There was some interesting work done at the University of Huddersfield a couple of years ago, which showed that students who used the library the most got the best degrees. I'll leave it up to you to speculate whether this was because those types of students were always going to do well anyway, or because the library helped them improve their grades - but certainly with a lot of the work we do across Information Services we aim to help you get better marks.
In the Academic Liaison Team we serve a few roles. For the students, we want to help you up your grade, or just save you some time (both would be ideal, but let's not get ahead of ourselves). For the staff, we try and be a conduit for information between the department and Information Services, and to keep up an ongoing dialogue around making what we do as relevant as possible to everyone. It's not always easy to understand exactly what Academic Liaison does, so we made a video to try and explain it. If you can spare 1 minute 25 seconds, have a look:
As it says at the end of the video, the Subject Guides homepage has more information. We'll write a blog post about those in more detail soon, but the short version is this: each Department has an Academic Liaison Librarian, often known as an ALL for short, and each ALL prepares a Subject Guide for their Department, detailing the most pertinent and useful information about what we have to help you study. We spend millions of pounds each year on electronic resources so that they're free to you at the point of access, and finding them via our Subject Guides (or YorSearch) ensures you get everything you're entitled to. This is good quality academic information, which Google either can't find at all, or can only find when you're on campus (and even that's because we've already got you through the paywall).
If I'm the Academic Liaison Librarian for your Department, you'll have seen me as part of your Induction, giving a brief talk to outline how the library works and what its benefits are to you. I'll probably have taught at least one workshop on your degree, about finding and accessing information, among other related topics. I may turn up in your Department a few times each term, either to run drop-in sessions or to attend Departmental meetings like Board of Studies. And I may have seen some of you for one-to-one research consultations, where we went into more detail about how to find and evaluate sources for your assignments. You can always email your ALL, either via the addresses on each Subject Guide, or just email lib-enquiry@york.ac.uk and they'll pass your query on to the relevant one of us. We're happy to hear from you, and can schedule an appointment if need be or just talk things over via phone or email.
Our aim is to point you in the right direction to find materials you can cite with confidence – the kinds of things which will get you better grades. We want to help broaden your search if you're not finding enough, or focus it in if you’re bringing back Too Much Information, and help you evaluate what you find. We can show you what to look for in terms of credibility and authority when using sources you've found via Google, or give you alternatives if you'd rather steer clear of search engines. We hope we can save you a bit of time searching, so you can spend more time finding. We can also assist in choosing IT tools for your academic study, and help you organise your references.
If Academic Liaison can make things easier, or quicker, or better, or more comprehensive, we will. So start by visiting the Subject Guide for your Department, and get in touch with us any time you'd like our help.
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