New Students will participate in orientation with their school. Contact your school directly for the dates and times.
Re-entering students, students needing a refresher, or new faculty and staff can either view the orientation video asychronously or reach out to a reference librarian with specific questions and an overview.
Orientation to the Library
The reference librarians have developed three types of orientation sessions for Fall 2022. We are also happy to develop something different in collaboration with instructors and/or administrators. Please note that all sessions will be online.
Contact us together at library@gtu.edu or individually at:
- Naw San KD : nkd@gtu.edu - Primary contact for Berkeley Member Schools
- Stephanie Miller : samiller@gtu.edu - Primary contact for Redlands (SFTS campus)
Three Styles of Orientation
Synchronous Orientation: Live, face-to-face introduction (in zoom, or a platform of your choice). This session is similar to previous orientations, where a librarian talks to students about: contacting librarians, logging in, the guides and tutorials, accessing ebooks and articles via Summon, searching tips, specific databases relevant to their program, and accessing print resources, including using Interlibrary loan and our scanning services. A preview of Zotero is included for writing intensive programs. The students will also have time for questions. Generally this session is 45 minutes- 1 hour long.
Asynchronous orientation: This is pre-recorded video that can be linked in Moodle or emailed to students. It would includes the material covered in the live session, except for students do not have the opportunity to ask questions. One option is to create a moodle forum, and have the librarian added as an instructor, so they can participate in any forum questions about the library and research. You can also track who views the video through Moodle. The link to the video will be posted here in mid-August.
Flipped Orientation: This has been popular recently, and is the orientation recommended by the librarians. Before the session, the students are assigned the pre-recorded video and watch it on their own time. Then, the students meet with one of the librarians live in zoom and have an open Q & A session. It’s an excellent option for students who haven’t used a library for a long time (because they can re-watch videos) and good for those who are already expert researchers (they can skip ahead), with the benefit of having a real live librarian to talk to them and clarify anything later. As the status and services of the library may be changing, this also gives students to hear any updates or about new databases we may have aquired. Generally the live portion of this session is 15-20 minutes, but could be longer to cover additional information specific for your students.
More opportunities for learning
Faculty: we are happy to work with your class to create additional videos or live in-class sessions. Some of the topics we can bring to your classroom include: plagarism, annotated bibliographies, biblical exegesis, content evaluation, and finding peer-reviewed articles. We also recommend building in library instruction with a major course assignment. Share the assignment with us and we will work with you to craft instruction to support student success. Contact library@gtu.edu for more information.
Workshops: we will be offering live synchronous workshops in zoom, as well as recording some of our most popular workshops. Please encourage your students to attend.
New Faculty or Staff?
In addition to the orientation video above, we would be happy to meet on zoom with your new faculty and staff to talk about in-class instruction, course reserves, and other library services. Contact us at library@gtu.edu to set up an appointment. Please let us know if you are physically in the Bay Area and will be using the library both in person and online, or if you are fully-remote person, and will only be using the electronic resources.