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Category: Libraries and Librarians

Why Advanced Search?

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 14th, 2010

I often teach Boolean searching to classes of students.

There, I’ve said it. And I’ve decided not to be ashamed of that practice even though most of the literature I’ve read since library school has steadfastly lambasted the practice as outdated, unnecessary, and self-indulgent.

Of course, I don’t teach it in every class, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for a good advanced search, and students of all class years may end up hearing about how they can use OR to combine conceptual synonyms and how they can use AND to combine those clusters of conceptual synonyms, and just look at how much better ProQuest behaves now that it understands what you mean by “gender” and “higher education” and “achievement,” and that you’d really like articles that address all three concepts, please. Freshmen eat it up like candy, and when I do my mini-surveys at the end of class (name one thing you learned that will be most useful to you — name one thing that still confuses you), the “how to use AND and OR” portion of class is a consistent hit. Sophomores through seniors really can’t function well in the MLA International Bibliography without it. And just yesterday, I learned one reason why they may latch on to Boolean searching as their ticket to research nirvana.

I was talking with a professor while her students were busily putting into practice the things I’d just taught them about searching the MLA International Bibliography, and she mentioned that she hasn’t ever really needed to know this type of advanced searching because she gets pretty good result lists and can scan them quickly to pick out what she needs. “I rely a lot on people’s names, though,” she mused. And that’s when I realized that advanced search techniques are important to students because they provide at least a partial compensation for the students’ lack of disciplinary context.

So, armed with the knowledge that a) my students like it, and b) they need it because they don’t know the names of the major players in their research areas, I’m going to happily continue teaching Boolean searching (when appropriate) until it seems like neither of those criteria apply any more.

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Communities of Inquiry

Communities of Inquiry

Published by Iris on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

I spent the last two afternoons in a workshop for professors who are thinking of teaching Carleton’s new first year seminars next year, so I’m now well steeped in thoughts about first year students. And the more I think about it, the more I think that my main goal for first year students is for them to understand the far-reaching impact and usefulness of understanding the concept of communities of inquiry.

Say What?
This is a stuffed cow. (Photo by Catherine Woolley)

Think about it. If you know who you’re talking with in this vast thing we call “scholarly communication,” it helps you make appropriate choices about everything from topic to citation style to rhetorical style. It reinforces the idea that you’re contributing something to a conversation rather than just parroting back a set of facts. It allows you to evaluate sources and arguments (none of which are inherently “good” or “bad” regardless of context). It helps you know which words are meaningful and therefore ripe for use as search terms. And perhaps most important, it helps you decide what you’ll need to back up with evidence in the first place. After all, only the things that count as odd or new or controversial within your community need explicit backing up, and these things can change radically from community to community. The omnipresent pieces of your community’s world rarely need explanation.

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What is Information Literacy Anyway?

Published by Iris on Monday, December 7th, 2009

Tomorrow I’m supposed to stand up in front of a group of faculty, all of whom are considering teaching one of the college’s new curriculum-wide freshman seminars next year, all of which must include some explicit practice developing information literacy. My task: explain information literacy to them in 10 easy minutes so that they can start thinking of ways to build it into their syllabi.

I wish I knew what information literacy is.

My co-workers have heard me say that I’m particularly confused by two things about information literacy: “information” and “literacy.” “Information” can refer to everything from color and smell to poetry to data to formal research articles. And while all of these things could be included in the definition of “information literacy,” for the most part we mean something more specific than that, something more like “facts or approaches or primary sources or secondary sources.” I know, I know, there are exceptions to that. But really, we don’t mean “the amount of the data after data compression” (Shu-Kun), or many of the other meanings proposed by Wikipedians. And “literacy” feels like a remedial skill to me, whereas I tend to think of sophistication in this area as a combination of concrete skills and an omnipresent habit of mind, both of which are useful in and out of the classroom and research contexts.

But this doesn’t really help me with my presentation, so I looked back at a couple of the position documents my department has produced in the last couple of years: Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts and the List of 6 and more. Then my co-workers and I plagiarized the second one, tweaked it a little, and came up with a list of questions that would be useful for first year students. This we developed into a handout for the presentation: Finding, Evaluating, and Ethically Using Information.

For my purposes tomorrow, these questions sketch out the habit of mind that information literate people exhibit. They don’t cover “knowing you need information,” and they don’t cover concrete search skills or strategies, but they are a start.

[edit: I should have linked to Steve’s post and didn’t, so here are his thoughts on the topic.]

Shu-Kun Lin (2008). ‘Gibbs Paradox and the Concepts of Information, Symmetry, Similarity and Their Relationship’, Entropy, 10 (1), 1-5. Available online at Entropy journal website.

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The World Between the Lines

The World Between the Lines

Published by Iris on Friday, November 6th, 2009
All's Well That Ends Well - National Theatre
All's Well That Ends Well - National Theatre

A few friends and I have started a Shakespeare Project. We want to read Shakespeare’s plays, starting with the ones we’re least familiar with and moving up to the biggies we all remember from college, taking about two weeks to read each one. (This is kind of a repeat of a project my family undertook when I was in high school. We’d all read a play a week and then sit down on Sundays to watch the BBC versions of the plays. It was a project I mostly resented at the time, but now really want to do.) So every morning I get up, make hot chocolate while feeding the cat, and then spend half an hour or 45 minutes reading a few scenes of Shakespeare. When the cat finishes his breakfast, he jumps up to sit quietly with his front paws planted as near to the left-hand edge of my Complete Works of Shakespeare as possible so that I can run my fingers along his head and shoulders while I read and sip hot chocolate. Pretty idyllic.

Anyway, I was reading All’s Well That Ends Well, which I had just seen beautifully performed by the National Theatre about 10 days ago, and I suddenly realized that there had been whole little scenes of action in the production that simply don’t show up in the dialog on the page. The actors and directors had taken the time to wonder why some of those off-hand lines were there, and to build that world into their production. Left to my own devices, novice that I am, I’m incapable of seeing the world that exists between the lines of dialog on the page, but that world is so much richer and more fascinating than the pure dialog admits.

As I taught a couple classes of freshmen this week and tried to build a picture of college-level research for them, I wondered yet again how to bridge the gap between expert and novice. I see conversations where they see bits of data. I see interconnections between vocabulary and lines of arguement where they see result list after result list that doesn’t contain “sources on my topic” (by which they mean “sources that say what I’m about to argue”). How do I first describe the world between the lines for them, and then help them develop the capacity to imagine it for themselves?

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