Category Archives: search and discovery

What are Reference Works Good for in the Google Age?

By IRIS Posted on by

Over the last couple of years, my co-workers and I have noticed steady and possibly even increasing use of our reference collection by our students. And while I love this (I mean… obviously… cuz I’m a reference librarian), I’m also always just a little bit surprised by it. I mean, they’ve got Wikipedia and Google, and goodness knows they use them for everything. Hey, even I use them umpteen thousand times per day, so I certainly can’t fault anyone.

Well, we recently had a meeting of area librarians at which we discussed the future of reference collections. Will they go all electronic? Will they become obsolete altogether? And how will our physical spaces in the library change over time? And all this got me to thinking about what the actual value of a reference collection is these days.

With a few exceptions, I think the value of a reference collection is not in the ability to locate facts. That’s what it used to be good for, but unless I’m looking for pretty specialized facts that I don’t think would get published on the web, or that would be hard to digest on a screen, I generally go to my friend Google. And while I’m sure that reference collections were never just about finding facts, that was one of their key roles before, and continues to be their perceived function. But, for me the reference collection is valuable in a completely different way these days. It’s not about discrete facts; it’s about context. It’s not a place to find what you need; it’s a place to find a beginning and get help interpreting result lists.

Built in bibliographies
One of the things that seems to resonate well with students is that they don’t have to dive into topics and build initial bibliographies from scratch. Just like they can consult their professors for starting points, they can consult an expert by turning to a subject encyclopedia and gleaning citations from there. Scholarship is all about building on other people’s scholarship, so take advantage of it an jump in like the real scholars do.

Term harvesting
I’ve already talked about how terms are crucial to search. While encyclopedias and dictionaries can’t help every time, they can be treasure-troves of terms, and they can help students deploy new terms by providing some disciplinary context for each new concept.

Managing result lists
And this brings me to the way that reference works serve us in this online age: they provide context that can help students look at a database result list and pick out likely items to open and explore further. We’ve all seen students who get overwhelmed by massive result lists and either just scrap the whole effort, open random items, or start doggedly opening every single result. (We have growing numbers of students who simply will not search things like ProQuest or JSTOR because there are too many results.) Disciplinary experts, on the other hand, scan for likely looking results and only open those that are related or that they’re pretty sure will help them figure out how to tweak their search. And reference works can help students develop the capacity to inch toward a more intelligent interpretation of and navigation through result list.

What else? As we think about collections and information needs shifting, where do reference collections fit?

The Problem with Vocabulary

By IRIS Posted on by

There are a couple of things I really like about being primarily a subject librarian, and about having subject librarians easily accessible in a college library. For one thing, it sure helps when those crazy-hard questions come to the desk and you can say something helpful-sounding like “I can get you started with some of the basics, and then you should go see so-and-so for more in-depth help.” Of course, then there are those crazy-hard questions that come to the desk and are in my area, so I can’t pass them off… but we’ll forget about those for the moment.

But one of the things that’s most valuable about this division of labor in an undergraduate environment is that each librarian can concentrate on developing discipline-relevant vocabulary. I’m not talking about vocabulary in the “how to talk to students” sense at the moment, though that’s certainly very important. After all, even “primary source” means something different to each discipline. No, I’m just talking about terms and vocabularies associated with topics of research. When a student of literature comes and talks to me about rhizomatic narratives or the relationship between metaphor and ideology, I have a whole thesaurus in my head that opens to the correct spot and starts coming up with alternate search terms. I know where these things fit into umpteen different literary theorists’ perspectives, I can recognize key works referenced in the titles of scholarly papers. Not only can I employ these terms and names directly by adding them to my search, but I can recognize articles in a result list that might be relevant simply by calling on this mental map of the topic. Then I can open those results and use vocabulary I find there to create new searches.

Since search is fundamentally a character-matching game, with people supplying characters in a row (i.e. words) and computers matching those characters to the characters in its index, lack of vocabulary renders search essentially useless. I don’t know or recognize the terms that are central to, for example, the IMF. So I’m basically stuck with ineffective searches and only limited options for refining my searches. And I can’t help steer students to refine their terms because I have no mental map of this topic beyond “something to do with money, and something that’s international.”

If we don’t have access to mental maps, how do we build our students’ mental maps? And how do we generate search examples that will help them learn?

And how do I develop mental maps of all the research topics my students need help with?

As Federated Search Matures, What Is Possible and What Still Isn’t?

By IRIS Posted on by

Over the course of the past few months (well, years actually, but more recently it’s become a higher priority project and less of a “watch and see” project), Carleton and St. Olaf have been exploring federated search as a joint option for our two libraries. It’s entailed many meetings and informal discussions, quite a bit of research, and significant time imagining scenarios and functions and services.

The good news is that federated search products have improved, even compared to last winter. Metalib, for example, has what looks like a slick set-up which would allow me to quickly and easily select databases that might be useful at the course- or assignment-level and to create a search box that will let my students explore just those resources. In fact, this more focused use of the system strikes me as incredibly appealing. I can imagine using this for almost every class I serve, but especially for the interdisciplinary classes. I would also look forward to using a federated search tool to look up a known item. You know the kind of search… you know the author or the title but not where it was published, and you have to go searching through 25 or 30 databases just to get a complete citation. These frustrating sessions could be a thing of the past just like the similarly frustrating hunts for full text access were squashed by our link resolver.

Encouraging this kind of use of the tool while discouraging its use as a kind of Library Google wouldn’t be so hard, I think. It would mean limiting exposure to the “search every database under the sun” search box, and placing all kinds of subject-specific search boxes in the places where students will be likely to find and use them. I can imaging search boxes on every research guide, and I bet professors would be happy to put course-specific search boxes into their pages in our Course Management System. We’d have to be careful how we labeled and described these pages or we’d end up with the “every search box searches everything” problem all over again. But I think this could accomplished, and what’s more, I think it could serve our students well.

At the same time that these exciting possibilities exist, though, federated search is still not up to par as a Library Google, or even a tool for pointing students toward subject-specific databases. Not by a long shot. Do a keyword search for “psychology” and you still won’t get many results from PsychINFO, simply because the word “psychology” has very little descriptive value in a database wholly devoted to that subject, so it isn’t used very often in that database. Because of this, the tool can’t even serve as a pointing device to get students into a subject-appropriate database. All it’d point toward would be Academic Search Premier, and ProQuest.

But will the students be satisfied anyway? We hear all the time that they don’t want the “best” sources as long as they find stuff that’s “good enough,” so we should provide access to some system that would supply “good enough” easily. Well, I didn’t necessarily agree with that line of reasoning to begin with, but in the last couple of years my co-workers and I have repeatedly experienced proof that general results from ASP and ProQuest do NOT satisfy our students. We have students who refuse to search ProQuest because of the sheer number of hits, many of which are irrelevant to their needs. If I do an example search in class and come up with 500 hits, a common response is, “But how do you ask it for more specific things? Isn’t that a lot to look through?” Seeing students flock away from ASP and ProQuest makes me think that an even more general search tool would not go over well in the long run.

And, of course, there’s the problem of the frustration and instruction time involved in helping students navigate collections of collections, but I’ve already written about that at length here. All I’ll add is that the one class of freshmen described there ended up requiring multiple sessions of clarification in class, time spend writing up detailed instructions that could be linked from the Course Management System, 7-8 hours of one-on-one time in my office, and about 4 hours of reference desk time, all told. And all that to accomplish a simple exploratory assignment that lead them through a collection of collections. And while I don’t grudge that time at all (I learned a lot by helping them through it, and it gave me excuses to teach them so much more than navigating American Memory), I can only imagine the amount of instruction and desk time we’d sink into a poorly implemented federated search product. Far from being a time-saver, I think it’d be a time-sink.

So at this point in the federated search life-cycle, I think it’s finally become useful if implemented smartly, but it hasn’t yet become useful as a monolithic library search tool. If we end up getting one of these things, I actually look forward to coming up with a careful and creative implementation that will maximize its benefits and minimize its faults. I think we could end up having a positive influence on our students’ search experience and outcomes if we do this well, just as I think both the experience and the outcomes will be disappointing if we do this poorly.

I have only one goal, and that is to serve my students well. I just wish I knew exactly what that would look like at this point. Even though I’m on the committee that’s supposed to recommend a tool to our libraries and should therefore be in a position to know which way we’ll go, I’m waiting with bated breath to see what we decide. The suspense is killing me!

The Joys of Journal Searching in the MLA International Bibliography.

By IRIS Posted on by

This morning’s class was one of those typical classes: Teach these students how to find journal articles in the MLA International Bibliography, please. Nothing very remarkable in that. But for some reason, today’s class went remarkably well. It was one of those classes where you leave feeling all glowy and like you’d actually made a real difference. And you know what I discovered? Of all things, I love teaching the MLA International Bibliography and citation best.

The MLA-IB is such a difficult-to-use database, and yet it’s the bedrock of almost all of the research done in language and literature (the disciplines that I serve). So to have finally figured out how to unlock it for my students has been such a huge relief! It took me more than two years of working with it and with my students to figure out how to tease information out of it and how to explain that process to students, but I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can say with confidence that I’m covering the important concepts and significantly changing my students’ searching capabilities in the process. I’ll even go so far as to say that I can usually pull this off in an interesting way… which is probably the glowy feeling talking, but I’ll go with it.

I can’t even describe how happy this makes me. I’ve struggled for a while to figure out what unique skills I bring to the amazing group I work with, and I think at long last I can say with confidence that there ARE search skills and strategies that are unique to my disciplines and that I now have some expertise in deploying.

I’ve also discovered another secret weapon, The Subversive Handout, which I’ll write about later. (How’s that for a librarian cliff-hanger?) ;-)