Librarians as Teaching Team Members in a Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Course

Abstract

Librarians have become a key component in the capstone mechanical engineering design course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The design process was taught using a team based appraoch. A librarian was a member of each E-team (the "E" stands for Excellence and Entrepeneuriship as defined by the Lemelson Foundation, one of the sponsors of the course), attended lectures and acted as an information agent. One particularly startling discovery was that the students were apparently overwhelmed by the data gathered and were not familiar with analytic techniques for making effective use of it. This paper gives a contextual outline of the course, illustrates the librarian's role, discusses what was learned as a result of their invovlement and presents plans for the future.