FINDING RESOURCES ON THE SHELF: FROM CREATING A HANDOUT TO RETHINKING THE FRESHMAN LIBRARY EXPERIENCE

The first time an undergraduate student heads to the library to retrieve an item can be daunting, due to the mazes of bookshelves and the confusion of locating materials using a mysterious and often confusing alpha-numeric classification system. This task is made all the more complicated for a student who has had little or no experience with a library. At the American University of Sharjah, using a library represents a new experience for most first-year students. As a result it became clear that new students at the University were experiencing great difficulty in finding books on the shelf. Our answer was to create a handout that would boil the process to the most basic visual components of finding information, selecting information and acquiring information. The process of creating this handout necessitated repeated revision, as we found ourselves constantly taking our own experience for granted and expecting students to intuitively know what we knew. In the end our experience led us to investigate new students’ abilities to read and analyze call numbers in the search for finding library materials.