I’ve talked before about how learning goals keep me focused and keep me from burning out on instruction, but it occurred to me in what felt like new says how the framework of learning goals could solve a lot of problems for me in ways that their less actionable cousins (like “best practices” or “standards” or even phrases like “user centered”) couldn’t.

Here’s what I mean in three examples:

• In my own teaching, there are usually 15 or 20 Very Important things that I wish I could teach my students in any given session. Using learning goals helps me prioritize from among the very important things, feel less guilty about letting some very important things fall by the wayside, remember to think about what they’re learning rather than what I’m teaching, and feel connected to the broader, more interesting issues of information literacy.
• In selecting a discovery tool, there are long, long lists of features and functions that user-centered design relies on. No interface has each specific feature, so how do we choose? How do we prioritize the list of very important features? What if we developed learning goals for our discovery system? What if these goals were something like being able to learn the differences between kinds of sources, be able to pick out important terms for the topic and field, and see where to go from here (different searches, different databases, different people). Maybe one system doesn’t have faceting but does have something else that reveals terms and directions. Maybe our usability tests could be more a long the lines of assessment of what the students learned by interacting with the system. Maybe this would all help us prioritize from the long list of important things to choose a system that functions in service of the mission of our library.
• In first year seminars (the context in which the original phrase came up), focusing on programmatic learning goals could help prioritize from the long list of things it’d be nice if all first year students knew. Maybe it would help guard against creating impossibly long check lists of things students should be exposed to, and therefore guard against treating first year seminars as massive inoculations that transform high school students into college students. Maybe it would also grant the teaching faculty the freedom to explore interesting topics in interesting ways while having similar learning outcomes.

Or maybe I’m just creating my own buzz phrase. Or maybe everyone else already knew this.

But for me, at my institution, expanding this framework beyond my direct teaching or my department’s strategic planning is helping me make those hard decisions that crop up all over the place and to make them with more confidence.

What we didn’t realize is that we’re not players in the discovery game — we’re pawns. The players strategizing and moving the chess pieces are the EBSCOs and ProQuests of the world, and sometimes sacrificing a pawn or three is the only way to win that game. It’s not personal.

Here’s how the game, the real game, is played.

A couple of weeks ago a ripple of outrage spread around the library community when Ex Libris sent out a letter explaining that EBSCO had removed its content from Primo’s central database.² Did EBSCO realize that they’d be hurting their click-through rates with this move, we asked. How could they be so selfish, we wondered. Don’t they realize they need us, we raged.

These were the questions of people who thought they were players in the game. In reality, though, EBSCO needs us like a chess master needs pawns. Which is to say, they need us quite a bit, but not that much and not as full partners. What they really need is to act on opportunities to profit and to ward off their opponent’s attempts to profit more.

Matt Andros, Vice President of Field Sales at EBSCO, was kind enough to help me understand things from EBSCO’s point of view, first through an email³ and then through a phone conversation (1/19/2011). The email was helpful; the phone conversation was enlightening. Apparently, participating in 3rd party discovery tools is not an opportunity for them to gain market share, and since the other big players aren’t participating either it could even open EBSCO up to loss. He told me in our phone conversation that 90% of academic libraries already have the major aggregator databases (like Academic Search Premier), so their goal is not primarily to increase the number of subscriptions there. And the metadata associated with their more specialized databases, the databases holding those exclusively licensed journals, isn’t itself exclusively licensed, so it could land in the discovery tool from any other company without harming EBSCO’s market. After all, what we’re after is the full text, and we can get to that easily via a link resolver. It’s just not in their interest to share metadata unless they’ll be getting something in return.

On the other hand, they do have to play the discovery game. “Discovery is hot,” Matt said to me yesterday. All the big players are playing it, so it’s not very strategic to fall behind in this market while ProQuest cashes the discovery checks. It is much more strategic to beat the competition at its own game by doing the same thing, only with (hopefully) better content.

As strange as it may sound, the future is not in unified databases powering discovery tools, Matt told me yesterday. He can’t foresee a time when the major database vendors will find it profitable to combine their metadata for our benefit. Instead, the future is in hybrid systems that combine discovery and federation. As I see it, libraries will have to decide if they care whether their EBSCO products or their ProQuest products are seamlessly integrated, choose the discovery layer that matches the company of their choice, and then federate in the content from the other database providers. Federated search is dead; long live federated search. And I’m sure the thinking at EBSCO is that we’ll be paying someone for a discovery tool, and that someone should be them.

So where’s our leverage in all of this? Competition in the free market is the force looking out for library interests, Matt said, and laughed with me as I pointed out that this was hollow comfort given the shrinking number of competitors out there.

After we hung up, I wondered if this whole game was short-sighted or the best long-range plan I’d ever heard. What happens when they drain us dry and their beautifully cultivated market withers on the vine? If we were their only revenue source, this might be a point of leverage, but we aren’t. They also own companies that deal in office supplies and companies that manufacture outdoor goods like fishing lures and hunting decoys.⁴ EBSCO is “one of the largest private companies in the US” according to Datamonitor’s company profile, so even if they are a little worried about library budget cuts, they can also move with confidence through the strategies that matter to them — the strategies that focus on their true competition.⁵

And that, my friends, is how the real game is played. Focus clearly on your opponent’s king and position yourself so that you don’t have to worry too much about your pawns, however useful and important those pawns may be to your strategy.

(Many thanks to Steve Lawson for helping me think through these and many related issues as I prepared this post. And many thanks to Matt Andros for his generosity in helping me rethink my assumptions.)

This would probably be true if the unique content and value of subscription databases were housed solely in the citation, abstract, and potential for full text access, but in fact it misses the point for many researchers. And it misses the point particularly for undergraduates.

Search is all about term matching, and terms are often the hardest thing for undergraduates to harness. So one key value of a database or search engine is the way that it introduces students to helpful information such as terms that might be important to their topics, genres of publication that are relevant to the scholars in the field that study the topic, and ways of judging the source’s relative weight by providing clues about other things the author has written or about how often the source is cited by other sources. These are not things that undergraduates are able to do just by looking at a citation and abstract.

Google Scholar is very forgiving of bad searching. It will nearly always give you something, even if you enter “impact of cell phones on globalization” into the search box. (Two of my big goals for this last term were to get students to stop searching for “impact on” and “globalization.” I was only minimally successful.) Because it’s so forgiving, it can be a great place to start. However, it’s pretty bad at leading you to new search strategies once you’ve found the one article where the author uses your phrase in her abstract.

Disciplinary databases are not nearly as forgiving of bad searching, so they may be pretty intimidating places to start. Where they excel, however, is in foregrounding those elusive, mysterious, and powerful terms that students need so badly if they’re going to revise their searches and gather more disciplinarily relevant material. The vocabulary, controlled and otherwise, is one of the two key advantages of disciplinary databases. These databases also help students make decisions about the relative worth of a source by (usually) giving links to other things by that author, other things published in that journal, citation counts, bibliographies, indications about peer review, and so on. And sure, these aren’t things that students are used to looking at when they enter college. But in my experience, these are tools that students very quickly come to rely on.

For the totally at-sea undergraduate, the most powerful research process will probably look something like this: take a citation found using a messy search in Google Scholar, plunk that citation into a library database, mine the resulting record for terms and other useful information, read a couple of articles “instrumentally,” and then repeat the process as needed with better and better terms each time.

So is Google Scholar a database killer? Like Steve, I think not. I think it’s a great tool that complements our other tools. And hey! It’s free!

The idea is that reading for comprehension is good and important and all that, but that the point of the article is only one of many things you can learn by engaging with it. Just reading the first few paragraphs of a work slowly and carefully, you can glean a whole host of names and terms that you can then use when crafting further searches or deciding where to search next. For example, you can note down concept names, other vocabulary, researcher’s names,  relevant institutions that might produce or publish information for the topic, or types of evidence used in this kind of argument. After reading the first few paragraphs of a few likely articles, you can go back and start using these new concepts and terms and research/institution names to craft more focused searches. At this point, you’re more likely to be using vocabulary that a more expert person would have used in the first place.

Here’s one concrete example.

Cooks, Bridget. “Fixing Race: Visual Representations of African Americans at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.” Patterns of Prejudice, 41.5 (2007): 435-565.
ABSTRACT Cooks examines the Johnson family cartoon series published in Harper’s Weekly during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Her analysis addresses the series’ caricatures of African-American fairgoers in the context of the landmark exposition, a national celebration of America’s cultural leadership and accomplishment since its ‘discovery’ by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Johnson family cartoons are remarkable because they are the only racist images in the issues of Harper’s Weekly in which they appear, highlighting the importance of their message that African Americans were an unwanted presence at an event that served to solidify America’s national identity. The series provides insight into some of the social anxieties of white Americans regarding the presence of African Americans at the exposition. It also explores white American discomfort with racial and economic diversity through the antics of the imaginary yet symbolically representative Johnson family. Cooks’s discussion includes a visual analysis of the cartoons and comparisons of the Johnson family images with photographs and illustrations of African-American labourers at the fair and with depictions of proper behaviour by white American fairgoers. This examination of the cartoon series questions the roles of race, class and social hierarchy in turn-of-the-century America, and illustrates that acceptable mainstream attitudes clung to ideas of racial prejudice.

Just from this I get a whole bunch of clues about how and where to look for evidence that might reveal attitudes about race in the late 19th century. I might not have thought to page through Harper’s and other magazines at the time. How would I find out which other magazines to look at? I could look at caricatures in general, cartoons (oh, and I bet there were caricatures and cartoons in newspapers at the time, too, so I could look there), advertisements, and anything else that exaggerates normality or abnormality. I could do more research into the World’s Exposition, since it’s positioned as being a representation of America. Terms like “national identity” and “social anxiety” might be useful. The abstract also makes it clear that one great way to build an argument about difference is to make an argument about what the ideal sameness might be. It also compares caricatures to photographs, which is kind of a similar rhetorical move — making arguments about exaggeration by comparing it to its opposite: realism.

If I read a few paragraphs of the article itself, I’m sure there will be useful citations to follow, possibly some argument about why Harper’s is a good source (which might hopefully mention some similar periodicals as part of this argument), certainly other historians who are interested in race in America, possibly some theorists (which would be a jackpot, particularly if this were a literary article, since searching for theorists is one of the hardest things to do), possibly some other types of scholars who might have an interest in this kind of topic, and hopefully some clues about where to go looking for photographs, either from citations for the photographs used or from other context.

Once I realized that this is how I approach most of the searching I do (since I’m almost never searching for topics in fields in which I’m an expert), I decided to back up and start teaching this as a way to read result lists and abstracts, too (part of my exploding the article idea). So now I often have students help me pick relevant terms out of both controlled vocabulary and abstracts, or point out clues hidden in article records that might point us to related genres or topics or avenues into the literature. Then we search again, and then again, usually (hopefully) finding whole pockets of literature that we’d never have stumbled on otherwise.

Finding the right terms is hard. It takes empathy with the author, it takes some knowledge of the field, it takes some knowledge of related fields (particularly if you’re in an interdisciplinary database and can’t figure out why you’re getting chemistry results in your humanities search), and it usually just plain takes reading. Reading carefully and with an eye toward learning vocabulary. Reading lots. And there are very few shortcuts.

And then comes full text searching of historical documents (something I’m going to be teaching tomorrow). That’s another whole layer of complexity, and I really love what Timothy Burke had to say about that recently. He makes it clear that you really have to read, and read a lot, before you can start searching through historical texts, and he makes it clear that developing a familiarity with other rhetorics is vital to scholarship.

Searching sometimes feels like the modern way and browsing like the legacy way of doing research. But in some sense, search is impossible without a hefty dose of browsing.

Anyway, my Ah Hah moment of the day was when this professor said that searching is a fundamentally empathetic tasks. That crystallized for me a lot of my thinking about searching — how you have to not ask a search interface a question (usually) but instead think of terms that your ideal article would have in it or associated with it. So, not my terms for a concept, but my ideal article’s terms for the concept. When I can get my students to make that leap, their results usually get much better.

I don’t know how useful it will be to use “empathetic” as a term when I teach (it’ll depend on the class), but it sure does help me think about the process.

For those of you who know OAIster, you know that it recently stopped being its own unique entity and started being an OCLC-hosted entity. It’s now available on the FirstSearch interface and the WorldCat.org interface. (Here’s more on the history of the catalog.)

Enter the oddness. My co-worker ran some identical searches on both interfaces and came up with startlingly different numbers of results for most of her searches. Confused, I contacted OAIster and have just heard back from them why this is so. Apparently, the “keyword” search in the FirstSearch interface searches through the Source, Subject, Title, and Notes indexes. The keyword search on the WorldCat.org interface searches all available fields and all indexes.

So now we know.

Every page with a search box is a “single search box” page.

We may gripe about clutter. We may grouse about having not enough guidance surrounding our search boxes. It doesn’t matter. For people who are primed to search, they will only see the search box anyway. The other stuff may as well not be there. (For those of you getting hot under the collar like I would be if I were reading this right now? Hang on, I’ve got something for you in a minute.)

Here’s my Parable With Two Screenshots. We have several lists of electronic resources on our library’s website, each of which has a “Search” and “Browse” function at the top.

We’ve gently corrected students who started entering their topic keywords into the “search” box, but haven’t been able to get rid of the box entirely. “Oh those kids,” we thought. “Desperately seeking search boxes again.”

Then last week I had a professor call me in consternation that the library systems were telling her there was nothing on her topic. Turns out… she had entered her topic terms into that search box.

Ok, ok, so that one’s legitimately confusing. We’ve realized that while the existence of the box is out of our control, the wording next to it isn’t. Soon it’ll say something more like “find a database.” Still, this is only the first half of the parable, and probably not the most relevant half at that. It’s mostly relevant in that its proximity to the second half made everything come together in my head. And so, on to the second half…

For the past two weeks, I’ve also had students from a lit class coming to see me, all of whom want “something, anything from the last ten years written about [insert famous theme] and [insert famous piece of literature here].” Granted, searching for themes is hard. Even something standard like “performative identity” requires thinking up all kinds of synonyms (body, fashion, display, etc). But what struck me is that as soon as I set the date limiter on MLA International Bibliography, each student gasped in shock and surprise. This limiter is not hidden. It is three lines, or 1 inch, below the search boxes. And yet it had been totally invisible to my students as they focused all their energies on those tantalizing search boxes.

So now back to my revelation (and those of you who’ve been thinking “But we simply can’t do away with advanced search pages! Single search boxes aren’t always the way to go!!” can tune back in now). Here’s what I now think: We can feel free to have advanced search pages on any interface that we think functions better with all of those options laid out. It doesn’t matter. People who only want a single search box will only see that search box anyway. People who want the options will see and appreciate the options. Everybody happy.

If I could also set a cookie that would authenticate me from my own home computer, life would be even easier.

Still need to work on the seamless access to full text part of the equation, though.

Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing “real” library research on the free web. “The kids are doing it” was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era and to dismiss the problem as one that “the kids” would outgrow, like braces or a lisp or chicken pox, as they became better versed in scholarly research practices.

Well, it’s not just the kids any more, folks. Enough journal publishers have opened up their indexing and abstracts to the free web that it’s now possible (especially in some fields) to actually do “real” library research on the web. And so people are doing just that. This year, our new faculty orientation session brought questions about Google-friendly access right to our door-step in a big way, and part of this rather disorganized thread on FriendFeed brought it up again.

And yes, ideally everyone could use one nice, big, easy search mechanism to do everything from the most broad to the most narrow topic and then get instant access to the full text of whatever they find. Too bad that’s impossible.

Google is more familiar and forgiving, it’s faster, and there’s a lot of good stuff in it (particularly if you’re searching for something that hasn’t had any controlled vocabulary assigned to it, yet). But currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of collocating like items based on something more robust than the author’s choice in vocabulary and PageRank. Currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of allowing scholars to leverage their disciplinary vocabulary and a better job of helping novices stumble upon key vocabulary terms. Currently, disciplinary databases are the only things that can offer relief to my students who say that there are just too many false hits in everything from Google to JSTOR (free text search may be what they’re used to, but they’re often relieved to leave it behind as soon as they’re shown controlled vocabulary).

But all that aside, neither option does the “access to full text” piece of the equation very well. Unless your library subscribes to the publisher versions of pretty much every eJournal out there (an expensive proposition) Google can’t actually help you get to whole swaths of full text, and even then you’d have to be on campus or logged in to your library’s proxy server or something. And even if researchers are in a disciplinary database, they’ll still often have to step outside of that database to get the full text, and while a link resolver is a wonderful thing, it’s still a long way from being a perfect solution to this problem. Either way this lands you at the A-Z list figuring out if we have access to the particular issue of the particular journal you want.

I wish it were easier. I wish access issues didn’t make researchers jump to the conclusion that we’re “hiding” stuff from Google, or that we’re being unnecessarily silo-ish, or that indexing is over-rated, or that you have to do “complex” searches in library databases. I also wish that we could bringing together disciplinary databases in ways that allow easy cross-searching without giving up the time-saving specificity of disciplinary focus and vocabulary.

Right now it feels like we’re balanced precariously on that tipping point with a precipice on each side.