"Like many other librarians, Steven J. Bell has watched students go to online databases, enter a few search terms, and get hundreds of articles in return. Swamped with information, and doubtless on a deadline, these students print out the first several articles -- making no effort to evaluate their quality -- and then run off to write their papers. Now Mr. Bell, library director at Philadelphia University, asks a question that might seem heretical for someone in his field: Is more information always better?
Mr. Bell, who poses that question in an article in this month's issue of American Libraries, the American Library Association's magazine, discussed his concerns in an interview with The Chronicle....
"There was a very interesting article recently in College & Research Libraries News ["Facing the Competition," December 2002] that basically said, We're giving up on information literacy because we can't reach the students anymore, and we're just hoping to come up with ways that they can search our Web site to come up with some information that will help them. That, to me, is throwing up the white flag and saying, Google has won. I think if we keep working with the people who create the databases, maybe we can come up with a product that has a better balance. ... There are loads of techniques that could improve searching, and they've got to be built into the systems better....
One thing that concerns me is that a lot of the services have a check box that says "full text." You click that, and you are eliminating what could be some very good articles that are available only in citation or abstract format. ... In the article, I call it "full-text fixation." We're creating a generation of researchers and scholars who are losing touch completely with the value of getting a citation that is on target for the topic, then walking to the shelf to find a hard copy or finding it in another database....
How we communicate that to the public and to our users -- that's becoming really important. I could bring you into the library and watch students do research. I could know that they are struggling, and go over and say, Do you need help? But they say, No, I'm fine. The mind-set is that all the information is out there, and that they just need to plug in a few words to find it." [The Chronicle, via WEB4LIB mailing list]
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