Category Archives: librarians

How not to do research

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

Here are some posts from a thread on an email list I follow. I am deleting anything that could identify the particular libraries where the posters work, although they are clearly all academic libraries. 1. A scenario reported by one of my colleagues:  student sitting at a computer not 5 feet from the reference desk where said colleague is stationed. He’s been there for quite a while.  As his friends walk by, he asks them how to find something, how to do something.  Colleague asks repeatedly if he needs any help and is rejected every time.  Then he starts phoning friends IN THE LIBRARY to come over and help him.  One of these friends suggests he search the ever-popular JSTOR.  Colleague reminds him that JSTOR is an archive and there are no current articles contained therein.  The student says, that’s ok, I’m researching something that happened in the ’70’s.  [Bang forehead on desk here.] 2. I was helping somebody on IM who noted he knew nothing about libraries and he needed articles for his topic.  After quite a few exchanges with some ground gained, I suggested that if he continued to have problems, he was welcome to telephone me as … Continue reading →

Yeah, you can use my catalog: don’t forget the databases

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

In this blog I have tried in a number of different ways to explain and promote the uses of online library catalogs and other databases. Students and faculty at the University of Washington iSchool decided to promote their catalog a la Lady Gaga.   Librarians have been sharing the video among themselves. Since The All-Purpose Guru hopes to reach out to library users and potential library users–and since that was the whole point of creating it in the first place–I offer it to my readers, librarians or not! Enjoy.

Continue reading →

Especially for researchers: that means you!

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

Research conjures up images of a scientist in his lab or a scholar toiling away in the library working on  his or her next tome. That’s research, to be sure, but it can also be a college student writing a term paper. For that matter, it can be finding out information about cars before heading to the dealership or checking out the classified ads. What is research? It’s the systematic process of investigation of some subject of interest by gathering and analyzing information about it. Usually research results in some kind of action. Writing a report is one possible outcome. Deciding which cars to look at is another. The first necessity for any kind of research is a question to investigate. What is the best car I can buy with the money I have? What do we need to tell our stockholders about how our business did over the past year? How did an obscure man like Barack Obama (or Franklin Pierce, or Grover Cleveland, or Abraham Lincoln) become President? What can I fix for supper with canned tuna that  I’m not already sick of? The researcher therefore must first refine the question, at least in part to determine what … Continue reading →

Ask your friendly librarian

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

In the early 1990s, my then 20-year-old step-son wanted to buy a used car. He found the choices and all of the questions he needed to answer overwhelming. I suggested he could get some good answers at the library, and he asked me to go with him. We walked into the library and straight back to the reference desk. I asked the librarian what information they had on buying a used car, and she quickly handed me four books. I gave them to my son and showed him to the copier. He looked through them, copied several pages, and gave them back to me to return to the desk. On the way back to the car, he said, “Thanks, man. I never could have done that by myself.” That was probably his first research project since his last high school paper. He had never visited the public library since he was a small child. I thought it strange that the son of a school teacher who used the library a lot would not think of the library as a resource and would find the prospect of asking a question at the reference desk intimidating. I have since learned that his … Continue reading →

Information literacy: the work of librarians past and present

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by 1

As long as there have been public libraries, librarians have been involved in education. They have helped people choose what to read for leisure and helped with their information needs. The recent emphasis on information literacy is more of a new term than a new concept, but as technology has transformed everything in society, information literacy needs to be done differently. For most of the twentieth century, the best way for most people to identify books on a particular subject was the card catalog in the library. Specialists could use various published bibliographies or the Cumulative Book Index among other tools. Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which began publication in 1905, helped the general public find information in magazines, etc. As the century progressed, publishers brought out more, and more specialized, indexes to periodical literature, including some of the major newspapers. Encyclopedias have been around since the late eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, encyclopedia publishers aggressively marketed door to door. Many families owned a set, but the library always had up-to-date editions of several different encyclopedias. The foregoing describes the kinds of tools available up until the Internet went public. In every case (except for the family encyclopedia), people … Continue reading →