Tales of a Librarian

I feel like I have been fairly busy in work over the past week or so, and I have noticed that I have been able to do more enquiry work. I enjoy searching the databases for relevant information for members of our information service, but I sometimes struggle with the key words etc. as some areas that we cover I am not overly familiar with.

For example, one enquiry this week asked for a detailed answer to a specific planning query, which I just had absolutely no idea about. Discussions with other members of staff, however, made me feel a bit better about this as it turns out it was a very awkward question and despite searching a number of resources there wasn’t really anything that provided a straight answer.

I feel as if I am becoming better at enquiries though, and quicker with them too. The more I do the more confident i become with them, as I become more familiar with the contents of our database and the key words etc used. There are also a number of other resources that we can use/access and I am gradually beginning to pick up on these as well, as they are of particular use for more difficult enquiries.

I was also given training in SPADS (scottish planning appeal database) yesterday, which operates pretty much the same as our other database, but has slightly different command languages and abstracts. It was quite confusing at first, and there are a lot of different elements that make up the appeal abstracts that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I will be getting to see how others’ conduct SPADS enquiries next week so hopefully that will help me to remember and become more familiar with their layout etc. It is quite interesting to search for appeals that have occurred in areas you know! I will keep you updated on my progress with this.

Technorati Tags: search skills, work, training, enquiries, library

Information Research blog points to an interesting article from Prentice Hall: Professional Technical Reference which discusses whether or not search engine such as google have made us into wonderful researchers or just ‘lazy googlers’.

The abstract of the article says ‘Every day millions of Internet searchers use Google or other high-speed search engines such as MSN Search. Are all these Googlers just doing the “search lurch”? Try a few key words, click a few search results, and maybe they’ll find what they’re looking for in a few seconds. Or maybe they’ll just give up and move on to something else’.

The rest of the post describes the advent of search engines and its implications for site navigation - do people still navigate within sites, is there a need for this, what implications are there for site designers and so forth, but also discusses the impact this has on users search skills and the time spent looking through each resource. Again, the dangers of electronic resources and easy access to auch a wide variety of information at the click of a mouse has already been widely discussed, with many claiming that such technologies will erode the ability of people to properly search and locate information, as well as reducing the amount of time spent studying a source of information, replaced instead by people moving in and out of websites within a few clicks.

This is relevant stuff - and really interesting! We are always striving at my work to promote the benefits of proper information searches conducted in a logical and efficient manner (to justify our existence!!) - as many people really do feel that it is all available on the first page of Google.

Technorati Tags: google, search skills, information literacy, information,