SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Information Competency Links

Topsy Smalley, a librarian at Cabrillo College in California, has collected an interesting set of links on information competency. Targeted at California college-level information, the site also includes links to the major information literacy links from associations like ACRL; ongoing projects in information competency; and links to college-specific information literacy initiatives.

Student Papers and Web Citations

Some uplifting research on the relatively low reliance on web site citations by undergraduates: In "Citation patterns of advanced undergraduate students in biology" (Science and Technology Libraries 22, no. 3-4: 161-179; subscription required), the authors evaluate the citation selections of 33 undergraduate biology papers. Of a total of 770 citations (about 23 per paper), only 1% came from web sites. The vast majority of citations came from -- you guessed it -- journal articles or book chapters. This may be comforting news to many information professionals who often feel that users rely too heavily on free web sources.

The Researcher's Companion

The University Library & Information Resources Centre at the Federal University of Surrey has produced a a step by step guide to conducting research. Tabbed sections of the tutorial expand with the help of sidebars. Although much of the information in the tutorial is institution-specific, there is useful general information in the tutorial . Librarians and others who create online research tutorials will find much that merits modification and adaptation to suit local needs.

Research 101

Research 101 is "an interactive online tutorial for students wanting an introduction to research skills. The tutorial covers the basics, including how to select a topic and develop research questions, as well as how to select, search for, find, and evaluate information sources."

Developed by the University of Washington Library, the site is deliberately NOT institution-specific. Please note that although I just came across this site, the site's copyright is dated 2001 and as a result some information might be out of date.

(Spotted on the El Dorado County Library's What's Hot on the Internet This Week)

Internet Education Project

The Internet Education Project (IEP) is a "means to promote and share peer reviewed instructional materials created by librarians to teach people about discovering, accessing and evaluating information in networked environments." The site deserves support from the library community: if more heavily populated with shared instruction materials, this could prove a valuable resource for sharing proven instructional strategies that help people learn about how information happens online.

The IEP is maintained by Emerging Technologies in Instruction Committee of the Instruction Section (IS) of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

Search Engine Position Analyzer - A Tool for Web Trainers

A search engine position analyzer enables you to check to see if a particular web address would have been displayed in the first few pages of search results (the only ones most people look at) if you searched using selected keywords.

This type of tool can be of great benefit to those who teach web searching. A position analyzer provides an easy way to discover if an allegedly "invisible" web search result would have come up in a typical keyword search of a major search engine. I often use them to test my class examples.

Search engine position analyzers are employed by search engine optimizers to check relative positions of a client's site. There are several professional-level SE position analyzers but I came across a free one that worked reasonably well in several tests that I conducted. The Search Engine Position Analyzer Script enables users to enter a URL, then enter the keyword(s) that would be searched. Check up to 7 search tools to test, and the analyzer returns information indicating if the URL would turn up in the first 50 results for that keyword search. The analyzer also links directly to the source search tool's results, so you can check the hit list to make sure.

Please note that during my tests, some of the listed search tools did not deliver results properly, indicating that the script may be somewhat out of date. (I attempted to contact the script's author without success.) The script's links to Google, Hotbot, and Altavista worked properly, with Hotbot defaulting to AlltheWeb's results. The script linked incorrectly to or returned no sites from Excite, Infoseek (now Disney's Go.com) and Lycos. Although it also linked to Magellan, that site no longer exists.

Creating Learner-Centered Instruction

Creating Learner-Centered Instruction is an open-access, free online course from the Faculty Development Institute at Virginia Tech. The course is "designed to provide ... the necessary resources to begin investigating the process of designing instruction to enhance student learning." The self-study program is dense, and not for beginners, but experienced trainers will find many fresh ways of thinking about design and planning of learner-centered training.

I particularly liked the lessons on creating student goals and objectives. I spend a portion of my time training librarians to plan and design effective end-user learning experiences, and without question, creating good objectives is the hardest part of the process.

Good objectives can inspire all other aspects of a training session, and so it's important to get them right. As occasional trainers, it's common for library professionals to get too caught up in seeing goals from their own point of view, rather than the learner's. As a result, much unnecessary content ends up being included in training programs, and the learner isn't fully engaged in the learning experience.

Demystifying Search Language

This excellent summary by Lynn Frances in the March 27 2003 issue of Law Technology News provides an essential glossary of search terminology that every serious searcher and trainer should know, plus good links to additional information resources.

A Case Against Teaching Google

During my lectures to librarians, I'm asked how much time they should devote to teaching "common" search engines (e.g. Google) and directories (e.g. Yahoo!) to their users. Many library instruction sessions start with Yahoo as an "example" directory and Google as the "best" search engine. The rationale used to justify the choices is that these are "starting points" that most users understand and can relate to. No wonder librarians are crying the blues about how students bypass the library and think that Google=research. We're introducing them to things that they already know, and end up reinforcing their own inadequate search behavior with our own modelling.

Although Google is great for certain types of questions (reference verification, finding known web sites), it's a poor single-source choice for most topical searches. When we use Google to help our users find topical information, we are simply proving to them that we know nothing more than they do about web search. The solution? Introduce users to high quality, less well known directories and other web resources that will not only surprise and delight them, but help them to realize that librarians continue to be a source of truly useful guidance and advice.

Big6 Teaches Information Skills

Learners who require a step-by-step method to learn better search skills should spend some time at Big6. Developed by librarians Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz, the Big6 is an approach to teaching information and technology skills.

The Big6 learning model (6 steps, hence the name) can be applied whenever people need to find and use information. For any serious web searcher, it's reasonably easy to integrate links to high quality web sources into Step 2 (Resource selection) and Step 3 (Resource searching) of the Big6 model. For teachers, the site contains lesson plans, downloadable slides, a wallet-size reference card, and many links to educational projects that use the Big6 method.