02-18-2008
MS Word for Dissertations / Publications
When I worked at UM, my responsibilities included doing technology consultations at the Knowledge Navigation Center. When I begin there, I used to dread faculty members or dissertation-writers with horribly messed up Word Documents. Usually they’d come in with obscure publisher requirements or the Rackham Dissertation Formatting Guidelines - they’d need to get their already horribly messed up document into shape.
By the time I left, I loved these patrons - I’ve become so savvy with all the little bugs and issues in Microsoft Word that I can bend it to do my will no matter how messed up a document is when I get it. I enjoyed taking frazzled, frantic patrons and showing them “how Word thinks” so they could not only fix their document, but also use it correctly the next time they wrote a longer document.
We also offered a workshop called “Using Word Effectively for your Dissertation” and a similar one for publication (aimed at faculty). Invariably, people would leave the workshop exclaiming about how much easier it was going to be for them to write their document and get it formatted for their final editing deadlines.
I’m about to teach the same class here at UT Arlington. After checking with the Office of Information Technology (who has their own set of technology workshops, including Word I and Word II) and the Graduate School, there is a need for this technology instruction on campus aimed at writers of dissertations and books.
There’s been a lot of talk about libraries and their role in the scholarly publishing process. UM hired two copyright specialists to talk to faculty about their rights when they publish. Librarians applaud and sometimes lead the charge in developing open access publishing models. Institutional repositories are more often than not initiated from and housed at the library.
Teaching the technical aspects of writing aren’t out of a library’s responsibilities. Just as we are the ones that end up teaching classes on bibliographic management software, so to should we be the ones teaching the technology that enable scholarship.
What kinds of classes could this entail? Adobe Illustrator? I know plenty of history faculty struggle making custom maps for the books they are writing. Digitizing images? How many times has a faculty member struggled to get their digital images into the right resolution and size for their next writing project? Let’s teach them Photoshop!
I also think providing our scholars and researchers with classes that immediately empower them to do new things will be rewarding for not only the scholars themselves, but for the library. Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise your stakeholders with capabilities they don’t expect from the traditional library?
Posted by frierson in Uncategorized | RSS 2.0
Great idea! I get lots of these kinds of questions and know that what I do is helpful — even tho’ I’m not teaching classes in it! I got an email from a (non-work related) friend who’s writing a thesis. “How do I cite something I got from doing a FOIA request?” In librarian terms, I told her that a document’s provenance wasn’t relevant to the citation. With fingers crossed. I couldn’t find anything about it with a quick web search, but it was a cool question. And shows how useful it is to have a librarian within IM-ing distance.
Assuming I’m still in IL, I wouldn’t mind helping with this. I’m knowledgeable about Word too and it can be very powerful if you know how to work with it.