Reference Reaches Out

Over the past few years, the Reference Department has been involved in introducing suburban and CPS high school students to college-level library research. Early this spring, a total of over 150 students from different schools came through the library with their Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate English classes.

Some came to learn how to find literary criticism, book reviews, and biographical information on authors of works they had read in class. Others were preparing to write papers about life in the 1920s, and so reference librarians introduced them to research databases and reference tools to help them find interesting material about social issues, music, politics, and basic everyday life during that era in U.S. history.

There is a growing interest among high school teachers, high school librarians, and college academic librarians in introducing information literacy skills to students, even before they enter their freshman year in college. The students seem to gain a lot from this kind of experience as well. One teacher said that every year her students tell her that their visit to the NU Library is one of the most useful field trips of the whole year... "They were so in awe of the resources available, and they felt that this experience laid important groundwork for them to learn how to use some of the resources in a university library--just what we were hoping for!"

Jeannette Moss
Reference Librarian
(Photos by Jeannette Moss)