Louise Klusek, Head of Reference at the Newman Library talks to us about her role in the development of the International Business Guide and how Baruch students and professionals are benefiting from it.

The International Business Guide is part of a collection of over 100 guides that the librarians at Baruch have developed for student research. It is one of seven guides that cover international business topics. It is best to think about the guides as research portals that bring together in one place all the library databases and some important web resources to help with international business research assignments.

 Where did the idea come from?

The idea for the guides came from my work with several professors and their international business students.  I often have particular classes and assignments in mind when I think about putting together a new guide. So for example, I built the International Business Guide to support Professor Grein’s classes; the International Trade Guide around an assignment for Professor Wymbs’ classes; the Multinational Finance Guide for Professor Gardberg; the Emerging Markets Guide for Professor Hunter, and the International Companies Guide for Professor LaManna’s BPL5100 classes.

 When I visit classes to talk about research, I want students to think about making strategic choices about the best research process to follow and the best research resources to use for their assignments.  At Baruch, we are fortunate to have many of the same databases that I used when I was a corporate librarian at Salomon Smith Barney. These are the same databases that our students will find on their desktops when they get a job on Wall Street.

 The Library has been publishing guides for about four years now. We started by creating guides that would answer some of the common questions students asked us at the reference desk.  These were things like: How do I research a company? How do I do a SWOT analysis? How do I cite my sources correctly? We also partnered with faculty and created guides for specific assignments. These course guides usually indicate how to find books and articles and how to cite sources.   

 What type of planning goes into the guides?

Typically I start by thinking about what type of resources students will need for their research assignments. Sometimes I work with a specific assignment in mind but not always.  It is easy for me to decide which databases to feature but I also have to decide which Web sources should be included. Many international organizations, such as the OECD, IMF, United Nations and the World Bank have valuable databases and report series that are hard to find on the web.  The guides are a great place to feature these resources.

 After I decide which sources to include, I try to arrange them in logical categories.  So, for example, because the International Business Guide helps students evaluate the investment climate and business conditions of countries, I used these categories: economics, labor, politics and law, society and culture, technology and trade.

I spend some time writing up the “Getting Started” page so students will know what to expect from the guide. Then I write the database descriptions and design the pages of the guide. I always rank the database lists rather than put them in alphabetical order because I know students tend to click into the first item on a list.   

 Another thing I ask myself is how much instruction and support needs to be added to the guide.  Databases with unfamiliar search interfaces might need a link to the database’s “Help” page.

 Why do the guide? To build information competency skills or for anyone doing research?

Both. It is hard for librarians to personally reach out to our students and the guides are one way we can make contact in an online environment in which students feel comfortable.  The guides are available 24/7 and from on campus or off. They are structured so that they can be used for many types of research projects and are used in a wide range of classes: marketing, management, finance, international business and even in sociology.

 How do you measure the effectiveness/impact of a guide?

We track usage with monthly statistical reports so we can see how often students connect to any one of our guides.  The International Business Guide gets over 100 hits each month. One of our most popular guides on Industry Research gets over 250 hits a month. We also get reports from our database publishers that let us know how often the databases are used, how long user sessions last, and which reports from a particular database are downloaded most often.

 I also see the impact of the guides when I get e-mails from students.

How do you prepare students to do effective research?

The first step is to encourage them to move beyond Google. Simple exposure to the power of databases like Factiva for international business news works.  Students quickly recognize the value of the respected information sources such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times that they can access from these databases. We also want to expose them to specialized resources, like ISI Emerging Markets, that they might not know exist.