This felt very luxurious. I was working reference instead. I had one not so great and one really good virtual reference transaction today.
The not so great one was for a student who had the dreaded “formats assignment”, where he was required to use x number of books, x number of web sites, and x number of articles. The student’s question upon logging in to the reference service was something like “I need a web site about happiness.” After determining that the student was needing a web site for the sake of checking it off on a list, I tried to ask some open ended questions as to which aspect of this sort of abstract concept of human behavior the student might be interested in exploring, and didn’t get much of a response that I could use to direct my search. I ended up sending the student a link to the lii.org section on psychology, figuring that there had to be some general web based sources there that the student could use for background information. I sent the student a couple examples of some stories on news web sites (health effects of happiness, etc) and described some of the search strategies the student could use to find more information. The student wasn’t happy with the links/search strategies I was suggesting, but wasn’t being any more specific than “The web site has to have a date on it so I can cite it”. I eventually gave the student information about contacting his local reference service to follow up on his question.
This was in sharp contrast to another student I was helping at the same time, who was just getting started with research on a legal topic, he was very happy with the “law about” section of http://www.law.cornell.edu/ and I was able to take him through some searches in lexis nexis, and he asking questions about search strategies, article sorting, finding other legal information, and I felt like he was at least off to a good start.
I’m using sports and pop culture examples more and more to explain boolean to students, especially the classes working on a paper related to a controversial current event. So one I used a couple days ago that got some instant glimmers of recognition from the class was:
Kobe NOT (nutella OR nike OR sprite)
What kind of weird-ass citation was that student using? APA only requires “Retrieved on [date] from [URL]“. I can’t think of a reason why the site would have to have a date on it for citation purposes; perhaps the prof put a date limit on the web articles they could use, so they weren’t pulling stuff that hadn’t been updated it years?
At my school we use MLA and when you site a web site you’re suppose to have the last time it was updated, but since a lot of sites don’t have that, most people just skip it.
Little D, it gives me hope that you are being taught MLA in high school. Based on a few of the students I’ve dealt with recently, I was begining to wonder. Although you “cite” a web site, you don’t “site” it : )
It wasn’t even so much that this person needed a website “with a date on it” that was a problem, it was that this was their response after they’d rejected as unhelpful everything that I was trying to show them, I had asked them multiple times if they could give me more information about what they were looking for, and “website with a date on it” was as specific as they were getting.
At that point, I decided that this person had Larger Problems with their Research Project, and would probably benefit more from a face to face interaction with a reference librarian at their own library, so I gave them the contact info they needed to do that.
Sometimes you’ve got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.