Comments on: What Can We Learn from “Lessons Learned”?

By: Polnisch Ãœbersetzer

Polnisch Ãœbersetzer — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:03:10 +0000

if the students are only using three databases but theyâ€™re finding good sources (thereâ€™s a fair amount of overlap among them, and link resolvers mean you can use one but locate information from another) then Iâ€™m not sure this is a problem.

By: MBA Lady

MBA Lady — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:55:58 +0000

I strongly believe information I need for a research should be taken from several sources. They can be Internet, Google, Libraries, coursebooks etc. This style of collecting information was chosen in order to get a impartial view on the topic. And the list of sources provided by our tutors is not always obligatory for me, I prefer consulting with librarians.
Honestly speaking any coursework is based on a students personal opinion and findings. However the quality of those findings depends strongly on the quality of sources chosen for research.

By: Maura Smale

Maura Smale — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:04:46 +0000

These Project Info Lit reports are so interesting. I’m not surprised either that students (still) put off research — even students who plan to go to graduate school (or eventually become librarians!) will occasionally have a course that they’re just not that interested in, and it’s hard to get motivated to do the work.

But I’m mostly sure that I think that problems with the student research process are more important now that we’ve got the internet than in the past. I think it’s less about the absolute amount of information and more about access to it. It’s so easy to get to so much mediocre information on the internet. And while most students probably won’t be writing term papers after they graduate, they may need to find health information or accurate news.

Of course, it’s hard to convince students that what we teach them in library sessions will be relevant to their real lives. I mention it in each class, but I’m not certain that it resonates with them yet (and maybe it can’t, at least for freshmen).

By: Barbara

Barbara — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:51:04 +0000

What I found interesting is that the title includes “digital” and the claim is made that this is increasingly important because there’s so much information, but the students are behaving exactly as they did before the Internet. The only difference is that they can procrastinate more comfortably now.

On the other hand, if the students are only using three databases but they’re finding good sources (there’s a fair amount of overlap among them, and link resolvers mean you can use one but locate information from another) then I’m not sure this is a problem. If they’re writing a dissertation and only know one general database, that’s another matter, but an undergraduate who has six papers/presentations due in a matter of weeks is probably wise trying to find a process that works even if they don’t use the premier database for a topic.

The Oxford Guide is very good. When planning a course for students planning to go to grad school I asked some faculty what they thought should be part of the syllabus and one (a historian) said he’d had an earlier edition of the book assigned in a graduate methods course and it was the first time he truly understood how libraries work.

By: Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:03:22 +0000

I don’t mean to be self-serving here, but most of the problems identified in this study are directly addressed, with specific solutions, in _The Oxford Guide to Library Research_ (3rd ed.; Oxford U. Press, 2005). I agree that “getting the big picture” is a major problem–but it is one that is also solvable, relatively easily, as is the additional major problem (not mentioned above) of how to choose the right search terms. It’s also relatively easy to get students beyond the two or three sources they routinely use on their own–provided some instruction is given that addresses this concern.