UW Engineering Library Collection

UW Engineering Library Training Tool for New Reference Assistants

In the Fall of 2003, I started working at the UW Engineering Library as a graduate reference assistant. The engineering collection is a notoriously difficult one to learn. My own background is in the Humanities, specifically, Comparative Literature, and I have no field knowledge in engineering. I wanted to be challenged by a difficult collection, because I believed doing so would make me a better professional reference librarian. In addition, I wanted to prove to myself that I can work in different environments as well as gain a stronger understanding of research and information access.

This web site is the start of a project I have committed to for the reference staff at the Engineering Library. It will be the building block to helping new graduate assistants to understand, on a more conceptual level, how information in engineering is organized for better facilitation of information access.

My intention is that this site will be available as at-the-desk supplement to the resources available to assist reference staff in helping patrons. In this version, I have incorporated the reference manual. In the future, I hope to create an index as well as a keyword search capability so that the manual can be a more dynamic tool. I hope to improve the content for this site once I have learned more about the collection in order to make it a better training tool. Hopefully in doing this project, I will learn more about how to construct a web site as well as more about the engineering collection.


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