The Library Course Page and Instruction: Perceived Helpfulness and Use among Students

Research guides can be divided largely into guides on particular subjects—subject guides—and guides tailored to the specific needs of courses—course pages. Recent studies indicate that online research guides are generally not helpful to college students unless the guides are linked to a course, either by being a course page or by being accompanied by an instruction session with the librarian. In this article, we report the findings of a study where students in a medium–sized (25 student), upper–division business course were asked about the helpfulness of a course page, the helpfulness of the librarian's accompanying instruction session, and how much they used the page. The student survey used mostly Likert scale questions. The study also reports on the course page's link traffic. Our results confirm earlier findings that a course page used in conjunction with librarian instruction is an effective tool to enhance student research. There were no control groups, and all respondents received both course page and instruction session. Seventy–one percent of the respondents indicated that the course page helpfulness ranged between “somewhat” and “very helpful,” and less than 10% of respondents said that they would not recommend a course page to other classes. Link traffic results indicate that neither a business subject guide nor a legal subject guide would have been as helpful to the respondents. These results support the argument that course pages should be preferred to subject guides when feasible.