via: Librarians Matter
A while back, I came across this blog post by Kathryn Greenhill discussing how librarians tend to emphasize how to use discovery and search tools, more than evaluation skills.
Surely it would make more sense to teach students how to work out whether an item is authoritative, well researched and/or suitable for citing in an academic work (these factors do not always overlap). Instead of a small section of an information literacy class, what if evaluation of resources was made central? What if, like Iris Jastram of Carleton College, we tried “teaching databases backward” – starting with a resource and looking at what elements were retrieved, how and why ?
I have also been wondering about how effective teaching databases are when:
- Databases are hard to master without constant practice
- There is no way to train students in every database user interface (UI) out there
- There is no guarantee that the database you teach in your class is the one that the student will need for their research
- The database UI or vendors can change at any time, negating any training you might have done for that database
I usually try to teach an EBSCOHost database in my library instructions, since there is a good chance that the student will use one of them, but I also know that a lot of the techniques I teach won’t work for JSTOR or other databases with a different search interface. If I am lucky I know the professor’s preferred database for the student’s research, and I can train that particular database or resource. I will have to think of some better ways to teach evaluations skills to students in a 50 minute class.
It is certainly always an uphill battle we face against time and I think most librarians would agree that teaching specific interfaces is counter-productive. The problem is that without putting transferable info lit concepts into context (i.e., putting theory into practice by exploring the databases themselves), I’ve found library instruction tends to fail. The key, perhaps, is finding the right balance with hands-on exercises that focus on aspects of research, search and evaluation that are common to most interfaces and that reinforce the basic theory preceding it in the session. Or perhaps (time is always a limiting factor tho) design instruction and exercises so that students learn how to choose relevant databases. You can then structure the exercises to be independent of any specific database.
I work with distance learners voluntarily taking instructional sessions online, so I get students from all disciplines in the same session (the advantage is they are self-selected and tend to be more motivated). I use Academic Search Premier for my demonstrations, but try to give students the flexibility to try other databases during the hands-on exercises if they are game.