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February 14, 2005
Students need a Life Preserver
From the New York Times, an article about students and online research: "Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea" (registration required). This article is interesting to me for two reasons. It points out that students, even college students who have the skills to do Boolean searching, still don't have the skills necessary to evaluate the credibility of online resources AND the following paragraph from the article made me think of something else entirely...
Up to now, librarians have taken the lead in developing information literacy standards and curriculums. There's a certain paradox in that, because a lot of people assumed that the digital age would require neither libraries nor librarians. But today, students have only limited contact with librarians, particularly because they do most of their online information-seeking at home or in the dorm.
Hmmm...students do most of their research from home. So, let's bring the library (& the librarians) to them! If they're not going to be coming into our physical buildings as much, we need to make our resources and services accessible to them from home.
So, how do we do this?
1) Provide a solid collection of subscription databases across subject areas.
2) Make students aware of these databases and the resources they have to offer (an up-front Metasearch tool would do that nicely)
3) Can students request that print resources from one branch/location (academic or public library) be sent to another? For free? Through the online catalog? And easily?
4) Does your library provide online reference services to help students with their research? E-mail? Web-based chat? Instant Messaging?
I wish I could say that my library is doing all of the above things, but I can claim only #4 and part of #3 (not free or easy). What I'd like to tackle next is #2--getting a metasearch tool to help our users find the wealth of information in our subscription databases. What's next on your list?
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Comments
Absolutely! Thank you Tanuki, for bringing that up. Personally, I won't sign a contract with a database vendor that does not allow for remote usage, and every single one of our databases (except for one) provides for unlimited use. It's an awful experience for the patron to be told by the librarian "oh, there's this great resource online," and then while trying to access the resource, be told that the max # of accesses has been reached.
Posted by: Sarah Houghton (Librarian in Black) | February15, 2005
Unfortunately, accessing "librarian-selected subscription databases" from home is not always possible -- depends on how the license agreement is worded. One gets into issues of maximum number of simultaneous users, ghosting IP addresses where access is restricted to the institution's IP (assuming by "from home" you really mean from home and not from a dorm room, say), and the like. Whoever is handling the subscription contracts for your library needs to be informed on the possibilities and probabilities and to be canny in her/his negotiations with the publisher.
Posted by: Tanuki | February15, 2005
I have certainly heard that point of view before. Personally, I wouldn't say it was either the worst or the best thing...just something new and different.
How is providing online resources "causing the bottom to fall out of youth literacy"? I'm not quite sure I understand.
Providing librarian-selected subscription databases, as well as online reference services, can serve as just the "specialized knowledge" that you are referring to. Even when students come into the libraries for assistance, they often don't receive any kind of user instruction or "how to evaluate a source" assistance. Often, the resources are just pushed to them in that case as well.
I don't see how the kids coming into the libraries is any better, truthfully. Not in reality. Perhaps in an idealized "we can instruct each and every one of them on the fly" world, but that's not the world I'm living in here at a public library. Nor was it at the previous two public libraries and two academic libraries I've worked at.
The kids are online. That's where they're doing the research. Withholding information from them by making it "in-print & in-person only" is not going to get us anywhere, other than to make us obsolete. By offering librarian-selected resources where they are (online) and offering our own librarian services where they are (online) we are serving them much better.
Posted by: Sarah Houghton (Librarian in Black) | February15, 2005
The Internet is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to librarianship.
It creates new frontiers for exploration, but it is my fear that we're causing the bottom to fall out of youth literacy without even being aware of what we're doing.
Bringing the resources to their homes is not the answer. At least not in a literal sense. Without the specialized knowledge that librarians impart about how to make heads or tails of information, aren't we effectively pushing people off the diving board without giving them basic swimming lessons?
Posted by: Anonymous Librarian | February14, 2005
