Teresa Weisser said "It's interesting that there is an assumption that finding information is easier now than it used to be. Recent research at the University of Washington indicates that college students do not find locating relevant information to be easy at all."
As information professionals WE know this. The question is whether the folks higher up on the administrative food chain understand this.
I'm also interested in seeing what happens once the Google "library" is available via subscription. I can see some non-librarian administrators thinking "Why do we need to spend so much to buy library books when we have 8-10 million of them available through Google?" I think library administrators should be thinking now about how they would answer that question.
Bernie Sloan
--- On Thu, 9/24/09, Teresa Weisser <Teresa.Weisser_at_MILLERSVILLE.EDU> wrote:
> From: Teresa Weisser <Teresa.Weisser_at_MILLERSVILLE.EDU>
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Y'all will love this
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Date: Thursday, September 24, 2009, 11:22 AM
> It's interesting that there is an
> assumption that finding information is easier now than it
> used to be. Recent research at the University of Washington
> indicates that college students do not find locating
> relevant information to be easy at all. The progress
> report for Project Information Literacy makes for
> interesting reading http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_ProgressReport_2_2009.pdf.
> One of the points which the researchers make is:
>
> In general, students reported
> being challenged, confused, and frustrated by the research
> process, despite the
> convenience, relative ease, or ubiquity of the Internet. In
> our sessions, frustrations included the
> effects of information overload and being
> inundated with resources, but more. Participants also
> reported having particular
> difficulty traversing a vast and ever-changing information
> landscape. Specifically, participants
> greatest challenges were related to finding the materials
> they desired, knew existed, and needed on a "just in
> time" basis.
>
> I would argue that, while finding data which matches a
> given set of keywords is quite easy, finding relevant
> information in the mass of retrieved documents which are
> allegedly relevant is difficult and getting more so as
> database size increases. Although "relevance" and
> "keyword frequency" are currently equated, that equation
> works better in some disciplines than others. In the
> sciences and other disciplines with relatively specific and
> unique vocabularies, keyword searching can work reasonably
> well. In some of the humanities and social sciences,
> not so much. As someone who does both cataloging and
> reference work, I was interested to note that, about a year
> ago, it became very difficult to locate relevant articles
> using keyword searches in our general periodical
> index. Whereas before it had sometimes been possible
> to help students locate articles without having to teach
> them how to use the controlled vocabulary, the thesaurus
> became essential once the database reached a!
> certain size. The keyword searches simply
> retrieved too much irrelevant material.
>
> Teresa Weisser
> Ganser Library
> Millersville University of Pennsylvania
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU]
> On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
> Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 10:46 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Y'all will love this
>
> On Sep 24, 2009, at 10:28 AM, James Weinheimer wrote:
>
> > I still say that we need to find reasons to "make
> ourselves relevant
> > in the
> > new environment" (a phrase that I have heard repeated
> throughout the
> > years
> > and apparently coming true in California). I think we
> can, but we
> > must think
> > outside the box.
>
>
> IMHO, the way to make ourselves more relevant is to move
> beyond the
> access to information and towards the facilitation of
> services against
> information. Finding information is relatively easy for
> people to
> accomplish. People are drowning in it. Figuring out ways to
> use it is
> more challenging. Examples include compare & contrast,
> graph,
> summarize, annotate, etc. More are here:
>
> http://pln.palinet.org/wiki/index.php/Future_catalogs:_food_for_thought
>
> When people acquire information from us (or others) we need
> to figure
> out ways to make it easier for them to use it for what ever
> purpose
> they desire. Learning. Teaching. Scholarship. Verification.
> Decision-
> making. Writing. Marketing. Estimating. Predicting. Etc.
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University of Notre Dame
>
Received on Thu Sep 24 2009 - 11:51:26 EDT