Comments on: How I Talk About Searching, Discovery and Research in Courses

By: Rana

Rana — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:07:12 +0000

One thing I’ve learned during my indexing training is that there are underlying reasons so many of the big databases are so researcher unfriendly, and why it’s worth trying different variants of keywords during your search. Basically, they are not seamless across the content; most of them are made of conglomerations of smaller databases from different sources, and not all of them are indexed consistently over time. When those smaller databases are later combined and aggregated by the central hosting service, the indexing that’s done at that level is perforce more simplistic, because the indexing “thesaurus” – the lexicon of acceptable keywords – is more restricted and has to apply widely across disciplines, instead of focusing narrowly on the needs of a single field. Moreover, because they are indexing so many articles so rapidly, most of them are limited to a handful of keywords at best, and the accuracy of the keywords depends both on the experience of the indexer and the clarity of the keyword descriptions. Imagine a series of drop-down menus suggesting possible terms, and only five fields that you can fill with terms, and that’s more-or-less what you’re dealing with. Moreover, as meanings of terms and concentrations of concepts evolve over time, new keywords are added to the thesaurus – but they are not back-added to older entries. So, for example, if you search under “cell phone” you will not get older entries using the keyword phrase “mobile phone,” the phrase that “cell phone” came to replace.

The result is that you have at least three overlapping sets of searchable text – the original keywords from the original database, the new keywords imposed by the aggregating service, and the keywords embedded in the text of the article – and each of those sets evolves and changes over time. Expecting an accurate and perfect set of results from a single search is therefore unreasonable, even if one has a high degree of experience coming up with viable search strings. Instead, the most useful way is to run at the topic from as many directions as you can, and pin it down that way.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:53:09 +0000

Right. I think using an advanced interface makes sense only when you start with a very specific need, you're working in a disciplinary environment where there are more constraints on information and where research traditions don't necessarily involve working extensively with textual or archival data at the discovery stage. My colleague Colin Purrington has written up advice on how to get primary literature citations for lab reports, for example, where he directs students very appropriately to specialized databases right at the start of their inquiry.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:44:54 +0000

It’s only after they get a gazillion hit results that the categories start to make sense.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:44:05 +0000

Over at the Friendfeed site, the librarians really disagree with your number 2. However, I think you are absolutely right for History and related disciplines. My high school students are completely flummoxed by most advanced search features and have no idea how to use them. It’s onl

By: Martha Hardy

Martha Hardy — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:21:46 +0000

Amen. Academic librarians around the world hug you (not all at the same time, of course).

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:56:32 +0000

Certainly one of my major pet peeves. We ought to be the whip hand in these relationships. Who else is going to buy most of these vendor products? And yet we passively accept terrible design decisions, hoarding of information, aggressive attempts to break interoperability and much else. This is another reason why faculty need to be more literate about contemporary information environments, so that we can insist that things change or demand that our institutions stop buying the products that don’t service our needs or specifications.

By: Martha Hardy

Martha Hardy — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:43:44 +0000

Oh, one more thing: I HATE that certain vendors have monopolies on certain indexes. We give these vendors too much power and then are stuck with their sucky interfaces (e.g., CINAHL, my current pet peeve, as the whole universe likely knows by now). I do like Google Scholar very much indeed.

By: Martha Hardy

Martha Hardy — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:39:55 +0000

Yes, I teach students to start with background and overview sources, when I have a chance. Often, they try to jump straight to a research question (or, even worse, a thesis statement) and straight to finding scholarly articles, which leads to all kinds of problems.

Also, searching, reading and writing are integrated, iterative process. You know, find some initial background material, read some of it, think about it, write something about it, figure out what interests you, do some searching for sources on that, mine the source for potential search terminology, write some more, refine the topic, start thinking about potential theses, lather, rinse, repeat.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:35:24 +0000

On the bigger point of information literacy: well, yeah, now THAT is the really big challenge. Students often just want their five articles now because they also accurately gauge what I mention above, namely, what the faculty actually want. The demand for this kind of understanding of information is going to have to be driven by faculty expectation, which in turn takes faculty thinking this way about information. Most faculty don’t, in my experience, while many librarians and information scientists do. I don’t really know how we’re going to get to where we ought to be.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:29:45 +0000

This for me would be a reason why undergraduates should never begin a search in an EBSCO database. 🙂 I’m only being a bit flip here. those are precisely the databases I’m trying to keep them away from unless they know they’re working with a topic where their use is specifically recommended and justified, or they’re at a stage in the research where they want or need to drill down a bit. There are research communities and research traditions where this advice wouldn’t hold, but in most of my classes, starting in a “big” environment like the LC catalog, WorldCat, our own Tripod, Google, Amazon, is the right move.