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Serving Native Communities
Submitted by Liana Juliano, Native Libraries Round Table Chair
Twenty participants gathered for an eight week online course, Information Services for Tribal Communities, presented by InfoPeople. The InfoPeople Project is supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. The course was created to give information professionals working in tribal communities in- depth reference knowledge. An added bonus for all participants was a free core reference collection provided by the California State Library.
The first and last meetings were in person and held on the Pala Reservation in north San Diego County. In the first meeting, Holly Tomren, class instructor, discussed what reference is and gave an overview of the reference interview. Then Ms. Tomren went through the books that were provided to the libraries one by one and explained how to use them. The free core collection included an encyclopedia set, almanac, dictionary, medical reference books, legal reference books, and career books. Over half of the collection consisted of Native American resources which Ms. Tomren created by conferring with several experts in the field.
During the online portion of the class, students had weekly reading assignments and exercises. Topics included ready reference, types of reference materials, evaluating resources, and library organization and cataloging. Students had the opportunity to post messages to the instructor and other students which gave them a great chance to network with each other. At the end of the course, Ms. Tomren posted several self-paced modules on business, genealogy, consumer information, and legal information to further supplement the student's reference knowledge.
The final classroom session was an excellent workshop on consumer health resources taught by Bette Anton. The session was adapted from the InfoPeople workshop Prescription for Success: Consumer Health Information on the Web provided by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Southwest Region, UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library and funded by the National Library of Medicine.
The workshop taught participants how to use Medline Plus to find reliable health information, how to evaluate consumer health web sites, how to locate health resources for Californians, and provided an overview of the collaborative databases of the National Library of Medicine.
The consumer health resources workshop was a big hit. One participant said, "the information is easier to find than the patron thinks," and another felt that she had "learned how to evaluate web sites." All the participants said that they would be taking the information they learned back to their communities and sharing it with colleagues
Posted on June 7, 2006 12:37 PM | Permalink