… The more you grow as a professional, the more often you’ll end up referring questions to others.
Comments closedLearning in Libraries and Loving It
… The more you grow as a professional, the more often you’ll end up referring questions to others.
Comments closedI’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. :)
4 CommentsTomorrow I teach my first real music research class, so I’ve spent the last couple of days putting together what I’ve affectionately termed the Longest Research Guide Ever (link will be live until Dec. 2007, after which time you can contact me if, for some strange reason, you really want to see this monstrous thing). On the one hand, I’m really proud of this guide. It represents the sum total of what I know about finding sources for music research (except that it doesn’t list a couple of important bibliographic databases… Sad that this would be the sum total, but there you have it. After all, I only learned this stuff myself 10 days ago…). On the other hand, it also represents all that I try to avoid in a course research guide, and so I feel kind of guilty even showing it to my students tomorrow.
Here’s what I don’t like about the guide: it’s long. It’s a long block of text. There’s nothing to lessen the unrelenting, overwhelming length of the thing. I’ve tried to mitigate this by including a sort of table of contents at the beginning, blockish indents, and bulleted lists. But still, the thing is just plain long, and the whole point of a course research guide as opposed to a subject research guide is that it’s supposed to be neatly tailored to the needs of a specific course or even a specific assignment. … This is no neatly tailored piece of writing; it’s a dissertation on how to find specific content in the library.
But this particular course guide is long for three very good reasons.
Whether this ends up being a success or not, I hope that at the very least the students learn as much by using the guide as I learned to create it. I also anticipate stealing most of the content from this thing to work into the research guide for the whole department, and probably 4 or 5 littler handouts for the music faculty.
4 CommentsI spent a couple of hours today trying to find the original French version of Hélène Cixous’ essay “Sorties” for a student. It’s one of Cixous’ most anthologized essays, but I simply could NOT find the French version. All I could find were translations.
Foreign language materials are notoriously difficult to find, even in WorldCat, because they rarely get full descriptions and almost never get tables of contents (which is what I needed). I couldn’t search WorldCat by anything but author (and limit it to French language), but this left me with many results, none of which were described fully enough even to tell me if the given record was for one of Cixous’ fiction works or not.
I tried bibliographies, but the ones we had on hand only listed English language versions. I tried web searching, but drew a blank there too.
At long last I went to one of my grad school anthologies and saw that the essay was reproduced from a translated book called The Newly Born Woman. After trying several other tacks, I finally plugged that title into our catalog, hoping that it would give me more information. Low and behold, the uniform title popped up Jeune née. English (“The Newly Born Woman. English”). Never have I loved a uniform title more! Suddenly I realized that the translated book wasn’t just some collection of Cixous’ work. It was the thing itself. Searching for Jeune née (leaving off the “English” because that’s precisely what I didn’t want) I found what I wanted and practically ran downstairs, pulled the book, and flipped pages until I reached “Duèxieme Partie: Sorties.” Haleluia!!!! Now if only I could add the tables of contents to our record Right Now!
I settled for adding the table of contents to WorldCat.org… but I’d prefer to be able to do it to our local catalog record while I’m thinking of it. Meanwhile, I’m going to have one of our catalogers add the contents notes as soon as the student is done with it. Meanwhile, I finally feel like a librarian again… I was worried for a bit there.
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