Knowledge of sources helpful? Really?

Happy New Year in the library. Although students are back on campus, it remains very quiet.

This afternoon I was struck by a statement in an article called "Librarians as Partners" in the newsletter The Teaching Professor.

"...librarians can provide feedback about how the students did their research and what issues they might have come up against, such as not enough books available on the topic given the number of students interested in it, or, if students all worked on different topics, whether some of those topics were harder than others when it came to locating relevant resources."

It reminds me a bit of a few years ago I emailed a professor about resources. All of the students in the class were researching the same topic and they had been told by the instructor that all of their resources for a lengthy research paper must have been published within the past five years. While I approve of current resources, I find that actual published research in any discipline rarely has all articles published in the past five years. There is very nearly a seminal report that is sometimes nearly fifteen to twenty years since its publication. I have seen them as old as 30 years old.

In this particular case, the key journal for this topic was one we didn't own, and one that had to be interlibrary loaned for students. Interlibrary Loan, of course, allows only five articles per library published within the past five years for any one journal. The sixth article requires copyright clearance fees to be paid. This meant that for the sixth student who ordered from this journal, the article would cost them $15 - $20. While there were other journals that had articles on this topic, this journal was clearly the key journal to be used.

I shared this information with the professor and never received a reply. I don't know if they found it useful and took it into account when grading bibliographies, or whether they simply didn't care one way or the other. I also didn't hear about the five year policy being relaxed - because, and as I explained to the professor, articles older than five years could be ordered without any copyright compliance needing to be paid. So, was it useful information? Or irrelevant? I really don't know. I do know that once the five articles that had been ordered were ordered that it was more difficult for the students that came after to find information.


So yes, I'm happy to share information. But it's always nice to know it's helpful.