Teaching students to surf without Googles

By Barbara B. Brand

The Internet is a great place to plan a budget vacation, find a map or buy an out-of-print book on your favorite hobby. It may not be the best place to do research for a college paper. The free instructional video "e-literate?" points out that misinformation and outright deception, such as a white supremacist site claiming to provide objective information on Martin Luther King Jr., are common on the Internet. Yet many students, pressed for time and convinced that everything is "out there," go to Google or other search engines rather than the library catalog.

How can faculty point students toward more authoritative sources? The increasing faculty demand for library bibliographic sessions for their courses indicates that many want better-researched papers. During the fall semester in 2002, State University of New York at Stony Brook librarians provided 170 sessions, a 52 percent increase over the same period in 2001. This increasing demand for bibliographic instruction is a trend in other libraries as well. Librarians in these sessions instruct students in techniques for searching the online catalog, introduce them to appropriate databases and give them some tips on evaluating information. Unfortunately, only a minority of students can be accommodated, and the brevity of the contact between a librarian and students limits the effectiveness of the sessions.

Collaboration between librarians and faculty on course Web sites offers another way of providing students with continuing guidance and encouragement in using library resources. Course management software, such as Blackboard and WebCT, is in use on many campuses. Although the use of such courseware sometimes is criticized because it excludes the library, this does not have to be the case. With support from computing staff, librarians can help faculty enrich their sites. Ideally, the librarian would be a participant throughout the course. Practically (because librarians have many other responsibilities) the librarian would be added to the course Web site temporarily to provide links to appropriate databases and the library catalog, as well as services such as interlibrary loan and online reference. Then, the librarian would leave but remain available for consultation by telephone or e-mail.

This system can be valuable at any level. For example, students in a first-year writing course may only need links to the library catalog and a general database, such as InfoTrac. Instructions accompanying the link might remind students to limit their InfoTrac searches to "peer-reviewed" so that they choose only the most authoritative material. Graduate students in psychology may be very familiar with PsychINFO, the major database in their field, but less aware of citation databases such as Web of Knowledge, in which they can trace not only the sources used in an influential article but also any recent articles that cite it. These students may also be interested in the Annual Review of Psychology, which describes and cites particularly important research in a given year. The library has this information online, and links within the course site serve as reminders.

As the subject specialist in women's studies, I collaborate most closely with faculty from that program. Professor Sarah Hall Sternglanz, the undergraduate director and an enthusiastic user of Blackboard, invited my contributions to the women's studies program Blackboard site. This site is available to faculty, graduate affiliates, majors and minors. A comprehensive set of links ranging from general full-text journal databases such as JSTOR to subject-specific indexes such as Women's Resources International are grouped in folders in "external links" to help all campus women's studies scholars identify the most useful databases from the hundreds the library offers. As new material becomes available, I can add it and send an announcement to everyone enrolled in the site.

Technology can lead students away from the valuable resources available in libraries, but it can also lead toward them. Professors, instructional-technology experts and librarians need to look beyond their immediate domains to include libraries in the information/knowledge exchange that is fundamental to education.