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People are always asking me, “What do librarians DO?”
The answer is “Anything we need to.” We’re generalists – constant cross-trainers and skills upgraders.
There’s more and more information to be had, and more and more ways to get at it. Such a proliferation means confusion and chaos.
Somewhere there is a needle buried in one of those haystacks, and you need that needle.
I am the magnet.
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The latest issue of College & Research Libraries (May 2009) has an article entitled “How Scholarly is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases.” Long story short, they found that Google Scholar comes up with better results than library databases.
Color me unsurprised. I’ve been using Google Scholar as a “federated search” tool for at least two years and I’ve yet to be dissatisfied by the quality of the results it pulls up.
What we do is route Google Scholar through EZ Proxy and let Article Linker (Serials Solutions OpenURL product) hook the Google Scholar Search results directly to the full-text in whatever database we have it in.
What bugs me is that we do not systematically teach the use of Google Scholar. There’s some resistance to the notion. Indeed, our “splash page” for Google Scholar used to strongly discourage students from using it, saying that it’s unreliable and less useful than going through the individual library databases. That’s not even close to the truth!
My favorite quote: “If Google Scholar contains much of the content available in library databases, why shouldn’t students begin where the most content exists?” (The downside is that that content isn’t always within the first 30 search results, and students are known to stop looking before the fourth page of search results.)
Here are some interesting factoids from the article:
- Their methodology involved using subject-specialist reference librarians as judges of scholarliness, using a rubric based on some pretty standard criteria. They compared the first 30 results from each search in Google Scholar and an array of standard licensed databases.
- Google Scholar contained 76% of citations contained in the licensed databases. Licensed databases contained only 47% of citations contained in Google Scholar.
- Citations unique to Google Scholar were rated 17.6% more scholarly than citations found unique to a licensed database.
Laika’s Medlib Blog put out a great post – Twitter Goes Viral: Swine Flu Outbreak – Twitter as Dangerous Hype? It’s a long and linky post that does a great job of contextualizing this article: “Twitter’s Power to Misinform.”
It also points out that the traditional news outlets are by no means 100% reliable!
As I talked about in my preparedness blog, staying informed is essential as a survival skill, and it’s nothing as passive as monitoring Twitter or your emergency band radio. Individuals must use their intelligence and judgment to evaluate all the information coming in, and make their own decisions.
Outside academia, “information literacy” gathers blank looks. Inside academia, it’s often the unwanted stepchild. But in real life, regardless of whether you call it by its high-falutin’, polysyllabic name, it’s a survival skill.
In English, a Shibboleth is a means of security – a word or phrase that only somebody in the in-crowd would know. It comes from a story in the Biblical book of Judges. The protagonists used the word “shibboleth” as a password to discover spies from a neighboring group that pronounced it differently. Wikipedia has a fascinating list of shibboleths in many languages.
In the library world, Shibboleth is an authentication and single sign-on service, and we’re looking into using it.
From the end-user and frontline user services standpoint, Shibboleth is a tool that operates invisibly in the background to make it possible for users to log into all the College’s services one time (per session.) Log in to register for classes, and then you can check your financial aid, post a message on the College social networking page, access your e-mail account, get to your online course page, access all the library databases, e-reserves, the helpdesk ticketing system, etc. all without having to log in again. It’s a foundation that needs to be laid before we can move onto the “portal” model.
There are similar products, but Shibboleth
- is for single sign-on to websites and services both within and outside of an institution.
- doesn’t require the end user to do anything except remember that one username and password combo.
Sentinel, in contrast, appears to be single sign-on within an institution and Athens seems to be single sign-on for an assortment of hosted services. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I will have to do further research.
It’s difficult for me to find out what services and tools integrate with Shibboleth out of the box. A lot of the information available on the public Web seems to be out of date. But from what I’ve read, Shibboleth has been successfully integrated with
- EZ Proxy
- Angel LMS
- ILLiad
- Domino web access for Lotus (Yes, we use Lotus Notes for almost everything, including our websites. Version 6, if you must ask. *sigh*)
- RefWorks
