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Science at Hampshire College:Helaine Selin BA, MA aa Science Librarian, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, 01022Published online: 18 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Helaine Selin BA, MA (1992) Science at Hampshire College:, Science &Technology Libraries, 12:3, 11-22, DOI: 10.1300/J122v12n03_03

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Science at Hampshire College: . Graduate Level Research

in an Undergraduate Setting Helaine Selin

Monday morning, September 27th, 8:30 am. I head down to basement room B5, roll out the terminal, LAN box, and Electrohome projector, and connect them to the appropriate cables and boxes. By some miracle, when I log on and give everything a Iry, it all works. I rearrange the chairs, pick up some stray candy wrappers and empty coffee cups and head back upstairs to await Ule class.

9:00. A group of about 25 slightly bleary eyed students, one of whom is drinking something green and slimy out of a Mason jar, makes its way into Lhe classroom. They like the room, because last year we had some trouble with the ceiling tiles and someone decided to leave the works exposed, giving the space a rallier post-modem, industrial look. The pro- fessor too trails in, and they slump into their seats. I introduce myself to this group of f i s t year students in a class called The World Food Crisis and tell them I'm going to spcnd an hour and a half giving them a semes- ter's course on research methods.

10:OO. The class is progressing nicely. Somehow, I've m'anaged to hold their interest and convey to (some of) them the process of research, Lhe world of scholarship, and their roles in both of those. I've explained some of our library's resources, somc available elsewhere in the area, and some available to them through various technologies. I've dcmonstrated Ule OPAC catalog, DIALOG searches and CD-ROMs, and given Ihcm a chance to have me experiment with their own research topics.

Helaine Selin is Science Librarian, Hampshire College. Amherst, MA 01022. She earned her Bachelor's Degree from SUNY Bingllamton and her Master's Degree from SUNY Albany. During 1992 she is exchanging jobs with the Science Librarian at Ule University of Exetcr, England.

O 1992 by The ~aworlh Press, Inc. All rights resewcd. I I Dow

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12 Science Librarianslrip ar Anrerica's Liberal Arts Colleges

10:30. I put Uie room back in order, unplug b a t which has been plugged, chat with the few who were interested enough to want to look at some of the books I had with me, and hope most of the students have understood most of what I've tried to convey. After Ulis, they head out into the library world, lrying to find primary sources that inform their occasionally bizarre ideas.

At Hampshire College, small group instruction in the acquisition m d use of the scientific literature is part of the science curriculum for almost all entering students. The professors in lhe School of Natural Science are for the most part very supportive of Ule instruction program, as they know that it shifts some of Uie teaching burden from them and results in higher quality research from heir students. In this paper, I would like to describe the science program at Hampshire College and the role of the library in that program. I will do that by f i s t describing Hampshire and the place of science in this small liberal arts college. Then I will discuss the place the library has UI h e development and sustaining of Ule science program.

Hampshire College is a four year liberal arts college of about 1200 studcnts located in a former apple orchard in the beautiful rolling counlry- side of Western Massachusctts. The idea for Hampshire originated in 1958 when Lhe presidcnts of four neighboring New England colleges-Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts-appointed a committee to reexa!nine liberal arts education and perhaps offer an alter- nalivc to the type of education offered at heir inslilulions. In 1965, with the help of a large donation from an knherst College alumnus and the Ford Foundation, the New College Plan was enacted, and in 1970 Hamp- shire admitted its first students. Now 21 and in its majority, Hampshire is still committed to most of the educational tenets that were part of its founding. The most basic of these is Ulat a meaningful and lasting educa- tion is shaped by lhc student's own intcresls. Education is not something that is imposed, but a process lhat cacli student initiates and actively pur- sues. Hampshire studcnts cngage in substantial independent research and creative work in addition to taking courses, and enhance their academic experience with internships and studies in the field.

TO encourage multi-disciplinary work, Hampshire has replaced single subject dcparhnents wiUl four broad based schools: Communications and Cognitive Science, Humanities and Arts, Natural Science and Social Sci- ence. This flexible structure permits a great richness and variety of aca- demic activity. Faculty members from different schools frequently Leach together, and cross-School programs are common. This enables students to approach problems and answer questions from several points of view, without the limitations of departmental boundaries.

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Helaine Selin 13

The School of Natural Science provides a broad range of courses in biology, zoology, physics, chemistry, geology, mathematics and biochem- istry. Studies in lhese traditional disciplines form the basis for multi-disci- plinary explorations in areas of interest in contemporary science, such as women's biology, environmental concerns, and problems in the health and agricultural sciences. The natural science faculty believes that science is best learned by carrying out substantial, significant work in the laboratory or in the field. Student-initiated projects are part of many introductory science courses, and this emphasis continues lhroughout a student's career. During their last two years at Hampshire, many science students spend at least one semester off campus working in a research lab, at a clinic or a field station, or in some other form of internship. As a consequence, Hamp-- shire's graduates have both theoretical knowledge and practical experi- ence. The faculty also have a commitment to teaching science within a larger historical and social framework. Course work in science and public policy, a senior seminar on women and science, or an internship with an environmental action group are considered valuable activities in the pro- cess of becoming a responsible and creative scientist.

Students working in the natural sciences engage in a variety of activi- 1ies:'field and laboratory projects, scminars, interest groups, and lectures. There are courses for students who are excited by science and ready to plunge into their subject and courses for students who are skeptical about the value of science or their ability to do scientific work.

Courses at the introductory level develop the ideas and skills necessary to explore interesting questions in science. Through extensive laboratory work and/or field projects combined with reading primary literature under the close supervision and support of the inslructors, students get a good sense of what lhe scienlific enterprise is about.

Science is taught at Hampshire using what is known as the inquiry method of teaching. The philosophy behind this conccpt is that every discipline has its own mode of inquiry, and that any student engaged in work in that field ought to learn the mode of inquiry. That is, a student writing on psychology ought to learn to ask the questions psychologists ask. A photography student should learn to bring the critical eye of the photographer to his or her work. And someone doing a science paper should develop the analytical skills of the scientist. Analysis? Criticism?

' Who ever heard of these thiigs as an undergraduate, not to mention a first year student? This is a long way from "compare and contrast." This is asking students to choose a topic of their own, use the library resources to find articles on theirtopic in the scholarly literature, and then read the literature with a critical eye, when they may not even know the words in

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14 Science Libraria~rrkiy at America's Liberal Arts Colleges

the article. Inquiry in the classroom also means that the professors don't know the answers to the experiments they propose. They don't set up an experiment, as they've done a hundred times before, with a clear idea of what they want the student to discover. Instead, they propose ideas in the same way they expect Uieir students to: let's see what happens if we do this, etc. Doing Uiis makes life much less dull for the teachers, and begins the process of making colleagues out of Uieir students. "The research experience-inquiry-should be a part of any undergraduate science course. While there are many ways to involve students in research, two ingredi- ents are essential. First, the research must be genuine. If the teacher knows 'the answer,' Uie excitement for both is, quite understandably, gone. Second, Uie students and Uie professor must work together in devel- oping, attacking, and analyzing a question."' The aim of this kind of teaching is not to i~npress students with how much the teachers know, but eventually to create intellectual equals.

I think it is clear from Uiis description that science students at Hamp- shire College-and that means essentially all students, since each student must do a project in each of Ule four Schools-are asked from the begin- ning to do the kind of scientific work U~at most undergraduates don't participate in until Uieir senior year, if at all. They are asked to use their powers of reason and observation to apply critical thinking to Uie ideas Uley devise. They follow these ideas experimentally, and they look to Lhe scientific literature for verification.

This is not always an easy process. I think that the possibilities for extreme fonns of frustration are rampant. The first area of fruslration lies in Uie formation of Uie question, or topic. All librarians have war stories of people asking for articles on biology when in fact they are looking for something to tell them if they are pregnant. We probably have as many stories of students interested in, and only in, Uie effects of high fiber diets on college age ballet dancers, and who reject the articles they find on modern dancers as being irrelevant.

The second area of potential sorrow comes when students can't find articles on their subjects, even if Ule topic is neither too broad nor too narrow. Many true beliefs of college students are not necessarily support- ed in Uie scholarly literature. It may be obvious to the budding researcher that the lunar cycle affects Uie menstrual cycle, or that sugar causes de- pression, or that foods planted at certain times of day are more likely to h i v e . But it is also true Ulat papers 011 Uiose subjects don't necessarily contribute to the tenure cl~ances of a young faculty member, who would be better off pursuing chemical compositions of plants, or drug effects on the rnenslrual cycle.

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And the third painful possibility comes when a student has narrowed a topic to the correct size, identified several perfect articles, and finds them unavailable or in languages Uley don't read. Surely many of us in small college libraries encounter this often. Here at Hampshire, we are part of a Five-College Consortium that includes our original parents (now siblings), one of which is the University of Massachusetls, a large re- search library. Our students have direct borrowing privileges at all of the other libraries, and there is a free bus that lravels among Uic collegcs every 20 minutes or so from 7 am to midnight. So access is not the prob- lem it might be in other places. Still, there are medical journals that are only available at the medical school of the University of Massachuselts, which is at Worcester, an hour away. And of course there are journals that are not available in Ule state at all. Even though we assure students Uiat we can get these journals, they have (you may have noticed) a habit of needing things sooner than we can get Uiem. So my job as Science Librar- ian, besides teaching students how to idcntify and acquire scientific litera- ture, often includes stress management.

At this point, I'd like to describe my job and Uie role that I play, in the library and in Uie School of Natural Science.

There is a librarian for each of Hampshire's four interdisciplinary schools. As Science Librarian, I 'am responsible for collection develop- ment in Ule sciences, for reference and bibliographic searching, and for guiding sludents, wilh classes and work wilh individuals, through the research process.

The library has been very forlunate in having always had collection development in l l ~ e hands of the librarians. This may partly bc a function of poverty-we never had Uie abundance to divide a significant amount among the facully. We have a clearly defined mission: to support intro- ductory level courses. Thesc tend lo be very specific, since their purpose is to introduce not just Ule subjcct, but also the mode of inquiry of that discipline. This year, for example. 100 level courses included Pcsticidc Alternatives, Optics and Holography, Nutritional Anthropology, The World Food Crisis, and The Science of Disarmament. You may noticc the absence of Physics 101 or Biology 101. The pedagogic philosophy behind this arrangement is that studcnts, by working in a specific field, learn the way that researchers in Uiat field work, and can creatc projecls and engage in the literature of that discipline. (In the second year, we offer more general classes-Organic Chemistry, etc.)

We have dcpcndcd upon the university for supplying Uie arcane and Ule overly expensive, a id on the othcr Uuec collegcs for filling in on standard undergraduate science books. So our task is a challenging one. For one

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16 Science Librariatrrhip at America's Liberal Arts Colleges

thiig, the curriculum changes every year. This means I can't rely on old favorites to keep the collection relevant. I have to scour the scientific literature and not depend on standard library reviewing sources. One inter-

, esting result of this buy-what's-going-to-be-used policy is that about 65% of our collection circulates every year, which is well over the national average of about 25% (200,000,dOi) circulations in 1988 out of total aca- demic library holdings of 720,000,000 books)? And because we buy the books ourselves, we are more likely to remember them lo recommend to students. I might add that although courses change, the general areas of teaching don't, and there is a lot of continuity in environmental studies, womcn's biology, third world science, agriculture and alternative technol- ogy. It is not an entirely haphazard procedure.

Reference work is a challenge. You may remember that every Hamp- shire student has to come up with a research proposal of his or her own and search the primary literature for articles to support or disprove Lhat theory. This means that there is littlc repetition; it is rare to have a class of students searching for the same topic. Actually, on h e occasions when a professor has sent a class, unprepared, into the library to find articles in some general area. I have been able to call the teacher and intercept the assignment. I am fortunate to havc an cxccllcnt working relationship will1 the Natural Science fakulty. I am a full voting member of the School, which means thal I participate in reappointment and promotion decisions, serve on hiring committees, attend curriculum retreats, and insinuate my- self as much as possible into the life of the School.

At any rate, life in Reference is rarely dull. It is often wild and hectic, and there are many times (again, this must be familiar to many of you) when you think YOU ought to set up a shingle on the desk saying The Librarian Is In, and have students lie down and tell you their research problems. The fun is that often you can make their problems go away. At Hampshire, we have Ulis interesting combination: students are doing fairly high-level research, but they are still young and fresh and full of beans, and very excited when they find what they need and delighted with them- selves and sometimes with you.

Our reference philosophy from the start has been to provide access to materials rather than materials themselves. A large part of this decision is economic, but some of it has a pedagogic belief behind it: that we are part of a consortium and ought to take advantage of what lies beyond our walls. In the sciences, even though we expect our students to use primary literature, we don't subscribe to Biological Abstracts (as of 1990) or Chemical Abstracts. Instead, we provide access to the expensive indexes and abstracting services on DIALOG. We do many searches, and we encour-

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Heloine Selin 17

age students to use the service, wluch is free to them, when they can't find what they need in the indexes we have. We use Science Citation Index a great deal, as professors are always sending students over with pa- pers that are five years old, insisting that they find an updated one. For one brief golden year, we had SCI on CD-ROM. We were able to buy this with some grant money, and bccause ISI, h e producer, had an excellent scholarship program. But the following year they raised the price out of our range, and we are back to computer searching. This is fine, except that I do the searching, which takes some of the thrill of discovery away from the students. One of the ways we have been able to finance h e searches is by cancelling some of the less used indexes, and pulling some of the money from Ule cancellation into online searching. We will never do $6000 worth of searches in Biological Abslmcts. Even if we put $1000 towards it, we may have some left over. We U~ink Unt h i s has been quite a successful way of bringing this technology into the hands of the users.

And now, CD-ROMs havc changed lhe way we think about reference work. We find we spend a good deal of lime explaining the use of CD- ROMs to sludents, and we have begun to ask ourselves many questions about this new technology. Is Ule process of information retrieval different now? Is a different cognitive process involved in searching for informa- tion manually and on CD-ROM? How do we help our students make informed choices about Ule items they turn up when searching, besides Ule obvious ones of being h a language they read and being mostly compre- hensible? I believe that the library will change radically in the next de- cade, and how and what we demonstrate will also change.

Here are some of the real life topics I've helped students with in Ule past year or so. I hope this will provide some idea of the kinds of ques- tions Hampshire students ask.

Diet and depression Evening primrose oil as an aborlifacient Natural herbal contraceplives Health problems at Ule Hanford nuclear reactor Undernutrition in poor women in America Native American herbal medicine

* Cow's milk versus soy milk Breast feeding as a contraceptive

My allotted Reference Desk time is only about 7 hours a week; the rest of the time I am around and available, and students feel free to contact me for help. The librarians also feel very free about asking each olhcr for

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I8 Science Librarianship at America's Liberal Arts Colleges

help, or about referring students they are having a hard time with. We work very well together, and are used to dumping problems on each other, as well as sharing difficult questions. The other day, as three or four of us were trying to solve a sticky problem, one student asked, "How many librarians does it take to . . . 1" Scicntophobia is just as great among li- brarians as it is among students, and my colleagues are quick to bring people with troublesome questions to me.

Many of the questions that we get at the Reference Desk, or directed to us individually, are fairly sophisticated. We likc to think that that is because the basics have been taught in the Bibliographic Instruction class- es that are an essential part of our work. I will go into some detail on our classes, hoping that they may perhaps be a bit different from what others of you do, and be able to provide some new ideas or insights. You may notice that the voice changes from "we" to "I" from time to time. I have used "we" when discussing something common to all four School Librarians and "I" when I think what am discussing is peculiar to me as the Science Librarian.

Our bibliographic instruction program involves giving classes in re- search methods to first year students. We do what is known as course- related instruclion. We take up one class period, and bring the class to the library, with the instructor, and spend the time demonstrating the various technologies, illustrating sources, and discussing research strategies. Sincc library work is such an essential part of the curriculum, the librarians (there is one for cach of thc schools) work closely with the students and the faculty. Our aim is to get each entering student who will be doing library research into the library during a class period, with the teacher present, to impress upon the student the need for using the library well, to rclieve Ule anxicties of Uiose who are bibliophobic and increase the anxieties of those who are nonchalant. Another aim of the classes is to introduce the students to me, so that thcy will have someone whose face they know when they start their research and begin to panic.

We do a lot of negotiation beforehand. Wc find out from the teacher what the assignment will be-and this is absolutely the one part of biblio- graphic inslruclion that shouldn't be compromised. There has to be an assignment that is conncctcd to the instruction. I'm sorry to say that the profit motive is at work here; unless the students have a real and urgent need for the information, they will not listen. The librarian will find her- self, to quote from a novel I read this year, "swimming upstream Ulrough the waning attention spans of the sons and daughters of the middle class." Studcnts must know that what we are showing them is necessary. There

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Hclaiue Selin 19

is no inherent interest in bibliographic instruction-the only value is in the application.

In addition to having an assignment, the timing has to be good. It is virtually useless to give an inslruction session during the first two weeks of the semester, when students are missing their dogs and parents and are overwhelmed in a hundred othcr ways. It's equally useless to try to cap- ture students' interest when U~ey've already started their papers and have figured the system out, however badly, by themselves.

Once we have the time and topic set up, the librarians prepare guides Ulat are specifically created for the class. We have streamlined this task by much of our reference collection into Pro-Cite, a bibliographic database. We spent a summer downloading records from OCLC into Pro- Cite and then dumping those into a word processor and annotating them. Now we just add updates and new books as Uley come in. It used to take hours to put a guide together, and it looked pretty tacky. Now it takes a bit less time, but looks like the real U~ing. We try to tailor each guide as closely as possible to the general subject of the class. This is easier at Hampshire, since first year classes tend to bc very specific, as I said in relation to collection developmcnl. But I don't think it really matters. The philosophy is that the process illid the sources are equally essential. Once students grasp the process of finding sources for the science of disarma- ment, they can go ahead and search for information on basal cell carcino- ma. The names change; Ule procedure is the same. This is an important part of instruction, I think: to make it clear to students Ulat what they learn today will be applicable lomorrow, and maybe even in ten years, no matter where Uieir interests go. I think it's good to err on the side of inclusion-put in more sources rattler than fewcr, just in case someone does come into the library with the guide in hand. It's been known to happen. I use plcnty of text. Some of my colleagues use the kind of Uiing Sheehy uses-the history of Ule name of Uie sources, ctc. I tend to be wordy about what's in it and whal it's useful for and omit the frequency, name changes and olhcr bibliographic details.

In preparing Ule classes, I use the same inquiry method as the faculty. For every class, I choose a topic of interest to me that fits into the general subject area of the course, and go about the process of identifying books, arlicles and other relevant material. For example, this semester, for a class on nutritional anthropology, I chose zinc deficiency in vegetarians. For a class on the world food crisis, I chose peanut butter, and the mixing of peanuts into flour in Ule Third World. There are two interesting results to his process. One is Uiat it's less boring for me; I'm always finding new

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20 Scie~~ce Librarianship at Anterica's Liberal Arts Colleges

bits and pieces to add to my librarian's store. The other is b a t it makes me sympathetic to Ute students in their searches, because it's never easy. Peanuts are only peanuts in America; in other parts of the world they are called groundnuts. To find information on peanuts meant looking it up in different ways in different sourccs. I'm always amazed at how complex the process is. And I know Uie words to use.

At Uiis point, I searcli for and copy examples from different periodical indexes, as much as possible sticking to the chosen topic. It's never possi- ble, at least in a small library, to have this work out perfectly. I always have to cheat and expand my topic in order to demonstrate how different indexes work, different subject headings, etc.

And this brings up another essential part of our instruction philosophy. It's not just the sourccs that we're trying to teach. Students don't really care how Biological Absrracrs is arranged or how frequently it comes out (although I often tell Uiem Uie price, which they find fascinating.) They don't even know what it is, what it's for. We concentrate on the research process, explaining how scliolarslup works. Sometimes, if I Uiink the class needs it, I will trace the steps from having an idca, Uirough testing Ule hypoUiesis, writing it up, prescnting Uie paper, having it published, having lhat journal indexed by an indexing service and getting it noticed by Ule researcher and Uicn into Uie researcher's hands. I think if students have some idea of where Uley fit into Uie research system, they may be able to do their part better.

Now I have preparcd the guide a id the examples, have the class and the professor in front of me and have explained to them the arrangement of Uie world of scholarship. I tell Uiem that their role has three parts: to identify what they want to rcad, to acquire what they've identified, and to read what they've acquired. I make it clear that I'm available for help with parts one and two, and that Uiey have professors for help with part three.

I try to make Uie talk lively. For a chemistry class I brought in a tape of Tom Lehrer singing his song about Uie elements. I try not to spend the whole time talking. I ask questions about the material they have in front of them, from the simplest kind like "What volume will I be looking for?" to more complicated kinds of interpretation like "What ollier sub- ject headings might you look under when you can't find cancer in Index Medicus?" Sometimes I'll include a paper in Hungarian, which appears to be perfectly suited to my topic, and ask them if they can discern why I might choose not to pursue Uiis particular article. I find there is no way to keep it interesling consistcntly. Sometimes I am dull; sometimes h e y

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Helaine Selin 21

are dull. And it's unpredictable. For the 9 a.m. Monday class on hologra- phy, I was sure I ought to start with coffee and donuts to at least keep them awake if not alert. In fact, they had interesting topics they wanted me to play with, and they were quite vibrant.

If the class is small enough, I get people out of the room with a quick assignment-find six variations of the subject heading "sex differences"; find the correct subject heading for Gaia, sewage sludge as fertilizer, herbal medicine, etc. If I canX get them out of the room and actually doing somehiig, I make them do something there, like guess subject headings for the topics as I said above.

We have been struggling with ways to demonstrate CD-ROM to stu- dents, when our room is not equipped with m extra CD- ROM worksta- tion (is anyone's?). Tentatively, we have solved the problem by doing DIALOG searches on the terminal that is there. The students can just call out research topics, and we can punch them in. This demonstrates the basics of searching, if not the peculiarities of the individual software packages. The students can see the process of adding additional subjects to narrow a search, limiting by language or publication year, and adapting their subjects to the language used by the database. It continues to amaze and delight them, and, again, provides some relief from my voice.

We have also begun to change Ule standard one and a half hour format, and now occasionally bring classes over for short sessions using the Med- line CD-ROM, or demonstrating census materials. Our aim is to get the students involved in the research process: asking questions and trying to find support for their conclusions.

The problem with a successful science bibliographic instruclion pro- gram is that it is exhausting for a single librarian. I have given as many as thirteen classes in a semester, each one taking a few hours of prepara- tion. If the class is good, and even if it isn't, everyone remembers who I am and when I work, and they seek me out next time they're in the li-, brary. This is grcat; this is what we're doing it for. This brings a lot of excitement and adventure into a day. And, at the same time, this can be very enervating. Usually, right after a session, Ule students are enthusiastic and raring to go, and the librarian needs a nap.

Every student at Hampshire College has to do a science project. Virtu- ally every project involves some library research. Because I am a cog in both machines-the library and the School of Natural Sciences-I am in- volved in a great many of these projects. This results in a lively and inter- esting job for me and students who are scientifically and bibliographically literate.

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22 Science Libraria~uhip at Anmica's Liberal Arts Colleges

NOTES

1. D'Avanzo, ~harlene. "Inquily in the undergraduate science classroom." BioScience 37 (8): 540.

2. Podolsky, Arthur, "Academic Library Survey," in The Bowker Atrwal: Library and Book Trade Almar~oc. 36th edition. New Providence, NJ: Bowker, 1991, p. 448.

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