Library instruction
I’ve recently been pondering the idea of database searches as an experiment – hypothesis, experiment, evaluate, modify the hypothesis and try again. This might make a useful way to introduce sci/tech students in particular to the idea that you’re not going to necessarily get your best results from your first search; I’ll have to see how they receive it when I’ve actually got a class to test it on….
Incorporating Failure Into Library Instruction (from ACRLog) discusses the pedagogy of learning by failure and talks about times when it’s more or less suitable for library instruction.
Anne Pemberton’s super-awesome paper From friending to research: Using Facebook as a teaching tool (January 2011, College & Research Libraries News, vol. 72 no. 1 28-30) discusses Facebook as a useful teaching metaphor for databases.
Don’t Make It Easy For Them (from ACRLog) – with caveats in the comments that I think are at least as important as the main post.
Data and databases
There’s a whole D-Lib Magazine issue devoted to the topic of research data.
Heads they win, tales we lose: Discovery tools will never deliver on their promise – and don’t miss the comment thread at the bottom of the page, which segues into the dilemma of increasingly expensive journal bundles and possible (vs viable) solutions.
Web services
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium discusses the idea that “the fundamental question of the web” is “Why wasn’t I consulted?” – that is, each medium has its niche of what it’s good at and why people use it, and webpages need to consider how to answer this question.
Library Day in the Life
Round 6 begins next week, in which librarians from all walks of librarianship share a day (or week) in the life.
Deborah
Thank you for keeping us informed, as always, Deborah.
I noticed that most, if not all, the librarians in ‘Library Day in the Life’ appear to be from countries other than New Zealand.
The ‘Don’t make it easy for them’ post (and comments) was thought-provoking. In my experience, most students seem to appreciate it when you not only find what they want, but also show them how to find information themselves. I guess it depends on the student and how much they want to learn, but this is my experience to date in the Law Library. I have never had a student look impatient or glazed over in the eyes when I show them how to find something.
NZ librarians tend to congregate on Twitter; Australian ones on blogs; and US ones – well, it varies more there (due to larger numbers) but the circle I hang out with is on Friendfeed. Anyway it means that international memes don’t always propagate here. I’ll try to do it myself at least today if not the whole week.
Yes, I like the approach you describe – to my (perhaps harsh) reading the original author seems to describe a choice between either a) doing the search almost in secret and then handing over the result, or b) showing them how to do it then telling them to go do it themselves. I like turning my screen and showing/explaining what I’m doing as I go, so it doesn’t need to take more time than necessary if they are in a rush but they can ask whatever questions they have along the way and will be able to do it themselves the next time.
Deborah