Karen M. Drabenstott
Associate Professor
School of Information
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1092 USA
Voice: (734) 763-3581
Fax: (734) 764-2475
karen.drabenstott@umich.edu
Welcome to the New Year from the CRISTAL-ED editorial staff. We will begin immediately with the new topic "Technology and BI: Offering New Solutions or Creating Bigger Headaches?" presented by guest editor Elisa Miller. Elisa holds a BA in journalism from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and a master's in instructional technology from the University of Texas, Austin. She then headed east to Drexel University where she is currently developing her dissertation proposal in BI in the doctoral program. Elisa is hoping not only to stimulate discussion on this topic but to learn more the issues that are of concern to the practitioners in the "field" and on the "firing lines."
She has been a webmaster at the Institute for Scientific Information (1995-1998), coeditor for Microcomputer Abstracts produced by Information Today, Inc. (1993-1995), faculty member at Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and Austin Community College, Austin, Texas, where she taught journalism, marketing and public relations and advised the student newspaper and yearbook staff. Elisa has been a member of several professional associations -- ASIS, ALA, LIRT, ACRL, ISPI, and AECT.
Please join Elisa Miller in a discussion of "Technology and BI: Offering New Solutions or Creating Bigger Headaches?"
Elisa Miller
elisa@cyberenet.net
The basic objective of bibliographic/library instruction is still traditional in nature: explaining the library to students and faculty. Typically, this has included instruction in how to find materials in the library's collection, as well as providing an introduction to library services. Expanded, the goal of library instruction has been to provide users with tools and skills that will allow them to identify, locate, retrieve, access, use, and evaluate information. However, for the last 15 to 20 years, librarians and librarian instructors have been challenged by the logarithmic increase in technological tools which have altered the user's concept of the library, along with along with the librarian's pedagogical approach to library instruction.
Accompanying this shift is the change in the student. Distance education programs are altering our notion of "campus" as many students may not ever set foot on the traditional campus -- in fact, they may not be located in the same city, state or even country! Many students are considered "non-traditional" as defined by age -- not the typically 18-22 or 23-year-olds coming directly from high school into a collegiate environment. These students also display a broad range of experience and comfort with computer technologies. Many younger students come in with an attitude that "if you can't find it using the computer, it doesn't exist, or it couldn't be important." New and returning students may be overwhelmed by the wealth of information that can be obtained via computer technologies and have difficulty determining how best to evaluate and select appropriate sources for their information.
During the 1970s, we saw a shift in the emphasis of BI from teaching tools to teaching concepts. According to Cerise Oberman, "the basic impetus for this was the recognition that tools change, while the basic set of concepts that governed information searching would be transferable--from information problem to information problem, from discipline to discipline... then along came the OPAC, CD-ROMs, locally-mounted databases, the Internet, client-server architecture, and the World Wide Web, all with different interfaces that had little in common with one another... librarians (began) focusing on teaching effective methods for using an interface..."
"In a few short years, we have managed almost a full swing of the pendulum back to teaching tools--only now the tools are electronic ones, which ironically, change faster that print tools ever did." Oberman predicts that in a few short years "our users will most likely be using a universal interface that will be graphically designed for end-user access to all data available in electronic form regardless of its location and proprietary nature.... with this small increment of electronic advancement, instruction librarians may find themselves with no electronic tools to teach and in need of rediscovering the concepts."
Additionally, she notes that research conducted by Carole Kuhlthau (studying elementary and secondary school students) is important for what she has to say about the early stages of research, which she found to be characterized by anxiety and uncertainty. Kuhlthau notes that the proliferation of vast databases accessible to the user often "intensifies the sense of confusion and uncertainty in the early stages of the research." If that is true for users located directly in a library, said Oberman, "then what of remote users, facing a totally disembodied array of information opportunities?"
Much of the current BI literature focuses on "here's what we did" describing novel uses of technology in instruction; little of this literature actually describes rigorous evaluation of effectiveness or efficiency of these programs. The ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) division of the American Library Association, through its Emerging Technologies in Instruction Committee has developed a project for soliciting "exemplary internet training materials" while the Teaching Methods Committee has awarded the inaugural winners in the TM's Top Ten Tutorials for exemplary library tutorials on the Web. The criteria for the selection of these sites is located at the URL: http://www.bk.psu.edu/academic/library/istm/criteria.html. While these examples display what can be accomplished using technological tools in providing library instruction, there are still many unanswered questions:
Dr. Diane Nahl
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Information and Computer Sciences, Library and Information Science Program
2550 The Mall
Honolulu, HI 96822
Voice: (808) 956-5809
Fax: (808) 956-5835
There are many points I'd like to comment on since this is my research area, however in this message I'd like to question some assumptions before discussing the questions.
First, though instruction/reference librarians developed concept-based instruction to replace tool-based instruction in theory, in practice these approaches were integrated, as they should be since one doesn't teach concepts of search and retrieval without teaching some system for doing that. Therefore, librarians are still teaching conceptually and procedurally of necessity.
Second, in a few short years there will not be a simple, universal interface (the everyperson interface that Ben Shneiderman has proposed) simply because complexity of information structure is expanding and is likely to do so for the forseeable future. In addition, there is too little research on interface use and design for novices in our field and less in HCI to make this possible. Most researchers in LIS study expert searchers and no one in HCI studies large information systems and their novice users. Even the Web studies are too premature to predict a universal simplified system. Some academic libraries have or are developing unified Web-based interface access, but they are not reporting research on how well these work with novices, only anecdotal reports have appeared.
Third, the expansion of remote users and distance learners does call for interactive, online tutorials, however, my research and that of others has shown clearly that novice users typically do not use Help, read instructions, or go to another screen to get information needed to prosecute a search successfully. About 1/3 of novice users (high estimate) may consult such search aids, which is a significant number, but what about the rest? And, we have no idea how successful they are after using the tutorial, etc. because there is so little research in this area. What do they understand when they see an interface? Do they understand the labels for the functions, etc.? There is much to discover about novice users before we can approach a general solution. One major finding from my research across several studies of different groups of novices is that concept analysis and search term selection are major stumbling blocks, and the natural language systems make this more difficult.
In the present day distributed information access model, my graduate students in the user instruction course suggest that we move toward 24 hour live, online assistance.
Robert Bauchspies
Middleburg, Virginia
bauchspr@mediasoft.net
It would seem that content analysis (CA), as a cognitive attribute in information seeking, is either constrained or advanced in large measure by our tools. An acknowledged given perhaps, but there seems to me to be a fundamental divide as defined with active and passive bibliographic instruction (BI). The fact that CA would even function in BI says much more about our professional language and the tension that persists than what we might otherwise recognize -- this of course, is in large measure provoked by information technologies (IT).
Information behavior though, is intrinsically expressed through a pluralistic cultural identity of the self, enhanced as it may be by what new behaviors are promoted by our IT. As some in the industry herald the coming "information appliance" age, where interfacing with information intensive devices becomes passive behavior, our abilities to express and ponder openly may be welcomed by some electronic Socratic entity waiting eagerly to reply -- a 2001 HAL revisited perhaps.
Librarians in some respects, have been taken hostage by the information industry, where the user perceived merits of locality and immediacy have taken precedence over our ensuring true information seeking skills to those same folks empowered with their global desktop or their geo-pilot. It has been suggested that we as librarians, could instruct our patrons right out of the library in a one way exit. Free full text, documents on demand, fee for service, etc., does indeed challenge any walled structure surely, but it also sets free those individuals to wander, stumble, discover and frustrate over the bounty of information at their fingertips (or uttered voices for that matter).
Someone needs to teach today's kids how to find relevant information efficiently and effectively and it might as well continue being librarians. We didn't always have keyword full text databases, except perhaps for the subject specialist reference librarian or scholar librarian. The tragedy as I see it, is the expediency and default to all things technological. And yes, a bound book is also an example of technical innovation. Communication in a human sense, permutates again, as it did with the advent of the telephone.
General trends do suggest that the electronic resources librarians will be the busiest on any given campus, provided the budgets and infrastructures permit the access along with all those required laptops and T-1 dorms. For distant education students, you'll just have to click the "tips" and "hints" links to improve your research results or suffer the no-hit bounty by skipping as you may, the guides provided electronically by the helpful, able, remotely situated, librarians.
Librarians will continue to generously and proactively provide skill training for research but will be increasingly burdened by addressing such encounter through the latest devices, rather than through cognitive faculty enhancing (commonly referred to as critical thinking). Our take of course being the enabling of the ability to discern relevance and value of information retrieved as so instilled in our "patrons."
It would seem, as Professor Nahl's LIS students suggest, that information technology pushes librarians into greater "cybrarian" and HELPDESK type modes. My speculation then might be, is this necessarily a bad thing and what, if anything, are we or our patrons losing in the process by the employment of such new tools and new definitions of environment?
An excellent, thoughtful essay. Content analysis has been with the profession since the later 1920s and early '30s. The military and state department professionals used content analysis quite effectively as an unobtrusive intelligence gathering mechanism.
I am glad that we recognize that the need for critical thinking skills has been magnified by electronic information resources.
Elisa Miller
elisa@cyberenet.net
While we have gotten off to a slow start -- perhaps because of the weather and the fact that many schools are just getting started for their winter quarters or spring semesters, I'd like to try to reinvigorate the discussion of technology and BI.
While we have a number of technological tools available within the library walls, many of these same tools are available for access from anywhere with a computer. Professor Nahl challenges the effectiveness of interactive tutorials available to these folks, as her research indicates that "novice users typically do not use HELP, read instructions, or go to another screen to get information needed to prosecute a search successfully."
I would have to agree with her assertion that there is not enough research yet; particularly focused on novice users.
Robert Bauchspies states that "someone needs to teach today's kids how to find relevant information efficiently and effectively and it might as well continue being librarians." This, coupled with Professor Nahl's graduate students that suggest movement toward 24-hour, live, online assistance, just emphasize the need for BI or information literacy instruction.
This leads me back to some of the questions that I posed earlier:
You may join the discussion and look over the list of past and future topics.
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