For the last several years, my mother has taught a Freshmen Gateway Colloquium on pre-industrial textiles at Illinois Wesleyan University. It is a writing seminar for Freshmen. My mother called me up one Sunday shortly after I set up my web space and asked me to make a webpage with a list of useful resources for her students' research papers. (She wanted me to list things like WorldCat and Jstor.) She asked me to do this for a couple of reasons. First, I was a history major in college and specialized in early industrial textiles. In other words, I knew which resources the students would find most useful. And second, I was getting an MLS and knew how to search the library catalog and explain the process to others.

In the course of my conversation with my mother, I realized that I could tell the students so much more than just "use this and use that." I could actually give them some research tips. Instead of spending a few minutes on the webpage, I spent two hours writing a four page paper on the subject and another hour making screencaps and putting the page up. It became what I call "Quick Tips."

My mother sent the page to one of her colleagues. He was doing a Freshmen Gateway Colloquium on the philosophy of artificial intelligence and asked me to make up a page of quick tips for his class. This became "Quick Tips 2". The tips remained the same, but I changed various parts of the page to fit his course. For example, Wesleyan had a link to artificial intelligence journals in its catalogue. I thought this would be more useful to computer science students than Jstor.

Overall, it was good practice for me as a librarian. I got to apply my knowledge and share it with students.