Having spent the afternoon with Libwebrarian and Lorcan Dempsey and a whole host of my classmates, I am entering my two cents into the discussion on "full library discovery" (FLD for the purpose of this post).
I started out with blog title "Is Full Library Discovery the LibGuide?" after reading Dempsey's introductory blog post on the topic, with a whole host of reasons of why I think FLD is a wonderful addition to the classic catalog/database collection search. Similar to LibGuides, FLD takes a specific subject and packages relevant resources into a nice little guide to assist you in your research. It cuts out the middle man so to speak. FLD takes your typical academic resources (journal articles, books) and groups them with unexpected, sometimes overlooked resources (open access materials, learning materials, subject specialist and yes, even LibGuides) opening up a whole new world of resource possibilities. Like LibGuides, the FLD system gives you "ALL THE THINGS" relevant to your subject search.
In this aspect, I think FLD is a discovery service that academic libraries need to pay particular attention to. For unexperienced researchers and library users, this service enables them "get their feet wet" in resource discovery. As a freshman with a research paper assignment, nothing is more frustrating than logging into your libraries website and having no idea where to start. An academic library's catalog is a huge, intimidating beast and it is our job as librarians to make it not so scary. While I think that nothing can replace a reference interview, be it in person or virtual, I do think that a FLD system can be incorporated to ease the learning curve. However, like Libwebrarian, I am posing the question: How far should we go when it comes to a personalized search?
At some stage to use those resources a student will be logging in to that system and that opens up an important question for me. Once you know who the user is, ‘how far should you go to provide a personalised search experience?’. You know who they are, so you could provide recommendations based on what other students studying their course have looked at (or borrowed), you might even stray into ‘learning analytics’ territory and know what the resources were that the highest achieving students looked at.
You might know what resources are on the reading list for the course that student is studying – so do you search those resources first and offer those up as they might be most relevant? You might even know what stage a student has got to in their studies and know what assignment they have to do, and what resources they need to be looking at. Do you ‘push’ those to a student?
Something to think about: If you crank out personalized search experiences based on what other students search or what the highest achieving students are looking at, what happens individual learning experience? Are you left with a bunch of students presenting the same ideas from the same resources? Where is the individuality? How can new ideas be presented or argued if FLD is relying on resources that other students used? Are you "pushing" your students into conformity?
If students see "here are the top three search results based on what you classmates are looking at" then you end up with 15+ papers all referencing the same three articles. Tonya's reference to The Principle of Least Effort is so spot on and Libwebrarian even backs up this theory.
Search for psychology on NCSU’s Search All search box gives you the top three articles out of 2,543,911 articles in Summon, and likely behaviour is not to look much beyond the first page of results.
I think this is where things can get sticky with FLD. While I am all for an FLD option on library websites, there needs to be more discussion on how much is too much when it comes to full library discovery.
While I'm sure that some students would just accept whatever "top three" results they get, there are probably others who will likely use an FLD as a starting point for their research. (There are also probably students who wouldn't even use the FLD.) If there's an option somewhere in the FLD to contact a librarian (such as the chat used on a lot of the pages on my undergrad library's website), they could easily seek help getting more sources.
ReplyDeleteThe screenshot on Libwebrarian's blog post looks like that FLD links users directly to the article. Some databases (I'm specifically talking about Science Direct, but I'm assuming it isn't the only one) recommend articles related to the one you're reading. If that's available, it would be easy for the student to find more sources of information on their topic.
I like to think that students would resist being pushed into conformity. If we make it easy enough to make another step, I think enough students would keep going that we didn't end up in the cycle of "everyone used these articles so everyone should use these articles".
I also think that if a professor assigns the same research topic to every student in the class, the likely result would be very similar papers no matter how they did the research. And if everyone in the class is writing about the same short story, e.g., then why shouldn't everyone use the best set of sources? There may honestly not be that many to choose from since scholarly research itself has to have a certain uniqueness in order to get published, and gets VERY niche very fast. In this case, diversity of sources might just mean that some students end up really struggling to make their sources seem relevant to the topic.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the case of longer research papers and speeches, seems like the professor would be more likely to encourage students to use different topics, for the sake of diversity, and to encourage students to do their own work.
Kaitlyn is right about ScienceDirect--it does link users to additional articles in a very helpful, user-friendly way. Students clicking through to a ScienceDirect article from their discovery system would be encouraged to explore further within the ScienceDirect environment. Cross-ref enabled sites also allow for linking to the articles cited within an article (and sometimes also the articles that cite it), which can generate additional journeys of discovery. In this case, the FLD did the initial hard work of locating at least one relevant source, and the user can go in various directions from there.
Love this Katie! While I think Kaitlyn and Nikki's comments are interesting, I'm still not convinced students wouldn't just take the "easy" way out. Maybe not because it's the easiest necessarily, but because they're not totally sure they're doing it right. And sure, if the FLD does give them the best three articles on the subject then for sure, use them. But who decided they're the "best"? The company? Prior student searches? The professor or librarian? The articles share the same subject headings? I'm unconvinced!
ReplyDeleteMakes sense with the theory of least effort because why push it to search for more when the top 3 (or as Tonya points out whatever company considers the top 3 or most used articles probably) are right in your grasp. But there are still some people out there (myself) that goes beyond the 1st page of a Google search just to see what else is out there. I typically go to the 5th page before I stop and tell myself either everything I needed was on the first page or stuff got weirder after page 3.
ReplyDeleteGood work everyone!! Dontcha just love the PLE :-)
ReplyDeleteBut I must add that we'll likely continue with PLE-like behavior in every generation of student probably going back to Plato, Aristotle, and the Lyceum ... it's simply a fact of life that some people are driven by it while many people are forced into such behavior on occasion.
Bottom line for me is that it is really hard for librarians to "mass teach" literacy issue to the extent the the PLE will be abolished forever. Put another way, those library users whose careers center on research will have either outside influences (such as a research mentor in their discipline ... think "dissertation adviser") or will have the internal fortitude to work hard to make sure the appropriate amount of research efforts is expended matched with the task at hand.