Today was one of those days where my eyes did not want to cooperate. After just a few minutes looking at the computer screen, my eyes felt dry and my head tightened up, but I persevered! I must keep working, even when my eyes are being finicky.
Today I added another book review to my list for the collection development project, as well as signed up for Flow, which is going to replace RefWorks. I practiced dragging and dropping an article from a database, as well as having Flow make a citation for a bibliography from that article. Unfortunately, it did not get ANYTHING right. I will have to keep playing around with it more so I can show students and have it actually work correctly when I show them!
I was mentioning to Jane that it is really great to connect what I'm learning in class with the work I'm doing in the internship. In my Information Literacy and Instruction class, we are learning this unit and this week about Discovery and one-search tools for research, particularly at academic libraries. The articles we've had to read for this week look at data from university libraries and discuss the pros and cons of use of these discovery tools. Some articles postulated that students could figure out search results on their own because they are used to using Google, while others strongly suggested further instruction on how to interpret the results these students are getting, because of that very "Google orientation," which results in quick choice of a link from the first page of results, without thought of relevancy or other factors that come into play with results lists. There's also a number of things that could potentially go wrong, such as databases being left out of search results. I personally am of the latter camp which suggests further instruction is needed so that the students, especially undergrads and the general public, can interpret the results, sort them, and know when and how to delve deeper and do advanced searches for databases and resources the discovery tool may have missed. Call me cynical, but I don't have as much faith in the research abilities of 18-21 years old as authors Cmor and Li do in one of the articles!
-Michelle