Shonn Haren
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Item Sustainable Assessment: Using Google Forms for Library Instruction(2015-06-29) Haren, Shonn; Mallon, Melissa N.Instruction librarians, especially in the social sciences, are often called upon to teach research sessions to large groups of students. Planning what to teach in these sessions can be overwhelming, but designing a method of assessing student learning over multiple class sections can feel next to impossible. This poster will illustrate how Google Forms can be utilized in library instruction as an effective tool for engaging students and assessing learning in an efficient and sustainable manner. The presenters will share an assessment instrument developed at their institution, along with two semesters worth of data to demonstrate how Google Forms can provide instruction librarians with a time saving, versatile and sustainable tool that combines ease of result analysis with a high level of student accessibility. The presentation will also cover benefits and concerns regarding this online tool, and touch on best practices for using Google Forms for student assessment. The poster will include screenshot examples of an online form used for assessment, and the spreadsheet results it generates. The poster will also include a series of graphs generated from the results to illustrate the ease and quality of data analysis available with this tool. Finally, the presenters will utilize tablet computers to demonstrate the form in action.Item Textual Portraits: Using Word Clouds as an Analysis Tool for Digitized Texts(2015-02-28) Haren, ShonnDigital collections of textual material have become rich repositories for primary source materials. However, dense collections of digitized text can prove daunting to patrons seeking to access and analyze the documents contained within them. This presentation will discuss how word clouds may be used as an effective tool to allow students or patrons to compare and analyze digitized texts. Word clouds are a form of data visualization performed on free text, in which the structure of a document is broken down, and a "cloud" of the words contained in the document is generated wherein the size of the words in the cloud is determined by the frequency of their appearance within the original document. This presentation will provide an explanation of word clouds, demonstrating how to generate a word cloud utilizing Wordle, a freely available online word cloud generator. This presentation will also discuss how word clouds generated from key texts in a digital collection may be utilized for promotional purposes, in order to illustrate or draw patron's attention to particular a particular document or documents within a collection. Finally, using a variety of examples, this presentation will demonstrate how word clouds may be used to assist patrons and students in analyzing and comparing digitized texts or bodies of texts, in order to both facilitate discussion and encourage further exploration of digital collections by students or patrons.Item Collection Mapping and Data Visualization as tools for Collection Development and Collection Assessment(2014-07-16) Haren, Shonn; Neugebauer, Rhonda