I have been interested in course specific student portals created and maintained by the academic library since I was a MLIS student, so I was pleasantly surprised to come across a webinar entitled "Students, Faculty and Librarians: Making Connections through Course Pages" After watching the broadcast I printed off the recommended article: Portals for Undergraduate Subject Searching: Are They Worth It? by Jane Nichols and Margaret Mellinger. It was a clear read that touched on most if not all of the questions I had kicking around in my mind after the presentation. Ultimately, I found two ideas particularly interesting.
One, a "librarian's" concept of type of resource (book, article, video) is more and more difficult for the traditional undergraduate to understand; "The task force concluded that OSU Libraries’ arrangement by type (database, journal, catalog) hindered users ability to find subject specific information (486)." Rather than looking for type, a student is looking for information on their topic.
I see this idea played out more and more as student work through the library portion of our required Researching and Writing Course. Even though we try to create clear lines between reference books, news, journals, books, and web pages in the assignment tasks student continually return resource lists that pay no attention to the type of resources but rather concentrate on the content. I have been wondering for some time now if the fact of the matter was that TYPE means little to students and it was encouraging to read that this is not a shortcoming of our teaching technique but rather a result of a conceptual difference.
Second and more applicable to this 23 Things exercise was the comment on a surprising find; users were not that interested in expending their time and energy on customizing their own library page or portal. This was a helpful reminder; while the tools and possibilities are ever-expanding; when we as a library create for our users we cannot expect the user to want to expend excessive amounts of time or energy. Yes, tools are great; yes, visuals are interesting; but we need to do the work and customization so that the user can easily and quickly meet their need.
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I haven't begun Thing 7 yet, but I too have noticed what you are saying about our students. (I work at a K-8 School in its library, and am a former college English teacher.) In fact, the public libraries in St. Paul have in part responded to such a shift in search paradigms; they now shelve non-fiction DVDs and VCR tapes along with the non-fiction books.
I'm not sure--as the former English teacher--if that is good or bad. I wonder if the methods of documentation will shift to this view as well. Until they do, students still need to be able to IDENTIFY which type of material something is so that they can use the proper form of documentation.
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