Reference Resources
I decided reflecting on resources required a good quote. Since I have honed my searching skills over the past several weeks, I decided I was up to the task of searching for an appropriate quote to sum up my thoughts on reference. What key word to use? How about knowledge? Several good quotes came up, but now what tone do I want to take? How about deeply intellectual?
As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.—Albert Schweitzer
Or
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.--Confucius
No, too serious. How about something more “librarian-like”.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.—Ambrose Bierce
Well, that has the tone of a media specialist with the arranging and classifying, but still not quite right. How about something a little bit lighter?
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.—Ralph W. Sockman
That quote is getting closer. But let’s infuse a bit of humour.
Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.—Woody Allen
I like that one, but I finally found the one that sums up my true experience with seeking knowledge about references and searching.
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.—Donald Rumsfeld
Now that quote pretty much sums up how I feel. I thought I was muddling through my life pretty well, able to find the information I sought. I think I have the heart of a pretty good detective. I can usually get on the scent of something and am willing to dig deeper and deeper; pick up the thread of a clue and follow where it leads. My experience with employing advanced searching techniques was eye-opening. I had some knowledge of Boolean searches and certainly used the obvious techniques supplied through certain search engines. For example, the MSU library provides very specific searches from the very first menu. You can select books or articles. Once you have selected articles, you can specify peer-reviewed, full-text, and even specific years. You can search by title, author, subject or keywords.
Through our reading, we identified certain specific ways to use (+) or (-). We discovered we can search with allintitle: or inurl:. We can also narrow searches to specific types of sites, for instance only .gov or .edu. Of course the various search engines have their own peculiarities. We also discovered that all search engines are not created equal.
We examined the different types of search engines: hierachical, page indexers, natural language, and meta. We also had the opportunity to share our experiences with kid-friendly searching. With all the new knowledge I garnered about search engines, I felt fully empowered and excited to embark on a great quest, but what to search for?
My computer skills class had an assignment to write a research paper about a famous person. The topic was broad to allow for student interest to guide the decision process. Plus, the assessment was geared to proper format rather than proper English, so the students should be excited. Of course, one female student in particular could not come up with a famous person. Let’s search/google (aren’t the terms synonomous for kids) for famous women. We had 5,100,000 hits. Now we will take out –athletes and –scientists. Now we are down to only 1,020,000. But wait, most of the top sites looked like they were about athletes. I will admit it took me two tries to figure out that I had to leave a space before the (-) or the search engine thought that I was looking for that specific, not asking to take all those references away. Now we have 186,000,000. More than before, how did that happen? Okay, let’s change to Most famous American woman. How did we get 250,000,000 hits for one specific request? The top result was for Horace Mann Middle School. Now let’s try only .gov sites=232,000,000 results. We have not given up yet. Let’s get more specific in a different way. How about “famous woman inventor”. Now we have 22,700 hits. We added “famous American woman inventor”, -0- hits. How can that be? There has to be a famous American woman inventor. Let’s try it without the quotes, now we have 385,000. A brief scan through the results seemed to be predominantly about African American women, so let’s try –African American. Now we are down to 286,000. Let’s remove the Native Americans, too. Down to 226,000 hits. We are getting there. Let’s try “modern”. Okay, 177,000 possibilities. At this point the 5th site let us to Mary Phelps Jacob, the inventor of the modern brassiere as well as a publisher. After an examination of the site, we switched the search to Mary Phelps Jacob. Now we are back up to 356,000 hits. Noticed the top site listed her as a publisher, let’s take away publisher. We are down to 310,000. How about inurl:=27,000, now :gov:url=3240. At this point, we realized the 6th site was “How Google Works”. Was Google trying to tell me something? Even Google was getting frustrated with my endless searching!
The two insights I gained from my experiences over the last few weeks has been that there are many more ways to search that I was unaware of. These techniques do require practice and patience though, just like most other worthwhile endeavors. Just like any other skill, practice makes perfect. I also realized that when I search for myself, I must continually adjust my searches as I evaluate the sites I retrieve. I have not usually seemed to reach a level of frustration when I have a clear idea of the information I seek. The problems I encountered in this exercise stemmed more from my lack of clear direction. I have a much better perspective of the necessity to have a good reference interview when a student needs help.
