In these strapped budgetary times, we all need to do as much as we can to reduce costs across the board. Thankfully, some of our cost-cutting measures can also enhance our pedagogy and enrich our assignments. All of us enjoy asking our students to read arguments that we find interesting models of rhetorical strategies and style. Frequently, however, we wind up asking students to read these texts in class. When we do so, we wind up doing two things: photocopying the texts before class and taking up class time with reading. We're strapped for time, have limited access to campus, come from hither and yon to teach, so our time before the copy machine is precious planning time. I also know that many of us also feel that we couldn't get students to do the reading if they didn't do it in front of us. I've designed this web page to encourage you to try a different set of strategies. If you use the resources that the library has available to you, and ask students to read the materials before class, you can use that reading time in class more effectively. Although you'll transfer the copying cost to the student (and probably in the end to the college via library printing), the department's budget won't feel the strain of the copying.
The library has two main resources that you can draw from: library reserves and full-text databases. The library offers a number of guides for faculty and offers a great deal of faculty support, both through reserves and through their subject area specialists. You can place copies of essays you've culled from books in reserve in the library. Students can access them physically by going into the library and checking them out for short periods of time (up to one day--I recommend two-hour reserves, however). Students may also access them electronically in Portable Document Format (supported by Adobe). PDFs are readable on any platform (PC, Mac, Unix) as long as the user has the appropriate reader, which arrives preloaded on most machines or is available for free from Adobe.
When your student access the reserves catalog, they will come to this page:
Once they select the link "Materials on Reserve," they'll come to a set of drop down menus where they can search for your course number or for your name.
Once they select an individual title, they will see the bibliographic entry, which will tell them if it's been scanned and is available online as a PDF.
Then, they just click the link to see the file. If you would like to put texts on reserve, please contact Dina Carmy in the library and make arrangements to do so. You will have to plan ahead a little bit, but it is worth it.
If the essay you want students to read was printed in a journal or a newspaper, the library may already have access to an electronic copy. If you want your students to read a newspaper article from, say, three months ago, you can probably ask them to take a look at through Lexis-Nexis, one of the full-text databases to which the library subscribes. The reference librarians have produced a very handy index of journals and newspapers that you can access through different library avenues (physical and electronic). Check it before you try to put an essay on reserve.
Lexis-Nexis compiles articles from newspapers worldwide, so it is an amazing resource for you to use. You can ask students to access it directly to retrieve an article (which gives them excellent practice on a narrow research task), or you can access the article yourself, email it to yourself, and save a copy of it within your SOCS resources. You can also forward the article to all of your students as an attachment within SOCS. One shortcoming of Lexis-Nexis is that it does not assign unique accession numbers to texts, so you have to search using keywords, publication dates, and publications.
EBSCOHost has the advantage of unique accession numbers. In many of my courses, I require students to read full-text essays stored in EBSCOHost. I includ the Accession Number (the unique cataloging number) for essays students access through EBSCOHost to facilitate their searches on the syllabus. EBSCOHost uses Boolean logic in its search protocols, so you can't just type in an author's name "Felicia Steele" and hope to retrieve anything. You would have to type in the authors name as it appears in the record--"Steele, Felicia"--or as with a Boolean operator "Felicia AND Steele."
To search the database using the Accession Number, open the database through the library's website. Open the "Academic Search Premiere" unit. When you get to the major search screen, select "Advanced Search" from the top tabs.
Now, students can type in the Accession Number that appears on the syllabus with each reading and select "Accession Number" as the search field, as below:
The article will then appear and students can download it, email it to themselves, or read it online.
Project Muse doesn't have an Accession Number cataloging system. Their catalog works more like a traditional library catalog. You can either place the "stable link" that Project Muse offers you on the syllabus (students can only access this successfully on campus or through TCNJ dialup), or you can ask students to search under the author's name or keywords from the title of the essay.
Before you photocopy an essay that you want students to read, find out if they can access it through one of the many databases that the college already offers. You may also discover that you can direct students to essays in current online publications, such as the New York Times Online. Remember as well that students have access to thousands of newspapers through the college's library. Ask students to read them before the come to class and then model active reading strategies for them once they're there. You can use that time in class to demonstrate to them the importance of annotation, note-taking, and other techniques that they should learn.