The Bruno Business Library is working to educate students on how to fully utilize the building and its systems.
The new program, called Get Smart!, will host nine one-hour classes every Monday through Nov. 12 and aims to better acclimate students to the business database systems available at the library.
Mark Siciliano, business reference librarian at Bruno, first came up with the idea for the series and will teach each of the classes. He said he was inspired by most students’ lack of awareness of all Bruno has to offer.
According to Lee Pike, head of Bruno, the library’s database systems have plenty to offer.
“The best business information has high value and costs money,” he said in an emailed statement. “That’s why corporations pay tens and often hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for business information from such commercial providers as Lexis-Nexis, Global Insights, Business Source Premier, among many others. That’s where the library comes in. We license dozens of business databases annually, and the content is freely available to students during their careers at the University.”
Siciliano said business professors sometimes ask librarians to come and give presentations about the databases’ capabilities, but students outside of this relatively small number of classes often don’t get exposed to the systems’ potential, especially early on in their college careers.
“When I present to a class, I always ask, ‘How many people have never been in the library before?’” he said. “When you’re talking to a group of freshman and they all raise their hands, it’s one thing. But if you’ve got a bunch of juniors and seniors with their hands up, that’s a problem. It’s almost a shame for someone to graduate from the business school and not be able to use the database systems.”
Class titles range from Financial Statements to Opening a Small Business, but Siciliano said he will not be lecturing about how to prepare a balance sheet or start a hardware store. Rather, discussions will focus on how students may most efficiently use Bruno’s database services to explore the information they need to further investigate these topics.
Pike said Siciliano’s expertise in the material should maximize students’ learning potential.
“He is an expert and will make the workshops worthwhile,” Pike said. “An investment of a little time in the Get Smart! workshops will save a lot of time searching aimlessly. Mr. Siciliano will take a hands-on approach to training in navigating interfaces and content and making wise choices. It will actually be fun!”
Though business is the primary focus of each workshop, Siciliano said the concepts he presents is not of relevance to Culverhouse students alone.
“Just because I put in a topic such as marketing to research doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it,” he said. “A lot of our campus library system’s databases are very similar, so you can take something I talk about and do the exact same thing with the Civil War or chemistry.”
However, Siciliano insists the database proficiency students will gain from the Get Smart! series can be an especially significant catalyst in business students’ post-graduation career search. He said Bruno’s database systems are not purely for academia – many big-name companies, especially in the brokerage and banking industries, use the same programs in the daily conduction of business.
According to Siciliano, most recently graduated job hunters either don’t know how to use databases or don’t recognize such proficiency as a marketable skill.
“If you put Bloomberg or Morningstar [database systems] on a resume, that will look tremendous when you’re going against hundreds of other applicants for a position at a company like Morgan Stanley,” he said.
Classes are limited to 20 people per meeting and will meet Monday at 6 p.m. in Bruno 11 on a first-come-first-served basis. For a more detailed schedule of topics, visit brunolib.cba.ua.edu/services/workshops.html.
