sept09b2.indd C&RL News September 2009 456 The original Assignment Calculator from the University of Minnesota is a free open-source tool which helps students man- age time and organize the steps of a research project.1 It provides a schedule and timeline for each step, and includes tips and outside links to more information. The head of in- struction and outreach services in the Henry Madden Library recognized the value of this popular tool, but felt we could expand on its potential for students and faculty here at California State University-Fresno. We accomplished this by tailoring it to our own library and campus resources, staff and services, thus making it more appropriate to the needs of our students. The Assignment Research Calculator (ARC)2 highlights library services in the context of the research and writing process, providing both students and faculty with a better understanding of the library’s role in information literacy. It helps students navigate through the steps in writing term papers, developing speeches, or working on other assignments requiring research, while aiding faculty in determining due dates in a syllabus or assigning deadlines for portions of a project. It can allow librar- ians and faculty to collaborate, resulting in more opportunity to advance the library’s information literacy initiatives. With a better understanding of the research and writing process, students are better prepared to participate in the community of scholars in higher education. Creating our own ARC We drew on our years of professional experi- ence working with students as reference and instruction librarians to begin assessing what we wanted to cover. The head of instruc- tion and outreach ser- vices had taught Uni- versity 1 (a First-Year Experience course) several times, and had an additional perspec- tive on the needs of these students, such as improving skills in time management, un- derstanding university life, researching infor- mation, and writing. Every campus has a unique student body, and we looked carefully at demographic information about the students at our campus, including data such as ethnicity, retention and graduation rates, fi rst-generation status, income, full-/ part-time status, in order to have a better understanding of who we are reaching with Monica Fusich, Jane Magee, Elisabeth A. Thomas Assignment Research Calculator Designing and implementing a customized product to reach your students Monica Fusich is head of instruction and outreach services at California State University-Fresno, e-mail: monicaf@scufresno. edu, Jane Magee is reference and instruction librarian at California State University-Fresno, e-mail: jmagee@csufresno. edu, Elisabeth A. Thomas is research assistant/outreach librarian at San Jose State University, e-mail: elisabeth.thomas@sjsu.edu © 2009 Monica Fusich, Jane Magee, Elisabeth A. Thomas The Henry Madden Library’s Assignment Re- search Calculator. September 2009 457 C&RL News our instruction and how it might relate to cur- rent campus issues or goals.3 We also were aware that students want to use resources at times convenient to them, not necessarily during the traditional refer- ence desk or faculty offi ce hours. A tool such as the ARC is available 24/7, in a format that is useful and appealing to them. The open source code of the original Assignment Calculator creates a timeline based on dates the user provides. Each step in this timeline provides links to a variety of Web sites created by different colleges and universities. Instead of simply using that open source shell, the ARC team molded the framework into a customized product that would be more meaningful for our own students and faculty. We did this by adapting the original tool, reducing and reworking the original steps to make them more meaningful to our students, writing our own content for each of the steps, and using screenshots and links for our own databases, Web sites, and resources. We incor- porated more focus on the writing process in connection with the research students need to do for a paper or project, and provided lots of information on additional help through links to the reference desk, chat service, individual appointments with librarian subject liaisons, and to other campus services. Connecting with information literacy competency standards “Information literacy is the set of skills needed to fi nd, retrieve, analyze and use information.”4 We decided early on that these skills, as defi ned in detail in the “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,”5 would be used as the framework for building the most useful content for our students. We began our research process by investigating what others had done with online assignment calculators, but did not fi nd much adaptation from the original open source tool. So we expanded our research to other forms of library tutorials, instruc- tion modules, and interactive learning units that covered the concepts and competencies we wanted to include. We reviewed and evaluated a great deal of online material in order to get a clear idea of what was being written for college students in the areas of library instruction and writing. The material consulted during this evaluation is listed in a bibliography on our ARC Web site.6 We discussed this material at length and decided on what we felt were the most valu- able instructional concepts for our students to learn from this tool. We reworked and renamed our steps based on these concepts, reduced the number from 12 to 10, composed our own content, and ultimately synched each step to the information literacy com- petency standards. By creating an outline of the standards, performance indicators and outcomes, and matching these directly with one or more ARC steps, we ensured that the ARC as a whole refl ected all of these widely accepted standards. This same outline helped us in writing the content of the steps them- selves, and enabled us to be sure that every competency was included in an appropriate section of the ARC. A quote from the “Use of the Standards” section of the “Information Literacy Compe- tency Standards for Higher Education” on the ACRL Web site illustrates the value of building the ARC the way we did. “The competen- cies presented here outline the process by which faculty, librarians and others pinpoint specifi c indicators that identify a student as information literate. Students also will fi nd the competencies useful, because they provide students with a framework for gaining control over how they interact with information in their environment.”7 An example of how we matched a stan- dard with part of a step comes from Step 6, “Find, Review and Evaluate Web Sources.” The standard and outcomes: Competency Standard Two: The infor- mation literate student accesses needed information effectively and effi ciently. Performance Indicator 1: The information literate student selects the most appropriate investigative methods or information retrieval systems for accessing the needed information. C&RL News September 2009 458 Outcomes include: 2.1.c. Investigates the scope, content, and organization of informa- tion retrieval systems (step 4, 5, 6). • Identifi es the differences between freely available Internet search tools and subscrip- tion or fee-based databases (step 5, 6). Our step: Search Directories vs. Search Engines. A search directory provides subject access to the Web. Use a search directory when you want an organized approach to sites arranged by main topic and subtopic. In addition to commercial subject directories such as Yahoo, there are many academic and professional directories that will save you time in the research process. These directories are cre- ated by experts in the fi eld, and link to Web pages that have already been evaluated and selected for that directory. In many cases there are annotations, evaluations and de- tailed descriptions. Search engines. A Web search engine pro- vides a keyword approach to fi nding informa- tion. You can search by keywords just like in the library catalog or library subscription databases. The most popular search engine is Google, of course. But there are others with different types of search interfaces that you may fi nd interesting. Open source and technical issues In order to make the process of customizing the ARC more productive and effi cient, it is important to have a representative from IT or a librarian with IT knowledge as part of the team. Downloading the open source code for the Assignment Calculator is just the fi rst step. An individual with intermediate knowledge of PHP script and CSS is needed to generate the ARC and to calculate the time percentages allotted for the completion of each step. And if the ARC includes an e- mail reminder feature for each step, scripting experience is also benefi cial. The team should also have access to a portion of the server in order to make timely corrections, updates, and adaptations when necessary. Promoting ARC and assessing use Our ARC has been promoted through demonstrations by instruction librarians in classes, prominent placement on the library homepage, inclusion in many subject and course-specifi c LibGuides, orientations to new faculty, and through ads in the student newspaper. We keep monthly statistics by unique visi- tors, number of visits, page hits, and hits by step. Our data show how heavily the ARC has been used since it was implemented, with highest use in March and May correspond- ing to midterms and the end of the semester (see graph 1). One interesting fi nding was that the steps that deal predominantly with the writing pro- cess (including citing of sources) showed a high number of hits compared to the steps dealing with research (see graph 2). We will continue to monitor these fi ndings and use the information to update and improve the ARC. We have also created a survey, located on both the landing page and the fi nal page of the tool, asking for demographic information as well as feedback on the usefulness of the ARC. We are currently in the process of adding an assessment tool to the fi nal step, to be e-mailed to each user, which will give us additional informa- tion on how the ARC helped in the entire research process. Screenshot from ARC. September 2009 459 C&RL News A work in progress The ARC requires some routine maintenance, such as checking for broken or outdated links, replacing screenshots of databases and Web sites when necessary, and adding alternative text to describe images and mul- timedia for compliance with your own Web accessibility guidelines. Usage statistics and assessment results must be compiled, main- tained, and evalu- ated. Publicity and promotion should be ongoing. Creat- ing a unique ARC for your campus is initially very time- consuming, but defi nitely worth it in the long run. It has been a reward- ing and really fun experience, and has given us an op- portunity to refl ect on who our students are, what they need, and what we do as profes- sionals. We continue to receive very positive reactions from campus administration, faculty, and, of course, the students. Future plans We hope to create another research calculator aimed at master’s and doctoral students, in which we will go into more depth with con- tent of interest to the graduate student. This will address topics such as doing a literature review, using a bib- liographic manage- ment system, such as EndNote, and focusing on a more scholarly writing process. Another poten- tial project for the future is to create course- or subject- specific ARCs in order to showcase resources and data- bases in particular areas, and to address discipline-specific research and writing issues. Comments from students and faculty in- dicate that some users would like to see the information found within each step of the ARC be made available separately from the calculator tool. We are currently “unbundling” the steps so the content can be more easily incorporated into other tutorials, learning modules, faculty syllabi or assignments, and BlackBoard or other course management systems. Conclusion Anecdotal evidence from students in classes and at the reference desk indicates that they are impressed initially by the timetable/re- minder features of the ARC, but later discover and appreciate the wealth of information (continues on page 468) Graph 1. Hits to the ARC by month. Graph 2. Hits to the ARC by step. C&RL News September 2009 468 inclusive, librarians going through the next review cycle will now be able to choose between Adobe Acrobat or LibGuides. It seems that the discussion of which elec- tronic “container” is used for the portfolios has kindled a more complex conversation about the content of the portfolios. Many questions have been raised both in the survey responses and in other faculty discussions: How should evidence and nar- rative be linked? Should there be a standard template or specifi c stylistic guidelines to follow? What evidence should be narrated or compiled into a bulleted list? and What relationship do the portfolios have to the librarians’ annual activity reports? Although the librarians seek answers to these questions, there is a hesitancy to develop guidelines, which may restrict the creativity expressed in the portfolios; as a group, the librarians struggle to fi nd a bal- ance between standardization and creative freedom. However, articulated guidelines might provide the necessary structure to help make this process less work intensive. For now, librarians who are more com- fortable with a narrative format will likely choose Adobe Acrobat, while those librar- ians more conversant with principles of in- formation architecture may gravitate toward using LibGuides. In some sense, the library is still standing at a crossroads with an eye in either direction. found in each step. Our provost, library dean, Development Offi ce, and other staff frequently promote the ARC to the campus and local community. We feel the ARC has helped to foster awareness of the library and our many services to students, and we hope to be able to document this in the future through our feedback and assessment measures. Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without funding from a CSU Information Lit- eracy grant awarded to Monica Fusich from the California State University Chancellor’s Offi ce, CSU Fresno Foundation Grant Agree- ment no. 60040, and the technical expertise of Anish Dutta, graduate IT student, Instruction and Outreach Services Department. Notes 1. Sourceforge.net, “Assignment Calcula- tor,” sourceforge.net/projects/assign-calc/ (accessed July 28, 2009). 2. The Assignment Research Calculator, csufresno.edu/library/ARC2/index.php (ac- cessed July 28, 2009). 3. California State University-Fresno, Insti- tutional Research, Assessment, and Planning, “IRAP Data and Research,” www.csufresno. edu/irap/data/index.shtml (accessed July 28, 2009). 4. ACRL, “Introduction to Information Literacy,” www.pla.org/ala/mgrps/divs /acrl/issues/infolit/overview/intro/index. cfm. 5. ACRL, “Information Literacy Com- petency Standards for Higher Educa- tion,” www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl /standards/informationliteracycompetency. cfm. 6. About the ARC, csufresno.edu/library/ ARC2/about_us.shtml. 7. ACRL, “Information Literacy Com- petency Standards for Higher Education, Use of the Standards,” www.ala.org/ ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/ALA_print _layout_1_185693_185693.cfm#useofst. (“Assignment Research Calculator” continues from page 459) . . . there is a hesitancy to develop guidelines, which may restrict the creativity expressed in the portfolios; as a group, the librarians struggle to fi nd a balance between standardization and creative freedom.