Hi there,

I am keenly interested in finding out if the information seeking behavior of your students has changed. In the past, pre-Internet, most of our students used their institutions libraries or learning resources center to gather information for classroom research. Now, students can access from home, the Internet, the WWW and digital resources such as databases ( FirstSearch etc.) that allow them to find and gather information.

Setting aside the quality of the information that your students may find, I would like to ask you two questions. I am also interested if this is a global trend, that is, is this happening in Spain, Canada, and other countries as well as the U.S.

1. How much of your students classroom research do you believe is done in your institutions library?

2. How much of your srudents classroom research do you believe is done by using the Internet, the W.W.W., and online databases?

I posed these questions at the end of the decision thread, and already received wonderful responses from two members, Thank you!

I thank you all for your responses!

Hi Carmen

The attitude of teachers against the internet has a great influence its integration in the courses.

Here teachers are very positive towards the introduction of the internet in the school and are also interessed in educative online applications.

Internet has to be integrated, not only to improve the pupils/students education, but also because it has become an important database.

The big disadvantage is that a lot of information on the net is unreliable.

Did you consider that also teachers use more and more the internet? Every year I invest less in new books. Regrettable, but reality.

At the other hand, we couldn't live without books. Searching the net is a time-consuming occupation and for a real good book and reliable information, I still advice my pupils to go to the library.

Martine

I'm a former teacher who now assists researchers in a non-institutional library and archive. One thing that has changed since I last worked in a (pre-information-age) classroom is that many college students have a more critical eye for reliable versus unreliable sources: they're less likely to accept something as true just because they've read it somewhere. The downside of the internet is that those who lack that critical skill believe all sorts of strange things.

Generally, the college students and other researchers who use our collections are looking for things far more obscure than they did twelve years ago. For example, our newspaper clipping subject files are now rarely touched except by researchers dealing with eras before the late 1970s, and we have stopped adding current articles to the files. Researchers in our archive today mostly ask for manuscripts, photo collections, rare serials unavailable on line, and so on. Those who use our lending library often ask for hard-to-find books they saw cited on web sites or in bibliographies of other books.

Students seem much more visually oriented than before. They're looking not just for information, but also for images and other multimedia files they can include in a PowerPoint presentation or a web page connected with their research project. As often as not, they crib what images they can from the web, and then try to fill in the gaps elsewhere.

An astonishing percentage of our clients has never heard of the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, or had forgotten it existed. Ditto for the New York Times Index and other valuable resources for finding older articles.

Thank you Martine and El Viajero,

You are both describing what the literature is recording. Tremendous changes in user information seeking behavior.

I do not believe that the book is out as an information source, at least not until the e-book is easy to use, but, libraries as places may be.

Libraries will remain as el Viajero describes,a place where more ephemeral informatio can be located.

Academic libraries are facing an interesting paradigm. Is the library a place or a service?

For remote users,which can be any student with access to the Internet, from home, work, or anyplace, the library as a service is the convenient expectation. With a user id the student can access thousands of journals via their institutions electronic databases. In addition more and more libraries have their websites where they have services as well as resources being offered. For example many academic libraries have the "Ask the Librarian" concept using live remote reference services.

The traditional university or college library was considered at one time in Jeffersonian terms, as the heart of the institution, or, the library as a place. However, in the last six years they have been reporting a very interesting phenomena, that even though enrollments are increasing, circulation is decreasing! (ACRL)

So, we are seeing fewer and fewer students using checking out materials and more and more students using the Internet , WWW, and online databases.

What's going to happen to traditional academic libraries?

Even that is changing, as once-obscure items are increasingly available on line. A ten-minute perusal of the Library of Congress' "American Memory" site yields manuscripts and photos that previously would have required great pains to access and copy. I once spent four hours perusing the catalog of the Vanderbilt Television News archives, for which I had to travel a great distance. I can now find the same information from home with 15 minutes of online searching.

That's a good thing. However, many academic libraries have used that as an excuse to stop collecting paper editions of periodicals that are available from fulltext database services. Some even deaccession existing microfilms of such titles. This is a dangerous trend. Aside from losing much information available in the original document (formatting, advertising, color versus black and white, was it on glossy or cheap paper, etc.), what happens if Lexis/Nexis drops a periodical from its roster? Every subscribing library instantly loses that title, assuming they weren't collecting the paper edition as well. Too much centralized decision making rests with a handful of data service companies. Also, the online editions often omit syndicated articles and some pieces by freelancers.

I love having access to InfoTrac and Nexis, but the case for saving the paper originals (or microforms or scans of decaying items) needs to be made in a more convincing way.

El viajero, you have pointed to many disturbing trends, one of which is the question of ownership versus access :
yes, indeed, it is a dangerous trend. Libraries that drop print subscriptions because they have replaced them with digital format are in a very shaky ground. The libraries license the information for a specific number of users, over a specific amount of time! So, if by chance the library is unable to continue the online license, it has nothing, no back up paper or indexing to back it up.

As you said in an earlier post, few libraries are still buying print indexes for the same reason.

The main problem for this state of affairs is lack of funding. Distributive education is part of every university and college in the U.S., yet library funding has not increased to implement this new user service, the 24/7 access that is best serviced via online databases. So the librarian when asking for additional funds, is often told, why do you want it in print when it's already online. When you say, well for several reasons: as a precautionary move for one, what if in a few years we cannot afford the e-databases, etc, for the sake of accuracy, which is important in research libraries serving graduate students; and most importantly is that full-text is not full-image, the charts, graphs, pictures, tables, etc., may not appear in full-text!

We have not passed the threshold where we can have all our access online, we are still in the nascent part of the information age, where we have to rely on both print and digital. That is why I am so interested in what type of resources freshmen and sophmore students are using for their classroom reseach.

Interesting post.
Does anyone know of any theses or similar on any topic related to a language student's use of on-line materials, etc. I work at a couple of schools and students have been extremely reluctant to use on-line materials available to the students at school or at home. Thanks much.

Hi madridmanjim,
I am working on my dissertation on this topic,on information-seeking behavior off students, particularly undergraduate students in communioty colleges, while there are dozens of studies of internet use, I have not run into any as you requested: "related to a language student's use of on-line materials."

What is the age group of your students? Will general articles on internet use do?

Let me know,
Carmen

Booklady,

I am going to offer you my insight on the use of online resources in class both as a professor and as a graduate student in a Spanish public university.

I am currently teaching an undergraduate course on 16 and 17th century English drama for last year undergrads. The main problem that we had to face when planning the course were the limited amount of resources be it in traditional formats or online. Our library, and in general those in the Spanish public university system, lack the most basic books and resources, so we had to resort to online resources in order to provide our students with the material that was necessary for the course. Our problem, also, is that our institution does not subscribe to most of the online resources so we have to get whatever we need in the free sites. In our field, texts are not that hard to find, but in the case of women writers it is almost imposible to find the text of the plays in free access.

So as a professor, Internet is a good resource to find whatever we lack in our library. My students search for information online and are familiar with the process and resort to it in the first place assuming that they have hardly anything in the library, so they use the Internet to find information A problem with this is internet access from school since the number of terminals available for student use is quite scarce. it has gotten much better in the last 4 years, but it is still very far from being at the same level as England and the USA. I think it may be quite accurate to say that they use the library as much as they use the Internet, or the Internet even more.

As a student, I started to use the Internet quite early in respect to my classmates due to my summers at Universities in the US. I can perfectly remember the turning point. I was doing summer courses at Yale University in summer 1996 and nobody referred us to online resources or asked us to resort to them when doing research. A year later in summer courses at Brown University, we were constantly encouraged to use the internet. So I think this reflects a change in the way information was sought. Back in Spain, I started to use the internet for information in 1997 and it was not that common here. It is after 1998 that people start to use it more frequently and see it as an instrument of research. I am still a graduate student, hopefully not for much longer! but I have gotten used to do my research primarily on the internet, especially for primary text from the renaissance and the Classics, they are easier to find and more sure to be found that in the library. For secondary resources the story is different, they are hardly ever available for free, but I found the Internet of much use because I have to travel to get material every few months to the US or to England and since the catalogs of the libraries are online, i can choose where to go based in the materials that they have that I can be interested in. If they were not online, it would be hard to figure out where to go, other than to the legal deposit libraries.

Nevertheless, when I have to write and reference editions, those preferred are the canonical ones which are in book format for the most part.

I believe that Internet is a very useful tool to do a primary research. It has changed the life or researches in countries with lack of resources bc know we know better where to go and have access to primary texts that otherwise we will not have. In that sense, the researchers and students of the Internet generation are quite spoiled. When I hear how they had to do things 15 years ago it looks like a different world and I experienced that myself at the Huntington Library where in MAy 2001 they did not have the online catalog and I had to deal with the old card system I never had to use before not even in Spain. It helped me understand how much easier computers and internet have made our lives.

Nevertheless, we have to use these resources but not to forget the old ways and know how to conduct research with books and more traditional formats. Computers in a way make us lazy bc all we have to do is type the search and wait until it is done. I personally love books and libraries and I think they can never be replaced with the Internet.

My experience is that our students should be taught the importance of the Internet as a research tool and the important of the books in the libraries and how to look for information within those books, it is amazing how so many people are not capable of doing so in an effective way!

I am lucky to be familiar with the libraries in the universities in the US, which are the dream of any Spanish researcher or student, you are spoiled in a way and cannot imagine what it is to go to a library and find everything you need. Despite this bad situation in Spain, I think our students see the Internet as a resource and use it often and can figure out pretty well if whatever they have found is reliable.

American higher education and Spanish are different worlds. When I talk to people about the differences I find people who can hardly believe the scarcity of our resources, which is sad, but true. it is impossible to give you a good answer to your questions in a posting of reasonable length, so I will be more than happy to answer any question related to this that you may have, but I hope I have given you the idea of what things are like here!

I am the teacher-librarian of a middle school. Given their choice, students would use only the internet. They don't care for databases....only the standard search engines, and frankly, they do a poor job of that. Students search using the address bar and think they've done all there is to do. There's nothing like watching a student labor over the Tecumseh Electric Power site when his topic is the Native American leader.

I frequently ask students to raise their hands if they have computers at home. When 98% of the hands go up, I say "Great, use your computers at home, and use our print materials here." Students have to be aware that any fool can put his information on the web and there is no control in place for accuracy, and that a book on a subject is most certainly going to have more information than a two page article off of google or whatever. It is often much faster to go to a print source for information than it is to use a computer, but students need to see that through experience and have to be shown which print sources are the best bets.

The additional problem we face now is that students think cutting and pasting lines from internet sources is the same as writing a paper! I think that is one of the biggest draws for them in terms of homework assignments. Sadly, the parents don't seem to see the problem with that and often encourage it! Sigh. I have my work cut out for me!