I’m still mad about this because it happens frequently. Students at all levels of education need library and research instruction–they should get it before graduating high school, they should be getting it in several different classes in college, and there should be something in grad school–seriously, there are people in my master’s program who don’t know anything besides Google.
And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?
Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:
First, zoom out. Start broad. Pick a few phrases or keywords, like “tech companies” and “culture.” See what comes up.
Actually, back up. First, does your library’s website search include articles, or do you have to go into a database? My library’s website searches some of our 200+ databases, but not all. And you’ll need to find (in advance search or adjustable limiters that pop up after your initial search) how to limit your search to scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles.
What other keywords are related or relevant? For the search above, you could use a combination of “silicon valley,” “company/ies” or “organization/s,” “sharing,” “collaborative,” “workplace culture,” “social culture,” “organizational culture,” and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.
Did you find something that looks promising? Great! What kind of subjects/keywords are attached (usually to the abstract, sometimes in the description section of the online listing)? Those can give you more ideas of what to search. Does it cite any articles? Look at those! Some databases (ilu ProQuest) will also show you a selection of related/similar articles.
If you’re researching a very specific topic, you may not find any/many articles specifically about your subject. You may, for example, have to make do with some articles about west-coast tech companies’ work cultures, and different articles about creating sharing/collaborative environments.
That said, this student did the right thing: they tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.
They tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.
I get goddamn professors pulling this shit, there is not one single level in the academy where research literacy isn’t lacking.
Also: Everyone has forgotten how to browse the stacks. As in, find a book that’s relevant, go to the stacks, then look at what’s near it on the shelf. You will find stuff that way that would never turn up on a search. It really works and can be a useful supplement to electronic research even though it involves your corporeal form and books made out of paper.
my law school requires a legal research class. you take it as a 1L, and it’s mandatory. you are signed up for it automatically along with all your other 1L courses. it’s a wise thing to do, because you’re fucked as a lawyer if you don’t know to find, you know, the law.
I have a library and information science degree, which I often refer to as a degree in google, and I’m only being a little facetious with that. I often impress people with my ability to find things online, but it’s only because I’ve taken so many classes in research methods that I know how to phrase a search well. It’s so important, not just in school!
Goddammit there is so much information and so many way to access it that it burns my biscuits when we don’t give students the tools they need to succeed at this. Hell yeah all y’all above!
And here’s what I’ve got to add:
Ask a Librarian
Seriously guys librarians are here to help. We would love to help you find the right resource for your particular informational need and we’ve been trained to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Nowadays you don’t even have to go to the library in person as many libraries offer online chat services as well as the option to contact via email. Further, and I think very importantly we are dedicated to our patrons rights to privacy. To quote the American Library Association the “rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”
Search the Stacks
This is one of my favorite ways to immerse myself in an area of study. While a good subject or keyword search will lead you to some good results sometimes is just as fruitful to go the library and plunk yourself down in section and browse all the books in a topic area. Libraries will label the (book)stacks based on whichever classification system they use and you can use the links below to figure out which area of the stacks you’ll want to look through.
Some websites like gutenberg project are dedicated to making public domain books accessible to the public. Using the search term public domain books is a good way to go about looking for more sources of them. Open sourced is another good term to use when trying to find freely accessible books online and that’s not just limited to fiction books but textbooks are also offered by various sites.
Project Gutenberg is an online archive of tens of thousands of books that have enter the public domain that can be freely accessed.
Openstax is one website that provides access to Higher Ed and AP open sourced textbooks.
Libguides and Pathfinders
As stated above librarians are in the business of connecting people to resources. If we can’t do so in person then we also do so by creating guides that can be found and used when we aren’t around. These guides are filled with search terms, books, articles, reviews, lists, links, and anything else we think would be helpful for patrons trying to explore a particular topic area.
Pathfinder is a particular term used for these guides. Libguides is a particular platform which to host these guides. Using either word at the end of your search terms online will bring up guides that have been created in that particular subject area. Or you can explore libguides directly with your search terms to find what guides librarians across the country have created.
Note: Using pathfinder in your search terms may pull up resources about Paizo Publishing’s same titled tabletop RPG series and while dragons are cool you can modify your search to library pathfinder to exclude these resources.
Other than using a search engine or libguides directly I find a great many pathfinders on university library sites. Usually what I do is find a university’s library webpage, find their pathfinder/research guides/guides section, and then browse through their lists of guides. These are generally organized by field of study so just pick the one you are interested in and look through the resources they have listed.
Some of the resources will be accessible for anyone while some might be locked for students of the particular university. If the article, book, or resource is locked by a school portal you can either search for it online outside of the university portal or you can go to your own university/public library to see if they have access to the resource there. Even if they don’t have it currently in their collection libraries are often connected with other branches and may be able to request an interlibrary loan of what you need.
Online Reference Resources
Sometimes the problem isn’t finding information but finding good information. Below are two sites that I use regularly to help me with this issue when searching online for resources.
The Ipl2 is a good authoritative source to find general information on a variety of topics. Even though the website is no longer updating there are still a plethora of subject guides that can be explored.
Open Sourced Journals and Articles
Just as there are open sourced books and textbooks so too are there open sourced journals and articles available. Again you can add the term open sourced when searching for these resources.
DOAJ is the Directory of Open Access Journals and you can search through here to find both articles and journals freely available to access.
Journal Article Tips
Finally whenever I’m searching through journal articles there are a few things I always like to keep in mind.
Build context. Once you find an article that is relevant to your search you can do this by exploring the citations. Both those that the article you are using references in its bibliography and those that reference the article itself.
Every database is going to do this differently but generally with a few clicks you can find out who has cited an article that you have read. If nothing else try popping the title of your article into google scholar and you’ll see a blue ‘Cited by’ below the description. Also in some cases you can click on the author directly in a database to see what else they have written in the subject. Totally ask your librarian for help navigating the particular database you are using again they will be stoked to do so.
Building this context of literature by finding and reading these extra articles is important to building a critical understanding of your topic and will allow you to build the best possible defense of your arguments. This will also allow you to see if the article you’ve initially selected is in itself a viable position or if it is an outlier of its field.
If you can try and find reviews of literature articles and special issue/special topic editions of journals. These are your best friends in the resource world as these types of articles and journals compile a great deal of information on particular topic in a tiny space. They are immensely helpful in building context in an area of thought and useful to finding out what to read further to be informed in an area of study. Add those words to your search terms to see if you can get some useful resources.
Goddamn…
We should be taught this in MIDDLE SCHOOL.
This is a more important skill than being able to WRITE COHERENTLY.
This is not just a writing or academic skill, this is a CITIZENSHIP SKILL.
Did…did they take this out of school? When I was in middle school we were taken By Class to the school library and the librarian gave a lecture on how to us the library and it’s resources. Of course, at the time all they had was the card catalogue, but we were taught how to read the cards. We were taught the dewey decimal system and how to search the stacks. Then the teacher gave us an assignment that made us go to the public library and use the knowledge we were given. I don’t remember if I was taught to look through journals then or if that came later, but I eventually learned it. Either way, I was taught that way back in the 80s…
WHEN THE EVER LIVING FUCK DID THEY STOP TEACHING THAT IN SCHOOLS? IT’S A GODSDAMN NECESSITY IN THIS AGE OF INFORMATION. INFORMATION IS FUCKING USELESS IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIND IT!
Gods…we are failing kids so fucking hard in this fucking country…
I was lucky enough to have great library education in elementary/middle school, university, and medical school, and it has made me LOVE my librarian friends so so so much <3
I didn’t learn how to do this shit until I taught myself as an adult.
Some people are lucky enough to learn it, but most people aren’t.
black people, please take care of yourselves. please take care of your health. please take care of your mind. please take care of your spirit.
i understand if your soul is not at peace. i understand if you are exhausted. just, please take care of yourselves in these dark, hateful times and surround yourself with people who understand why.
In 2016, over 75,000 mail-in ballots were left
uncounted and discarded because they were received after mail-in voting deadlines, which all vary by state, according to CBS news.
Some states like California allow you to check with the Registrar of Voters on-line to verify both if a ballot has issued and if it was received to help prevent voting errors.
Remember, the most common forms of voter fraud are 1) gerrymandering, 2) voter suppression and 3) foreign participation through both lobbying and online misinformation.
please please please everyone who can vote make sure you’re registered and check when your ballot needs to be in. they are deliberately slowing things down so be careful and cautious about this, play it safe.
people who think its unethical to eat chicken eggs are like people who think bees should keep all their honey. they literally produce more than they need and your unwillingness to even buy local means you are doing nothing to help them, support your small farmers you heathens
This is not true.
1) honeybees do not produce “extra honey.” And beekeepers don’t take some of the honey, they take all of it.
2) chickens have been artificially selected from naturally producing eggs once a month to producing eggs every couple of days. Their bodies are not sustainable and the health complications of this rapid egg production kills chickens.
Hey idk who like. Lied to you about the way honey farms work, but could you stop spreading misinformation? Are you a beekeeper?
Because I am!
Beekeepers make sure hives are fed before there is pollen in the air, protected from predators and the elements, and have enough honey to sustain themselves. We don’t take all of it.
But overproduction of honey leads to stagnation in the hive. It puts stress on the queen to lay eggs, and when they inevitably fill up all their space with honey (instead of filling up the multiple empty, clean boxes of frames beekeepers might put on top of the main hive box), the queen can get so stressed she dies. If there’s a spike in the weather and the hive hasn’t prepared new queen brood, that’s it! The colony is dead. Because there wasn’t enough space for eggs and honey in the hive.
Beekeepers take excess honey. We are constantly monitoring the state of the hive, checking for parasites, analyzing the eggs for diseases, and making sure they are fed and healthy (usually with sugar water and pollen substitutes until they have made enough honey to sustain themselves in the early spring months). If a queen dies prematurely, we make every attempt to replace her to save the colony.
I know there’s an urge to patronize everyone who works in the farming industry, but try to understand the differences between small scale agriculture and industrial farming. There IS a difference. And stop spreading misinformation.
If you’re this passionate about ethical consumption, look into some of the ecofeministresearch on non-hierarchal interspecies relationships (working on building animal-human relationships in a non exploitative way).
But yeah! Stop spreading misinformation! Please 🐝
Also if I can harp on the chicken part?
Yea Chickens are some of the most abused animals on big factory farms and I’ll be the first to admit it’s criminal and more needs to be done to regulate this.
Yes selective breeding over time has caused an increase in the ammount of eggs produced by chickens and factory farms have some messed up practices to get more eggs from them including forced moutling.
THIS IS WHY YOU SUPPORT LOCAL FARMERS AND THEIR EGGS
Many people take to raising their own hens because of America’s immoral treatment of hens in factory farms like you’re not helping the poor chicks by starving these farmers financially you’re just hurting the one people trying to change things and making the OPTION of cage free organic cruelty free eggs even harder to find
Yeah, as someone who like… lives on a chicken and duck farm… Coops help keep wild animals out but birds are kinda dumb. And chickens literally do not need to keep the unfertilized eggs!
Most chickens will sit on unfertilized eggs until they can tell if they are or not… By the smell of rotting egg. Yeah, ew. Farmers can hold that bitch to the flashlight and tell if there’s a baby in there! They know! The eggs are not being abused!
Also, if you separate your cocks and your hens, there wont even be that issue in the first place. Egg-laying is basically chicken menstruation, but unlike mammalian menstruation which is full of blood and dead tissue, chicken menstruation is full of tasty tasty nutrients
Support local farms! Most grocery stores carry eggs from small, local farms that give hens acres of open pasture and healthier housing.
Also, that “selectively bred to lay eggs more often” thing? Literally just comes from feeding the chickens every day. The chicken’s ancestors would only lay an egg when there was abundant food, so people started feeding them every day to get more eggs. That’s it.
So two firefighters came into my store this morning. Now, we get firefighters in the store once in a while, probably because our complex is perpetually setting off the fire alarm, and every time they show up my whole team fawns over them like they’re walking sex gods and I don’t really Get It.
But y’all. Two firefighters came into my store this morning, and I Get It. Because that woman was so goddamn attractive, with her dark eyes and her muscles and her strong hands and her charming smile and her casual confidence just lounging around like she owned the place and a;dlfghadfghdfg I have never looked at ANYONE and immediately stopped breathing but y’all it HAPPENED. This woman was so stunningly handsome that I literally cannot tell you what the other female firefighter in the room looked like beyond “I think she was blonde.”
But you know what, I’m BoH so I didn’t have to talk to the stunningly handsome firefighter, and that was fine. I minded my business and tried (and failed) not to look at her. Until the next guests came in, and I said “Hi, welcome in!” reflexively like I’m supposed to.
And this firefighter. She looked at me with this cheeky little smirk, and she said, “Hey now. You didn’t welcome me in.”
And instead of saying something coy, or charming, or clever, the words that actually came out of my mouth were: “Well, you’re very attractive, and it threw me off.”
Y’all she chuckled and she WINKED AT ME. And I’m pretty sure I died on the spot.
She was so charming that I didn’t realize until an hour later that she wasn’t wearing a mask and I’d forgotten to be annoyed about it.
So today I get to work and my boss hands me my paperwork and… a lighter. A nondescript blue plastic lighter, which I flip over a couple of times looking for initials and then, not seeing any, I ask, “Whose is this?”
“It’s for you,” my boss says, with that look on his face like he’s trying not to give away the punchline of a joke.
And y’all, it’s relatively early in the morning. I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately. I haven’t had my coffee yet. So forgive me, because my dumb gay ass asks, “What for?”
Which it turns out is exactly what he wants me to ask, because he says with a big grin, “Heard you wanted to get someone’s attention at the fire department.”
All day long at regular intervals he points out flammable objects around the store.
There was pushback. People formed rapid response and migrant support networks, blockaded and occupied facilities, blocked vans with human walls, attacked and boycotted financial sponsors, protested outside the homes of ICE officers, provided legal support and material aid to detainees, etc. In one particular wave of arrests ICE only kidnapped I think less than 10% of their target number and admitted themselves that it was because of popular resistance
Yes, the ICE operations were a clear predecessor to this and people really shouldn’t be as surprised as they are, but pretending that resistance to these fascist policies is smaller than it really is is nothing but demoralizing. It gives people the impression that it’s too late, that they’re all alone, that no one is standing with them in solidarity
But we’re fighting. We always have been, and we always will as long as injustice exists. And we need your help!
if one more nonamerican calls americans unclean or stupid or some shit for dying of rona when our government is actively trying to murder the most vulnerable of our population by using them as expendable cogs in their minimumwage fueled capitalistic machine im going to turn into one of those bugs bunny w gun memes
“But all those people who won’t wear masks…”
…WOULDN’T BE AS MUCH OF A PROBLEM IF PEOPLE ACTUALLY HAD TO SIT THEIR ASS AT HOME BY LAW, AND GOT PAID ENOUGH MONEY TO DO SO
Instead, we are given NO laws with teeth requiring people to stay home except for the essentials, NO federal laws requiring masks (with some state governors banning mask requirements), and NO stipend for staying home, which is on purpose, because they want us DESPERATE to go back out and work. DURING A PANDEMIC.
THIS IS ALMOST ENTIRELY A GOVERNMENT-TRYING-TO-MURDER-US-FOR-PROFIT ISSUE.
Shit-for-brains Becky with no mask working at Target wouldn’t be near as much of a problem IF TARGET WAS CLOSED AND SHE WAS GIVEN ENOUGH MONEY TO STAY THE FUCK AT HOME.
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