula would be a matter for each institution todetermine.

Another possible explanation for the lack of formale-journal instruction is that librarians rarely teach “for-mat.” Cognitively, we might see instructing patrons touse e-journals in much the same light as teaching aworkshop on using a VCR or providing on-the-spot in-struction for using a microfilm reader/printer. The as-sumption is that if we lead patrons to the information,they will automatically know how to utilize it. Librar-ians do, in fact, teach format. Most of the time this in-struction takes place at the point of need. If a user ishaving difficulty finding information in a book, a librar-ian explains how to use the index. If a patron cannotload a reader/printer, a librarian will demonstrate itsuse. Teaching format as a part of a regular bibliographicinstruction program may offset some point-of-serviceinstruction.

Some librarians may feel that e-journals are too com-plex to teach effectively. With hundreds of resources of-fering e-journals in multiple formats and from variousaccess points, and with all the technical issues sur-rounding electronic publishing, many librarians mightfind it challenging to condense suitable content into asingle, teachable workshop. Librarians who believethat e-journals are too complex for a single workshopneed to look for the commonalities of e-journals anddemonstrate these to their users. As an example, al-though some publishers might link to “Archives” andothers to “Back Issues” or “Previous Articles,” they areall linking to the same kind of feature—previously pub-lished issues of the journal. The “E-journals” work-shop covered these common features within the hourallotted (Figure 2). By examining the common elements

most e-journals share, rather than focusing on specificlabels used, the workshop aimed to better prepare stu-dents to use journals from many different publishersand aggregators.

Some instructional librarians are unfamiliar with thetechnical and procedural issues surrounding e-journals.These issues often fall under the administration of cata-loging and technical services divisions or systems staffwithin academic libraries. Instructional librarians, incontrast, are usually in public services divisions, such asreference. A workshop like this provides a rare opportu-nity for collaboration within a library. Acquisitions li-brarians, catalogers, or systems librarians could be in-vited to team-teach e-journals. Technical services librarianscan provide additional insights for course objectives thatrelate to bibliographic records, pricing and budget, andcollection development policies. Through a team ap-proach, everyone benefits from a colleague’s area of ex-pertise in an instructional setting.

The “E-journals” workshop taught at UBHSL will con-tinue to evolve. New content providers, access routes,and full-text formats will be added as they are adoptedby our library. A Web page now exists to support theworkshop and has links to all relevant resources and acopy of the PowerPoint presentation.

17

It is hoped thatthis page will serve as a springboard to developing an on-line tutorial. Since the University at Buffalo plans to mi-grate to a new integrated online system in the near future,this workshop content will have to be adjusted to encom-pass any changes resulting from that migration. The IMECoordinator is developing a fifteen-minute presentationthat distills the essential elements from the hour-longworkshop. This condensation will be used as a compo-nent in course-related instructional seminars and otherclasses to help instructional librarians stay current withchanges to e-journals access.

Perhaps other types of libraries will consider addingan e-journal workshop to their course schedules. Evenpatrons who are comfortable using electronic journalscan always learn something new that could make themmore fluent and efficient in their use of these ever-chang-ing resources.

Figure 2. PowerPoint slide lists some features common toe-journals

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Stewart Brower Serials Review

Notes

1. “Library Literature and Information Science,” http://hwwilsonweb.com (30 August 2001).

2. ISI

“

Web of Science,” http://webofscience.com (30 August 2001).

3. Mary Beth Fecko and Linda Langschied, Workshop Leaders; LindaAnn Hulbert, Recorder, “The Impact of Electronic Journals on Tradi-tional Library Services,”

Serials Librarian

21, no. 2/3 (1991): 185–87.

4. Esther Green Bierbaum, “Plugged-in Jell-O: Taught or Caught?”

Serials Librarian

29, no. 3/4 (1996): 89–103.

5. See, for example, A.J. Meadows, Penelope A. Yates Mercer, andDennis McVey, “The Training of Library and Information Staff in theHandling of Online Electronic Journals,”

Journal of Information Sci-ence

23, no. 2 (1997): 163–67.

6. Joseph W. Barker, “Now Which Buttons Do I Press to Make TheseArticles Appear on the Screen? Electronic Journals at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley,”

Serials Review

25, no. 3 (1999): 49–54.

7. Karen Hunter, “Electronic Journal Publishing: Observations fromInside,”

D-Lib Magazine

July/Aug 1998 edition, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/07.hunter.html (11 July 2001).

8. After the workshop was already developed and taught, two similarworkshops were found being offered by the Memorial University ofNewfoundland Health Sciences Library titled “Electronic Journals—Making Sense and Making Contact” and “Keeping Up to Date withElectronic Journals.” Notes for these classes are available on theirWebsite at http://www.med.mun.ca/hsl/guides.htm (20 February 2002).

9. Libraries Web Advisory Team, “Catalog—University at Buffalo Li-braries,” University at Buffalo, October 10, 2001, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/bison/ (22 October 2001).

10. Tom Pirrung, “Electronic Journal Collection,” University at Buf-falo Health Sciences Library, October 19, 2001, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/hsl/coll/ejour.html (22 October 2001).

11. Stewart Brower, “E-Journals Workshop,”

University at BuffaloHealth Sciences Library, August 26, 2001 http://ublib.buffalo.edu/hsl/ime/ejournals/index.htm (1 September 2001).

12. Heather Munger, “Tips for Searching for Electronic Journals,”University at Buffalo Health Sciences Library, May 2000, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/hsl/coll/tips.html (9 August 2001).

13. Cindy Hepfer, “Journals—Health Sciences Library, UB Libraries,”University at Buffalo Health Sciences Library, May 22, 2001, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/hsl/coll/journ.html (26 August 2001).

14. National Center for Biotechnology Information, “Pubmed Cen-tral Home,” National Library of Medicine, October 19, 2001, http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/ (22 October 2001).

15. Flying Publisher, “Free Medical Journals Site,”

2001, http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/ (22 October 2001).

16. Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, “Electronic JournalMiner,” Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, 2001, http://ejournal.coalliance.org/ (22 October 2001).

17. Brower, “E-Journals Workshop.”