One of the challenges of the Library staff is identifying the best way to help our patrons understand how our finding tools work. Do we offer instruction in the classroom, or do we offer stand alone training sessions? Do we schedule them during lunch, at night, on Saturday? It's an important question because the power and capability of an online system or other research tools are irrelevant if no one knows how to access their capabilities.
Instruction is particularly helpful when accessing the collection in the Instructional Resource Center. Did you know you can search for curriculum by age level and scripture passage? You can limit your media search to only DVDs, eliminating all videos. You can search for everything that the IRC has - in any format - and eliminate all the books in the stacks from your search results. There is so much that you can do in our online catalog to find appropriate resources for your teaching and study, but they are not readily apparent when you're dealing with the IRC.
I encourage you all to attend a training session this fall, and if you need help before then, please use Paula's very helpful tutorials - in print or video format!
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