Google/Ask/Yahoo! is rarely the first place I will look for information when helping a student. If it’s a really current topic, I’ll try Academic Search Premiere and LexisNexis. If it’s something more scholarly and related to a specific subject, I will use subject databases, though I will usually try Academic Search Premiere as well since it just has so much stuff. Yesterday, I was helping a student find scholarly literary criticisms and books about Tom Robbins’ work. She only had a few days until her paper was due, so ILL-ing books was not an option. The first thing I would have done was search the Literature Resource Center or I would have grabbed the index for the 20th Century Authors series. However, the student had already exhausted the material in the Literature Resource Center (good girl!) and for some odd reason her professor had expressly forbidden them from using any of the first floor reference materials. Ummm… ok… I think the purpose was to get the students using the databases and the library catalog, but while that would work well with Shakespeare or Dickens, there isn’t quite as much on Tom Robbins.
We really don’t have any other databases that specifically find literary criticisms, so I could have spent the next 30 minutes searching various databases looking for stuff about Tom Robbins that was of high enough quality to go into this gal’s paper (most of which would not have been of high quality). Instead, I decided to try a trick that I often find useful when doing reference work — depending on the subject. I know that there are people who are big fans and scholars of authors, wars, historical events, and other subjects. Some fans are passionate enough to make bibliographies of all the works they’ve found on their subject of interest. Sometimes I can do a search in Google/Ask/Yahoo! and find a bibliography on a subject for which it was difficult to find articles doing a regular database search. So I tried doing a search for Tom Robbins and voila! The first result was a “fan site” for Tom Robbins complete with a bibliography of his works and works about him (separated into books, magazines and newspapers, scholarly journals, and theses and dissertations). Yes, the bibliography was a bit dated, but still, it was extremely comprehensive for the years it covered. And since the student needed only three more works and their date did not matter, we were sure we’d find plenty of these in the databases or the catalog. The books about Tom Robbins (he was discussed among many other authors) we would never have found in the catalog because he was not a subject term nor was his name mentioned in the title. The articles I may have found had I searched every conceivable database, but it worked a lot better to find the bibliography, check our A-Z product to see if we have the journal, and find the article in the database that journal is held in. While this trick doesn’t always work, since there aren’t always such fans/scholars for every subject, I find it’s often worth trying if I can’t find enough stuff in the databases. If I don’t find anything, I’ve usually only expended about 1-3 minutes of time.
This is why I never buy the whole Google/Ask/Yahoo! is something librarians should avoid using bit. I always start with the databases, but the databases don’t cover every subject well. Sometimes I can find good things in Google/Ask/Yahoo! because I know what I’m looking for. And I know that my search skills will get better as I face more challenges at the reference desk. But honestly, I think most librarians brush up on their search skills when trying to answer difficult reference questions. Any librarian worth his or her salt will learn something new every day that they are on the reference desk. It’s so important to be flexible and not to only try searching the three things you always search and then give up if you can’t find anything. We have to not only be familiar with our own databases, but with how to search-smart on the Web, and which Web sites have useful subject info. I work with a lot of Masters students in diplomacy and criminal justice, and these students often need to use the Web to find a lot of the statistics and government information they use in their research. Our Criminal Justice Abstracts and Criminal Justice Periodicals are good, but they don’t always meet the needs of our students.
I can’t even believe how much I’ve learned in the past eight months by doing reference, teaching information literacy classes, and creating instructional materials for the online grad students (much more than I could have learned in any class). It’s crazy! So while Steven Cohen tells us to brush up on our search skills instead of “working on that library MySpace account [and] posting pictures of your book collection on Flickr,” I think most of us work on our search skills just by working with patrons (and are those really your options at work? Mine usually are slightly more urgent and necessary). Yes, I look at Resource Shelf and LII, but just like my students, I learn a lot more by actually using what I’ve learned in practical situations. I agree with Steven that online searching should be a core course in library schools, because I’ve seen bad/half-assed searching and that’s why I am so proprietary with reference questions from the online graduate students. And at my school, with many older staff members, we have the opposite problem, where some people ONLY search the databases and never venture out on the Web. And sometimes I wonder if perhaps people who aren’t committed to going the extra mile for their patrons will never make the effort, whether they are search savvy or not. Maybe I’m just a young, overconfident or totally naive librarian, but I honestly think that by being flexible about the resources you use, knowing about your library’s databases, relevant Web resources, and search engines, and always being willing to go the extra mile for your patrons, you’re going to do pretty good reference work.
Meredith, that was really well said, and I agree completely. There are times when a broad web search is the right thing to do — even if we feel that it’s our job to educate students about the library-specific resources we have to offer, there are times when using the web is just the right thing to do. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the same is true of our databases, as well. My definition of a good reference librarian includes the idea that we use the full range of resources available to us, and that we know which are most appropriate, and when.
I suspect that when many librarians stridently deny the usefulness of search engines at the reference desk, they’re really expressing fear that the search engines will replace us, or expressing dismay that the search engines do some things better than we do. Which, honestly, is why we need to know how to use them.
Amen! As I’ve said before (and undoubtedly will again), what constitutes a good reference source depends on the question. The other day we had a patron come in who wanted to know about hog prices. Actually, he wanted to know specifically how much my coworker had paid for hers last year. I don’t think any database (or search engine) could have answered that!
You don’t know about the Hog Price database? For shame!!! 😉
I don’t know – perhaps its because I’m a special librarian and research requests tend to be somewhat infrequent and extremely indepth, but I can’t help but agree with Steven that search skills are definitely something you should spend time working on. Dialog in particular is a database where if you don’t use it, you lose the search skills for it, and while its an extreme example I think it applies in other situations – from the Internet to a paid database.
Maybe I’M being naive, but I thought Steven’s point was more that we have to keep up the more traditional skills in addition to adding all the fun web 2.0 functionality. For me, that means taking a few minutes on “cataloging” days or days when I’m working on the SLA Petroleum and Energy Resources Division blog to do some practice searching, maybe in Dialog, or maybe on a new search engine I’ve heard about.
Nice post.
At MPOW today, in a talk about finding content for MPOW, the first thing I asked our intern was “Can you do an XYZ Google search? Or an ABC Google search?” He said “Absolutely!” And I didn’t even put him on the spot to prove it to me–I figured if he didn’t then, he would by five minutes after we got off the phone. 😉 But most likely he does, because knowing how to exploit Google is like knowing how to drive, and he’s apparently getting a good education.
I don’t have any problem telling someone to Google up this or that. If you’re talking to savvy info professionals, Googling up something ought to be equivalent with the shorthand instructions two good cooks might share.
Meredith, my only other comment is about your (otherwise quite gorgeous) writing. You could make your posts so much more readable by chunking your completed paragraphs into twos and threes. That’s all you need to do: go through each paragraph, find breaking points, and hint the Enter key.
It’s just an online absorption thingy issue: the shorter paragraphs are easier on the eyes. I wish I was more consistent using this tip myself.
To make a point really stand out, set it on its own.
Anyhoo… great post!
An other “Google Trick” that is of relevance to many students is for citations. For example, if you put the title of the article plus “Works Cited” you get (hopefull) proper citations in MLA — to me this is a better strategy for the time-pressed student than offering the manual, but I always offer the caveat that the citer may not have it right!
Stealing citations from relevant articles is also a favorite strategy of mine and one which is good for your PhD students who want “everything” they can find, and Google is helpful here as well. “Stolen citations” are usually a good way of getting the “classic” works on a subject area — moreso than the databases, which usually favor currency — and for some reason I cannot fathom — positivist literature.
Google rules — it’s the learning strategies that suck. Google can only get people so far. That’s why I always advocate an information search plan. Even for the time-pressed student, having a plan of attack is much better than slogging through hit-or-miss strategies.
Finally, the true intent of my post comes to light.
The problem that I have with Google is not the engine itself. In fact, it can be too good at times. Too good that librarians could forget that other engines may provide better results under similar circumstances. By defaulting to Google, it becomes an instant reaction to use for any question posed.
You actually took my post a step further by actually mentioining other search engines and that’s exactly what I appreciate about your post. My beef was with always using Google. We all know (do we?) that Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN all have pretty low cross-results (I think it’s in the 30% or so).
To NOT use other search engines, as well as subject specific directories and the fee-based databases, is actually doing our users a disservice. In addition (and I mentioned this in my post), anyone can default to Google. What librarians can do is go beyond what the general public can do. Anyone can type in a few words in Google. It’s the increased where-with-all that librarians have with filtering unwanted data, focused research, and advanced knowledge that makes us special and needed behind the reference desk.
If Google can’t solve every problem, we shouldn’t be automatically defaulting to it. If it could, we should. And maybe it is because I worked in a special library for 5 years that the nature of the questions pushed me beyond Google into free and fee-based databases and that I learned from that.
Or, maybe it was the many times that attorneys asked me to “Google something”, and I brought them back better results from other search resources that planted a seed in my brain to not default to Google.
Or maybe I’m just jealous that 50 bazillion people use Google and far less than that use our nations libraries for research.
As a public librarian, I’m in the same camp as Meredith. Google, or A9, or whatever, works best for our users in many, many, many cases.
And I’d go further. We need to (re)design our libraries with this reality in mind. At my library, for instance, we can walk the user over to a stand-up OPAC and help them search for a book (DVD, video, etc., etc.), but we can’t do the same for an online search.
Yet this is often what the situation (and user) warrants.
Just this evening, for instance, I described an information search that Google (or whatever) would have answered. But (mea culpa) I chose to answer the user’s question rather than his information need.
This was due, in part, to the physical accessibility (or inaccessibility) of our Internet-connected public-access computers.
Ideally, our OPACs would enable Web browsing. On the other hand, users would have to be “barred” from using these WebPACs for emailing, surfing or chatting. (Otherwise they’d almost never be available for the very situation we’re describing.)
My post is here: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/infomikevictoria?id=31
Any ideas?
Karen, you’re totally right. I tend to be long-winded and I think that would definitely be helped by just breaking up the giant blocks of text. It’s funny, because that’s something I really dislike in other blogs, and yet I do it myself. Thanks for making me more cognizant of it. 🙂
Good points from All. I enjoyed the first keynote at CIL06 which served as a good reminder to break out of my search engine habits. I found Clusty the Clustering Engine this last year and have found some applications for it in certain reference situations.
As the systems librarian for our school, I put Google’s toolbar on all of the library’s open systems cause I love the highlighter when trying to find keywords in a long page. I know others toolbars do the same but our IT dept. is not “enlightened” enough to support Firefox on campus yet.
I use search engines to help find more keywords, phrases, and related topics when the student is researching a difficult or obscure topic or if the database’s controlled vocab doesn’t produce any other terms to pursue.
Thanks for the tip on citation searching and fan sites. I can use that.
Meredith, don’t forget the search engines that search inside the books too – Google Book Search and Amazon.com – can’t tell you how many times (well ok, it was probably only 3) I’ve found something using those search engines that never could have been found using traditional resources.
Hi, Meredith,
Good post! I just did two freshman comp classes this morning that were all about “no resource is inherently good or bad, it’s all about how you use it.” This is true for the Web, proprietary databases, Amazon, even People magazine. The librarian’s responsibility is to know the full range of resources that can be brought to bear on a question, and to (gently) guide the user toward the most appropriate sources.
Looking forward to working with you and learning more about Wikis and all the other cool stuff you use. Cheers.
Janice Beal
University of New England, Biddeford ME
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No, no, no, you’re not long-winded… you’re maximalist. 😉 Wear it and be proud! I learned that trick from Teresa, my editor at TechSource; I noticed she went through everything I wrote and broke my paragraphs into two or three chunks. What would be comfortable to read in paper is hard online. Often it’s all you need to do.
Thanks Janice! I completely agree with what you wrote. I’m looking forward to working with you too!