From Library Babel Fish, June 25, 2013
I’m old enough that the annual Beloit Mindset List (created to help instructors avoid making what they think are contemporary cultural references that are actually historical to their students) is full of references to things that I never got around to knowing before they became passé.
I’ve started compiling a different list, one that identifies the tacit knowledge many of us have about information and how it works based on experiences that our students haven’t had. Here’s what I have so far.
Journals and magazines are published as ongoing series. For those of us who remember print, articles are bundled into issues, issues into volumes, and every year more articles are published in these bundles. If every article you ever read was found online, the relationship of articles to a particular journal published in a particular year is not at all obvious.
News is different than opinion. (Hard to believe, but even small cities typically had two major newspapers dividing the day.) One thing that is immediately obvious from the layout of a printed newspaper is that news and opinion are different categories. One could argue that news is strongly influenced by reporters’ opinions or the orientation of the publication, but when it comes to making choices about what information to use and how to use it, the distinction between reporting and opining matters. That distinctiveness is much harder to recognize online.
Books don’t have to be read cover-to-cover to be useful. They even come with tools to help you search inside the book – tables of contents and indexes, an introduction and conclusion. It’s not cheating if you read only one chapter of the book, or focus on only the pages that are most relevant.
Citations have the information you need to track down the source. That’s what they’re for. It has always been hard for students to trace cited works, partly because there are so many steps involved. First, you have to figure out what the thing cited is: a book, a chapter in a book, or an article in a journal – or something else. Then, you have to figure out where on the library’s website you look up books or find out what journals are available and for which dates. Then you have to either get the book or print journal on the shelf, or find the full text link to the article or ebook (which may be wrapped in pesky DRM) or request it from another library. What seems almost harder to grasp is the idea that citations are incredibly useful, just like links on a webpage, albeit slower.
Databases and catalogs (usually) don’t search inside books and articles. If Google is your model for search, you are likely to search databases and catalogs using highly specific words and phrases. Those often don’t work in many library tools, because these tools, like your friendly NSA, work with metadata. In library databases, that usually means it’s trying to match your search to words in titles, abstracts, and subject headings or descriptors.