AASL Conference 2011: Unlocking the Art of Search Engines
RSSBy SLJ Staff
Search engines are a powerful tool—but there's an actual art to using them, say three panelists who presented today at "Power Searching: Demystifying Popular Search Engines and Getting Quality Research from Everyday Tools," one of the many interesting preconferences that took place during the American Association of School Librarians 15th National Conference in Minneapolis, MN, from October 27-30. Close to 80 librarians packed into the workshop with their laptops in hand to hear Debbie Abilock, co-founder of Palo Alto, CA-based bibliography software company Noodle Tools, Natasha Bergson-Michelson, an instructional librarian at Google, and Jole Seroff, the director of library and information services at the Castilleja School in Palo Alto, give essential tips and answer questions about ways librarians—and their students—can refine their skills to get the most out of online searches. What are the most popular search engines? Google, Bing, Blekko, DuckDuckGo, and Wolfram Alpha, but many of us—including librarians—lack the savvy to teach and use them to their full potential. But learning about a handful of commands can transform a strong searcher into a masterful one. "Creative thinking makes good searching," says Abilock, who told librarians to go back to the basics by thinking about how a successful reference interview is conducted. The fundamental questions that librarians ask patrons to help them define their informational needs also holds true for online searches, whether they're fact-based ones, such as "What's the population of Chicago?," or inquiry-based questions, like "Why did the population there increase between a certain period of time?" Unfortunately, Abilock went on to say, today's students are taught to conduct research by rote, which is a failure on the part of K-12 education. Instead, librarians need to show kids how to be "metacognitively aware," by actually thinking out the entire research process. Bergson-Michelson says the essential questions to ask before beginning a search are: Who cares about what I care about?; What words would I use to describe it?; What words would my trusted source use?; Where would my trusted source share this information?; Why would someone use one format over another to communicate this information?; When would this information be published?; and How will I know when I have found what I want? Bergson-Michelson gave the example of trying to answer the following question: How many visitors were there to each national park in Kenya last year? One possible answer to the question, about who would care is the Kenyan government. So adding an advanced search operator such as "site:go.ke" would result in uncovering Kenyan government files. Another advanced search operator such as "filetype:xls" would exclusively pull up excel spreadsheet files. One easy way to answer common questions such as "What's the population of Japan?" is to conduct a forced search by simply typing the question into the search engine, says Abilock, explaining that search engines aggregate answers to these types of questions. But when looking for more in-depth information, Bergson-Michelson suggests adding the term "infographic" to your search, which will pull up results with informational charts. Of course, there are websites like YouTube, which offer excellent visual how-to's, and Shazam, a good resource for identifying songs. Another helpful tip? When searching for information between a number range, use two dots between the years or numbers rather than a hypen. So for example, if you want to find out the number of major hurricanes that took place in Florida, type in "major hurricanes Florida 1996..2010" into your search. Also, a good rule to remember is to add the word "help" whenever trying out a new search engine. Keep in mind that certain search engines are good for specific types of information. So if you'd like to find out what the weather was like on the day you were born, skip Bing and Google and opt for Wolfram Alpha, which Abilock says is the best one out there when hunting down such precise data. Remember, there are certain "stepping stone resources" to use at the outset of any search to help better understand a topic at hand, says Bergson-Michelson. If there's a word you come across that you don't fully understand, like remittance, type in "define: remittance" to get the definition. Another useful stepping stone resource is Wikipedia, which is useful for providing basic background knowledge on esoteric topics such as Yarn Bombing. FYI, it's a type of graffiti or street art that employs colorful displays of knitted or crocheted cloth rather than paint or chalk. I am truly grateful for this information as I have to do an induction with our 6th form students in preparation for their extended personal research projects.
My usual interaction with them is to keep them working quietly in the library rather than fooling around, chating, mkaing a noise, etc.
This should raise my status and hopefully, tip their present immature conduct out of the windows. * = Required information
From left: Jole Seroff, Natasha Bergson-Michelson, Debbie Abilock.
Reader Comments (2)
Posted by Gail on November 3, 2011 05:38:20AM
