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In fall 2005, Olivet Nazarene University was looking for a bonding activity for the library’s research assistants (RAs), who served as student liaisons with various academic departments. Enter ebrary’s Academic Complete, a new, multidisciplinary subscription database the library wanted to promote to the entire campus. “Librarians were pretty excited about ebrary,” said Instructional Services Librarian Jasmine Cieszynski. “We wanted to make sure that students, faculty and staff were aware they now had access to authoritative content in all academic subject areas, at any time, from any computer with Internet access.” After months of discussion on how to best promote ebrary, the six RAs unleashed their plan in February. RAs set up laptops at a table in the student union building during lunch and dinner for three days. They invited students to enter a raffle for one of three ebrary T-shirts (modeled by RAs at the table) or $5 added to their TigerDollar card, which could be used at laundry rooms, the bookstore, and other facilities around campus. In order to enter the raffle, each student had to conduct a search in ebrary. The RAs purposely refrained from preparing canned search terms. “The idea was to pick any search you wanted,” said Cieszynski. “We challenge you to challenge ebrary.” Most students chose to search on topics within their majors. They were especially excited about the ability to copy and paste selected text into Microsoft Word with automatic citations and URL hyperlinks back to the source. The result: Despite wireless Internet failure one day, over 100 students participated in the challenge, according to Public Services Librarian Diane Fox. “The statistics and the usage definitely went up.” The positive effects extended beyond the end of the promotion. RAs reported that they and their peers use ebrary for a variety of projects, and librarians fielded more requests from students about how to access ebrary from public terminals. In addition to student outreach, librarians and RAs also attended College and School meetings to demonstrate ebrary to faculty. These training sessions covered such topics as searching, creating a personal bookshelf, highlighting text, and copying and pasting text with automatic citations. As a result, professors began instructing their students to check ebrary when conducting scholarly research. The library also added records for ebrary titles onto their Voyager online catalog in March. For Cieszynski and Fox, the promotion was well worth the effort. “People now still know about ebrary,” said Cieszynski. “The key is that Academic Complete is cross-disciplinary.” “ebrary was our first attempt at campus-wide promotion,” said Fox. “We would very much like to do something similar in the future.” To read the case study on the Olivet Nazarene University website, please click here.
Olivet Nazarene University added MARC records for ebrary titles to their online catalog, Voyager. Each record contains a live link to the e-book and authenticates users through the EZProxy server. |
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