All You Can Do is Duck
January 1st, 2006This article from Rocky Mountain News (well, really from AP) baffled me.
The baffling part: The journalist, Anick Jesdanum, interviews a student at New York University who says:
“The library is daunting because I have to go there and everything is organized by academic area,” Quaranta said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
OK, it may not be that baffling (I’ve heard of students not going into libraries because they are daunting, but not because they are organized by ‘academic area’), but what struck me as odd was reading the paragraph before:
“Nicole Quaranta, 22, a New York University grad student in education, does most of her research online. She’ll check databases for academic journals and newspaper articles - but rarely books, even though she acknowledges an author who spent years on a 300-page book might have a unique perspective.”
I wonder if this student realizes that she is actually using the library. Also, the articles in these databases are categorized by….oh yeah, academic area. Books, the part of the library that she find ‘daunting’ are searchable too, using the library catalog, categorized by, you betcha, academic area. This is one reason why I’m not 100% against the book scanning projects by Google, etc is that they might actually get students interesting in (GASP!) books. While many students will just pick a section of the book that interests them and use it in research, they will still be using books. And maybe (MAYBE!) they will actually go and read the entire text.
Another part of the article that I found fascinating is that sites like del.icio.us and Flickr are mentioned:
“An online bookmarking service called del.icio.us, just purchased by Yahoo, lets you discover new sites by checking those frequented by people with bookmarks similar to yours. The idea is that people who share bookmarks also are likely to share interests. Del.icio.us, Flickr and several newer services also support tagging, the ability to organize items by keywords. Even more important will be good research skills - infoliteracy. That means knowing where and how to look, and evaluating what you get back.”
Ah, the perfect opportunity to show off how library catalogs can be enhanced by using tags. Nope, missed the boat on that one. Libraries are seen as utilizing conservative classification systems, which isn’t untrue. We do. But, a new revolution is upon us where users may demand to use their own schemas when classifying and (more importantly) looking up materials on our catalogs. (eg -Library Thing) and librarians should be aware of this. I’m not saying that we should abandon DDC, etc. I’m saying, look at what is out there now and anticipate. Just anticipate. (link via Internet News)
April 13th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
For your information nicole quaranta’s quotation was taken out of content. She was talking about NYU’s vast library.