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Occupation | Tenure @ current position | |
Music librarian | 3 years | |
Assistant Professor, Neurobiology | 7 years | |
Microbiology Researcher | 10 years | |
Medical School Librarian | 3 years | |
Medical School Librarian | 1 year | |
Germanic Studies Librarian | 5 years | |
Reference Desk Librarian - Generalist | 18 years | |
Reference Desk Librarian - Special Subjects | 7 years | |
| College sophomore | 2 years |
SCHEDULE
January to March 2019
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They don’t know what they don’t know.
They don’t realize that if they don’t find it in SearchWorkstheir catalog, it doesn’t mean it’s not available at Stanfordtheir institution. Often, they need to try a different way of searching in order to find the item. They may not know the correct vocabulary to use and therefore need to take a step back in their research to discover the correct vocabulary.
They are directed to librarians by their professors, and librarians will connect them with sources to search and tips for conducting the search. They’ll start with the general reference desk librarian and then be routed to a special subjects librarian if they need more specialized searches.
They don’t know facets exist or how to use them.
Because they are inexperienced, they don’t understand that specificity matters.
They require greater error tolerance than SearchWorks allows them.
They start searching at on Google.
Languages other than the ones they understand are a barrier because they don’t know how to search in a different language. They also may not know the correct spelling (including diacritics), or they may not know how to search for something in a language that uses characters other than the English alphabet.
To get inexperienced researchers heading in the right direction, librarians provide guides specific to subject or even course to help them so as much research on their own before they have to seek assistance.
Undergraduate students may take workshops on how to research and how to use the library, including an introduction to reference desk librarians. Need to do more research on how this experience could be augmented through use of linked data.
NEXT STEPS
Interview actual undergraduate students!
Design a few concepts that could:
Help researchers discover relevant sources that may have been unknown to them,
Provide cross references that help them understand relationships,
Increase error tolerance to help inexperienced researchers get on the right path,
Translate controlled vocabularies to natural language,
Replicate the peer recommendations and in-person librarian guidance in the interface to increase success of search.
Explore what data would be required to implement these concepts