Nursing 783 Health Policy & Ethics - Don't be as helpful as you'd prefer to be

 Hi all,

Today I had a consultation with a PhD student in Nursing 783 Health Policy & Ethics.  

She gave information about the research topic before the meeting - 

Articles to support December 2023 Governor Cooper approved Medicaid Expansion known as NC Health Works. Need help and direction in finding articles to support the background of the policy, major stakeholder, and 2026 now effectiveness of this policy. 

When our meeting opened, she responded to the reference interview question "Are you allowed to use sources other than journal articles?"  

I like to ask this question b/c it pulls students out of the "only recent journal articles" trap.  It prompts them to open their assignment instructions, which we'll need during our meeting.  

We talked about resources that could be useful for an assignment like this  - 

1. The NC General Assembly website has a search box that can be set to previous legislative sessions to find bills and laws
2. Searching the open web for news stories and other non-journal article sources can be helpful
3. The the library guide to Law sources links the HeinOnline database- that's a collection of legal materials including law journals, legal blogs, etc.

The student visited these links and did some searching. I suggested terms and so did she.  

She asked me about citing laws and I gave general advice - I like apastyle.org for most APA references, but I haven't seen bills and laws described there.

The Publication Manual of the APA, which we now have as an ebook in the catalog for 6 people at a time, covers citing bills and laws.  Put information from your source into the order/style suggested for that kind of source (a state bill or law).  I didn't create the citation for her!  In fact, I also tell students that I can't review references for them (it's a capacity thing).

I thought this was a pretty solid consult and I reached out to the instructor to let her know that I could create a library guide with links such as the ones above.

Wups, nope!

The instructor was pleased with the content, but also said "that student should be doing this on their own. Part of the course is learning to access policy documents.  They won’t have a Lea when they graduate!"

Makes sense. I want to let students know about these sources, but I went a little over the top. 

I'm writing this long post so that 

1. You know how I'd want to go about finding this kind of information. I absolutely solicited advice from coworkers :)  FYI, there are 11 more students in the NUR 783 course-please feel free to refer them to me, the liaison librarian for nursing.

2. And so you have a few takeaways for desk and chat service (still very Sage on the Stage, me!)

- what I described above is a full research consultation meeting, more than a chat or walk up

- students sometimes ask for a lot of help and instructors might be less than pleased if we do too much for graduate students

- for the health sciences, please don't feel like you have to set up citations for students or review reference lists (Sam also works with health sciences, I don't want to speak for her areas)

- if it's a student in nursing, nutrition, communication sciences & disorders, or genetic counseling, you can refer them to me - Lea Leininger, laleinin@uncg.edu 

-not sure whom to refer to?  check the research guide for that subject to see who the liaison librarian is; I'm happy to help out with other subjects as I'm able

Whew, done for now!

Thank you :)

Lea Leininger, Health Sciences Librarian