[WEB4LIB] Re: In defense of stupid users

[Patricia F Anderson]

> A9 does look nice (a quick search on 'Plantinga and "Ontological Argument"'
> yielded useful sites) but I think Google was being used not as a contrast to
> other Internet search engines but against online catalogs and commercial
> databases on one hand and librarians' expectations of what sort of
> competencies patrons really ought to have.

That was what I understood from the discussion, but the point I hoped to 
make was that tools either exist or are in development to make are 
various information environments truly seemless. Point two should have 
been "what can we do to help with both training and aiding the move toward 
the seemless?"

> On the one hand there is the lamentable state of affairs where patrons
> (often high school and college students) simply want answers, as if
> databases were some sort of gum-ball machine.  Research often requires one
> to clarify and reformulate one's topic and accept a bit of what one is after
> from a number of sources before coming to a whole.  This, however, is often
> confused with the mechanics of the search where patrons must adapt to limits
> of media (in this case databases) in order to properly interact with it.

And *that* part is training and education. I work mostly in healthcare, 
where information for a patient with a new diagnosis rapidly becomes so 
important that they want a lot more than a gum-ball. :-) And are willing 
to work for it. Most patients with significant information needs want to 
know more about how to search, and will ask questions and work with 
librarians / friends / other health care experts to learn what they need 
to know. I have a training tool in my book that attempts to get at the 
ideas of clarification and refinement of the query. It is pretty focused 
on health, so parts of it would not transfer over to non-health topics.

<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfa/mlaguide/free/quickgd.pdf>

I think perhaps page one of this next handout might be useful in a general 
sense:

<http://www.lib.umich.edu/dentlib/services/gds/FRIARdb.pdf>

I'm sure we all teach our patrons to revise, whether in a course or at the 
reference desk, we use a tool or simply in conversation. In my teaching, 
I've noticed that the patrons I deal with (older than most undergrads) are 
increasingly likely to already realize this and to do it by instinct. Five 
years ago, when I surveyed my students, their response to a search with no 
desirable results was to switch search engines. Now it is to switch terms. 
I am impressed! And delighted to see this change.

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu