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Category: In My Classroom

“Teaching the Computer” and Other Fun Substitutes for Boolean Searching

Published by Iris on Thursday, November 1st, 2007

I’ve been doing a lot more teaching and research consulting this term than ever before, and lately I’ve kind of fallen into a different way of teaching complex searches. I used to be more explicit about using boolean to build those wonderful long strings, complete with parentheses and all that jazz. Unsurprisingly, this method left students impressed, but slightly baffled.

Lately, I’ve started “teaching the computer” each of my concepts in turn, and then using the search history to combine the concepts. This started with my senior thesis writers who needed ways to manage immense strings of MLA International Bibliography controlled vocabulary terms. I’d teach them to mine the thesaurus for broad and narrow terms for each of the concepts, explaining why the rules of indexing require that they include even the narrowest terms they could find (which I talked about here). And then, after we’d gathered as many broad and narrow terms as we could for each major concept, we’d hop over to the search history and combine the concepts. Et voila! Beautiful search results (most of the time).

Now I’m trying this out on less advanced students who are having trouble with the concept of combining terms. I help them “teach the computer” each of their concepts and then combine concepts. So, in ProQuest (for example) I might have the student brainstorm all the possible words associated with the concept “poverty” and string them across the top search box using OR “to let the computer know that any one of these could fit my concept.” Then move the cursor to the next search box and start stringing together words associated with illness and health care, again putting an OR between each term. Suddenly, our result set has tons of good articles about the relationship between poverty and disease.

Something about the process of describing a concept to a computer and then having the computer find the overlap between concepts seems to be easier to grasp than the more technical process of combining terms and groups of terms. Maybe it means that we have to juggle fewer terms and concepts in our short-term memories. Maybe it means that we can chunk up the process into easier steps rather than thinking of the search as one massive and frustrating step. Who knows… I’m not a cognitive psychologist. But my advanced students especially seem to reach that “ah-ha” moment pretty quickly and move on to adapt it to their own needs. It’s early days yet with my less advanced students, but so far I’ve seen a few of them repeating the process without a hitch. And several times, I’ve gotten the feeling that my consultations were shorter because the students reached that point of feeling able to go and try this on their own more quickly.

Unfortunately for my ego, this leaves students less impressed with my librarian-ish super powers… after all, anybody can think up words that describe a concept. Ah well. I suppose there’s some value in having people think they could do this without my help. :)

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The Problem of “Print” Resources in Research Assignments

Published by Iris on Friday, March 16th, 2007

We’ve all heard it before. A student comes to the desk and announces that although she already has almost all the sources she needs for a paper, her assignment specifies that she must include at least one “print” source.

In an interesting twist, I’m starting to hear this from students who’ve done everything right. They’ve consulted our databases and found the full text of scholarly articles online. But they get very nervous when I tell them that these full text articles online “count” as “print” sources. How in the world could they have known? It makes perfect sense to me and to their professors, but there’s no way a student could know that “print” simply means “formally published” in all but a small minority of cases.

So I’ve begun to teach Ulrich’s whenever I think this might come up. So far I’ve only done it twice, but each time was completely surprised by the reaction I got. The students ate it up, and of all the things we went over in class, this was the thing they’d come up afterwards to get even more information about. Finally, there’s a way for them to tell without a shadow of a doubt if the PDF they found on Google or via one of our databases is a “print source” or just some paper up online. Here’s the rule: if it’s in Ulrich’s, it’s a “print” source, even if it’s an e-only publication. As an added bonus, you can also tell right off the bat if a source is refereed, knew or established, some places it’s indexed, and whether or not it’s an e-only publication. (Added bonus for me, in order to teach Ulrich’s I have to check to make sure students are adept at finding the periodical’s name, which I always like to squeeze into library sessions.)

So that’s all well and good as a stop-gap measure, but what I’d really like to do is get away from requiring “at least three print sources.” Why not require at least three “formally published” sources, or ask students to determine if their sources were scholarly or not and then justify their choice? “Print” sources will only make less sense as we go along, not more.

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The Value of Book Reviews

Published by Iris on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

Yesterday I taught a class on finding book reviews. The professor had specifically asked for this topic, and I was happy to comply, but I was a little at a loss to figure out what I could do other than pointing out the “document type” limiters in different databases, and show the differences between book reviews published in scholarly journals as opposed to trade publications and newspapers. Luckily, one of my colleagues has thought more about this than I have and taught several classes on book reviews, so I shamelessly cribbed her materials and even mooched some of her examples. And although I can take very little credit, the class we built together seemed to go over very well with the students and this faculty member.

Warning: Extreme examples of my inexperience as a librarian and researcher are about to be revealed. Read on at your own risk. I cannot be held responsible for injuries to eyes that have rolled too far back into your head and can no longer be retrieved, or for bruises to heads that have been beaten against computers. Nor can I be held responsible for damage to hardware or software of said computers.

. . .

I learned a whole heck of a lot teaching this class. First of all, I’d never taught for American Studies before, so I spent quite a bit of time simply familiarizing myself with the publications in that field and where their journals get indexed (Academic Search Premier and ProQuest each index the major American Studies journals, in case you’re interested). But the real breakthrough for me came when my colleague and I were working to answer the question: so what? Why would you spend time looking for book reviews given the fact that the vast majority are positive, a good percentage are neutral, and only a tiny fraction are negative? What use could writing governed by such a ritualized style and publication process be other than to give a summary of the work?

Well, it turns, book reviews can be extraordinarily useful. So useful, in fact, that I will be incorporating them into as many classes as possible in the future.

  • These short essays can give clues about where a particular book fits into the field and niches of that field because it’s one of the reviewer’s tasks to say how well or poorly the book works for people in that field.
  • Reviews can also provide clues about the major players in that field. It’s not uncommon for reviewers to compare the author or book to other authors or books in the field or having similar theoretical perspectives. You can find valuable primary and secondary sources this way. You can also look for other things written by the reviewer, since he or she might also be a player in the field.
  • Reviews may highlight was evidence counts as good evidence in the field. Does the reviewer wish so-and-so had consulted census data? Bingo, you know that statistical information holds cache with this group of scholars. Does the reviewer applaud the use of images, or hint that the author should have explored the intersections between this topic and, say, cinematic history? That’s more information for you to consider as you think about your own topic.
  • And you can also find out what disciplines might be interested in a topic by seeing where reviews for the book appear. Mary C Waters’ book Black Identities was reviewed in the year 2000 by Black Issues Book Review (Vickerman 2000) and by the Journal of Economic Literature (McKinnish 2000), just as an example.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Book reviews are chock full of the important buzz words in the field. In my class yesterday we looked at reviews for Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. We found one from the Journal of American Culture (Kay 1999), one from Publisher’s Weekly (“Forecasts” 1998), and one from Entertainment Weekly (Jacobs 1998). Reading from those reviews, we not only came up with lists of disciplines, related topics, and related concepts, but we also came up with a substantial list of search terms which yield really beautiful results about the social history of the beauty culture in America. What fun!

References:

Forecasts: Nonfiction. Publishers Weekly. 245.16 (1998): 57.

Jacobs, Alexandra. “Hope In a Jar.” Entertainment Weekly. 440 (1998): 68.

Kay, Gwen. “Hope in a Jar (Book Review).” Journal of American Culture (01911813). 22.2 (1999): 106.

McKinnish, Terra G. “The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (Book).” Journal of Economic Literature. 42.1 (2004): 201-202.

Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a jar : the making of America’s beauty culture . 1st ed., New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.

Waters, Mary. Black identities : West Indian immigrant dreams and American realities . New York ;Cambridge Mass.: Russell Sage Foundation ;Harvard University Press, 1999.

Vickerman, Milton. “nonfiction reviews.” Black Issues Book Review. 2.4 (2000): 54.

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Know Your Results Before You Search

Published by Iris on Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Imagine going, money in hand, to a storefront that gives no clue as to it’s merchandise. Will this store sell shoes, food, antiques, or pets? Lined up next this blank storefront are about 50 others, each with a more or less obtuse name, and each with a microphone protruding from it’s door, ready to receive you requests. What would you do?

This is what students face when they first delve into online searching. From long familiarity, most students have a pretty good idea that they’re searching the author’s text of web sites when they choose to request information from Google. Some might even know that authors can supply metadata, but many do not. And most are familiar with the result list as it is presented, and what they can expect to see when they click into a result.

But what about library databases? Some allow full-text searching, some only include citation, abstract, and controlled vocabulary. As the librarian for languages and literature, my primary tool is the MLA International Bibliography (Chadwyck Healey), and this database doesn’t even include an abstract, and the controlled vocabulary is not very evenly applied. (What I would give for MeSH-like terms!) But my students also need to know how to manipulate catalogs and several other databases, including JSTOR, which replaces MLA’s subjects with fully searchable full text. There is almost nothing similar about searching these two databases because everything inside the storefront is fundamentally different. The words you choose, the care with which you construct searches, the results you get… everything changes.

So I’ve begun teaching databases backwards. I start with a record and get the students to understand what’s there and what’s being searched. Then we move back to the result lists and figure out how to leverage a “messy” keyword search by analyzing the results, quickly opening anything that looks remotely relevant, and gleaning search terms that way. Then and only then do we move back to the search interface and I’ve found it takes very little time for the students to understand what’s going on now that they know what they’re searching and what they can conceivably expect to see when they click “Go.”

My favorite question from a student came part way through one of these backwards searching experiences. “Can I use these same ideas in ProQuest?” I answered that she could use exactly this technique to learn at least the basics of any of our databases. But I knew she still had more to ask… “Can I use these same ideas in Google?” She asked. Yes — yes you can.

I need to plant that kid in all my classes.

[Update: Thanks to Mark for pointing out that as I’ve laid this scheme out here, it works best in class situations. But with a little tweaking it also works in “real life” when you confront a new database. See the comments section beginning here for that exchange.]

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