Observing my first B.I. 1/23/2020

Librarians love to use a lot of abbreviations and acronyms, and I was stumped when Dr. Louderback suggested that I sit in on some BI's. B.I. stands for "bibliographic instruction," and it is a big part of the NSU library's services. These are academic sessions for students that are led by librarians, providing detailed instruction in how to use library resources to do academic research and properly cite source material. Professors in various academic departments schedule the B.I.s for their classes, usually at the beginning of a semester or at the start of a large research paper.

I will be working with Karl Siewert in the near future on putting together a recorded version of a B.I., so we thought it would be a good idea for me to observe a few live sessions in action. Karl's formal title at the library is "Instruction Librarian and Subject Librarian for the College of Education."

On Thursday I attended an atypical session - atypical because it was for high school students! Broken Arrow High Schools have a program for Juniors and Seniors to take classes at NSU for college credit. They come to NSU for classes in the morning and return to their high school in the afternoon.

Karl had at least 5 back to back sessions with high school kids that morning! Nevertheless, when I observed his fourth session of the morning, his presentation was energetic and effective. I knew from a previous conversation with him that he was a high school instructor in a previous life before becoming a librarian, and I can say that background worker to his advantage.

A few observations:

1. As students were settling in, he did some pretty impressive tricks on his yo-yo (a side hobby of his). This immediately grabbed the attention of the class and I imagine built a level of trust (e.g. he's not your scary or stuffy Hollywood librarian).
2. Karl had a pretty interesting way of describing his profession. "We are people who have a passion for helping people find answers." He stressed that nothing in the world makes librarians happier than to be asked questions, and how sad it was that so few people ever took the opportunity to do so. 
3. The students were doing a research project on their on an academic program they were interested in pursuing in college, along with one scholarly article on that subject. This was an exercise to get students comfortable with using library resources. Karl guided them through the process of using databases. What could have amounted to herding cats (everyone was researching something unique), turned out to be very smooth. While some students needed more attention to others, everyone had what they needed by the end of the class.
4. The key to such a successful session, as far as I could tell, was how refined and distilled the presentation was. Since he had the kids for 50 minutes, he needed to make a good impression and use his time as effectively as possible. There was no rambling or tangents.

My biggest takeaway in regards to this observation is the importance of brevity, clarity and prior planning that goes into a successful B.I.