Although I often had issues explaining our business news collection, the Newsrack addressed a broader problem in our collections. The project was also not just about business news. Our underlying aims were to simplify student’s information retrieval process, focus by selecting from a smaller pool of resources, and search process by limiting search techniques: browsing a title by issue or keyword, or searching a query across fewer titles, titles they had to appraise on the Newsrack before selecting to browse. Doing so also enabled alternative search techniques such as searching by title or by issue. We valued granularity because we sought to introduce students to journals, articles, and databases in a different light. The design layout consisted of separate pages, divided by subject, comprising news titles. We used the LibGuides platform from Springshare because it is easily integrated into our content management system. The Virtual Newsrack began with surveys to faculty, patrons, and librarians about commonly used news resources. Regarding the first example, teaching a student to search the Wall Street Journal in our database tab undercut my “using the library is easy” pitch, and searching specific titles such as Fortune or Bloomberg in a database like Business Source Complete was beyond the literacy level of lower instruction. Furthermore, news does not always follow logical naming conventions: The Wall Street Journal is a newspaper, Businessweek is a weekly magazine and also a daily website, and The Economist can spark a conversation but The American Economist cannot. Moreover, most e-journals are hosted in the same databases or publishers, which makes the look almost identical to the untrained student. Because of the disparate nature of our WorldCat Discovery, which parsed some news into databases and some into e-journals, there were not any succinct nor comprehensive ways to teach the resources. The idea for the Virtual Newsrack came from the difficulty we had incorporating news resources into instruction sessions. What is a newsrack? Back in the day, in order to buy a newspaper, you would walk up to one of these contraptions, put in physical coins, and grab a physical paper. We called it “The Virtual Newsrack,” imagined as a digital counterpart to the newsstands that sit in library reading rooms. Unwittingly on the eve of the pandemic, we rolled out a project that simplified access to our university’s digital news collection. With that in mind, a colleague and I sought to make news more accessible in our library. Most Americans still think libraries can help them “find information that is trustworthy and reliable.” That opinion is significantly stronger for younger generations. Librarians are at a unique nexus between a useful yet underused resource and an audience in need of information. While that data is higher for “online-only news sites,” it is fair to assume students do not understand the value news has to the research process, and a lack of understanding of the information landscape regarding business news. The “born digital” generation has almost no newspaper literacy, a February 2022 poll found 45% of Age 18-34 respondents “never” use newspapers, with only 40% responding some form of monthly usage. Moreover, the news landscape changed tremendously in most of our students’ lifetimes.
However, patrons face significant hurdles navigating the news landscape, and chief among them can be our library websites. The news has so many useful applications for information literacy and instruction in business. While we may share news resources with each other–I’ve favorited all the links on Angel’s “Business Media I Consume” –it is not always easy to succinctly explain the value of our library catalogs’ news offerings to business students. Teddy loves baseball, random facts, and begging his 1972 MGB to survive his commute.
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His professional interests include instruction and student information search process within business subjects. Before moving west, Teddy was an active member of the Capital Area Business Academic Librarians Group (CABAL), serving as executive Vice-Chair.
He is a UNC SILS alumnus and previously worked at Salisbury University in Maryland. Teddy Stocking is a Business Librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno.
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