An excellent library, but do students know how to use it?

ICU's library is voted as No.1 or No.2 among all Japanese university libraries year after year. I feel the resources in the library are satisfactory for most purposes, the staff are dedicated and friendly, and the facilities are comfortable. Today, my research paper writing class for 2nd year students had an orientation about how to use databases for finding sources, and the library staff gave a nicely planned overview of how to do key word searches and obtain relevant texts. The reminder about being critical of information was good too.

The main need for improvement on today's orientation was "interactivity". The lecture with PowerPoint was full of useful content, but the engagement of the students seemed low. I think the best solution is to put all resources on a website as a How to manual so that students can access by themselves when they have a need. The overview can be a video or voice over slide show easily and that will help the library staff avoid making a droning presentation to a large room of semi-engaged students. The interactive resources will be valuable for all students, not just the ones who enroll in the research writing class - so good luck ICU library! You're doing a good job! (I wrote this to them in Japanese already in the comment section of today's orientation )

Since I'm blogging about this, I should note that the library needs to be open more, like on Sundays, holidays, and later at night and on Saturday (they shut down at 4:30pm on Saturdays and are not open at all on Sunday - How are my students supposed to get their research done?)