Assignment #5
Summer's winding down and time is beginning to slip away from me, so in the spirit of killing two birds with one stone, for this assignment I chose a few topics that pertain to my next work of fiction. The assignment was to use KnowItNow.org and Kent's Ask a Librarian feature for help with research.
In my last assignment, The Information Awareness Report, I'd found that asking professionals or librarians was my best bet for getting accurate and relevant information, so I think I had high expectations going into this.
Know It Now
I started my quest for information on knowitnow.org early this morning. I tried a few times, maybe three, before getting a response. Christine, the librarian I chatted with, was helpful and perky. After simply entering in my question, she returned several web sites to me that looked as though they were specific to my request and jam-packed with information. She asked me if I needed anything else and honestly, I couldn't think of anything else to ask for. I was rather surprised to find that the information was there by request, and I wasn't going to have to filter through a thousand messy websites to find what I needed.
All in all, the conversation lasted for five minutes, was polite and helpful, and a transcript of the conversation was emailed to me, complete with links Christine had provided, right after I closed the chat box.
Ask A Librarian at Kent
The next thing I did was pull up the Kent library site. There was a chat box already open and ready, saying the librarian was online. I quickly typed in my informational request. The page warned that it may take a few minutes because the librarian might be busy, so I waited, but after probably ten minutes I gave up. I tried again later and got the same thing. My third attempt in the afternoon was a charm. I got a message back in about two seconds. He asked me for specifics, if there were narrower branches of the topic and what kind of resources I'd like. Settling on journal articles, websites, and a few key points from my topic, he promptly sent me his search results from Kent's own library, and then told me he would email me with other articles soon.
Only five minutes passed before my inbox had an email from the librarian containing full articles he'd found on the topic. FULL ARTICLES. Not just the links or the record for it, the entire article.
Let me repeat that just so you can get the full effect of how convenient and easy this is: I was emailed full articles relating to my specific text. Articles that I did not look up myself, I merely asked for them.
Conclusion
Will I use these online librarian sites again? Absolutely. It was easy and fast. The only problems I encountered were technical ones, not with the service itself. The librarians themselves seemed ready to spend all day researching with me if I'd asked it of them, and seemed to genuinely enjoy research.
The best thing about using librarians? Just as I'd hoped, they were knowledgeable and cut out the "middle man" work of finding trustworthy sources. Even when I research in libraries myself, or databases like what was required in the last assignment, I often don't know enough about using them or about the sources they cite to tell if the information will be useful to me. And I could have spent an hour on Google narrowing my search to the articles and sites the librarians easily found and sent me in five minutes. Added to that, I have emails sitting in my account, ready to be pulled up and viewed at any time. And in the fast-paced and ever-changing world of the internet, that is a very good thing indeed.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
Information Awareness Report
In my Access to Information class for my MLIS degree I was asked to create an Information Awareness Report. The gist? Research a subject you don't know enough about and explain your methods.
Having recently finished writing a novel about a gay teen, and after reading this amazing post to librarians about LGBT literature for young adults, I started to wonder, "What's the publishing world like for gay fiction for teens? Is the outlook as bad as this young man believes? Are all the stories getting published for LBGT teens the same?"
Of course I had read the standard "classics" for the genre, Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden, The God Box by Alex Sanchez, and there were lots of things I loved about all of them, along with some criticisms. But perhaps there were other stories out there, better stories, that I was missing. The only way to find out if there's truly remarkable fiction out there was to read it, but I realized that, other than these classics, I didn't know where to start. Thus began my search for books with an LGBT theme that come highly recommended by critics, librarians, and teens themselves.
Google
It's hard to deny that Google has some advantages. It's quick, it's easy, and it's convenient. It's made for someone like me, who spends most of the day with her hands glued to a laptop. It can also be just about the least effective method for finding information the world has to offer. As I typed "books for gay teens" into the search engine and waited for the results, I hoped luck would be in my favor.
It was. Google returned nearly 25,000 results to me in under a second, and the first page of results at least looked extremely relevant to my question. The very first result was like hitting the jackpot: Alex Sanchez's own list of Great Books for Gay Teens. This was a great start, and since I've liked Sanchez's books, his recommendations would probably suit my tastes as well.
Another article Google returned was one from the Huffington Post, called 13 Great Books for Gay Teens. Although it was informative for the concept of my search, I found myself realizing that I should have been more specific. This article, Sanchez's list, and the majority of the first page of results were all repeating themselves, and although they were mentioning the classics, I wanted more uncommon answers, and I wanted books that were uncommon as well.
My next Google search then, was "LGBT young adult fiction awards." This returned exactly the kind of results I was looking for. Here are just a few of the worthwhile results I found:
What I learned:
Overall, I thought that using Google was effective. As always, it was fast and easy and readily available. The results that I found were right there on the web to see, nicely displayed, and I didn't have to order anything or make a trip to the library to find the actual article.
There were problems I had with Google search that left me, ultimately, a bit perplexed and frustrated with my search results. The first was that it became quickly evident that the keyword search was ineffective. Even though the results matched words, the content was often not what I was looking for. It appeared to be more advertisements, business websites, personal blogs, or various other mediums where the information was questionable at best. It was evident that I would have to check the information thoroughly to make sure it was correct, which is certainly not ideal and will not save a user any time.
American Library Association
The next step was logical. Who would know about the best LGBT fiction out there available to teens? Librarians, of course. A quick search in the search box of the ALA website brought up this extremely pertinent article from the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Rountable at the 2000 ALA Conference. Not only did it give an insightful list of fiction and nonfiction for gay teens, it also linked directly to the Roundtable page on ala.org, which led to me discovering quite a bit about the group, their project, and advocacy.
What I Learned:
Always trust a librarian. Really, next time I have a question about this topic, this will be the first place I check. The roundtable is a wonderful professional resource maintained by experts who have already pulled together news and information and resources. In fact, everything I found in Google was already cited on this page and it could have saved me a lot of time.
Library Thing
Like the ALA, I assumed that Library Thing would be a great resource for finding lists of fiction for gay teens, and I was right. A simple search for "gay teens" in the tags section of their search page brought up lists of books that other users had tagged with that phrase. From there it was so easy to narrow it down to what I wanted using their feature called "tagmashes" that lets you integrate more than one tag in a search, in other words, you could seriously narrow down a book by topics or genre in one easy click. In addition to that, narrowing down the search was made easier by their "related subjects" section, which allowed me to browse, discover, and pinpoint exactly what I was looking for. I "walked away" from this resource with a bigger list of books to read than any of the other resources I'd tried.
What I Learned in This Assignment:
Having recently finished writing a novel about a gay teen, and after reading this amazing post to librarians about LGBT literature for young adults, I started to wonder, "What's the publishing world like for gay fiction for teens? Is the outlook as bad as this young man believes? Are all the stories getting published for LBGT teens the same?"
Of course I had read the standard "classics" for the genre, Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden, The God Box by Alex Sanchez, and there were lots of things I loved about all of them, along with some criticisms. But perhaps there were other stories out there, better stories, that I was missing. The only way to find out if there's truly remarkable fiction out there was to read it, but I realized that, other than these classics, I didn't know where to start. Thus began my search for books with an LGBT theme that come highly recommended by critics, librarians, and teens themselves.
It's hard to deny that Google has some advantages. It's quick, it's easy, and it's convenient. It's made for someone like me, who spends most of the day with her hands glued to a laptop. It can also be just about the least effective method for finding information the world has to offer. As I typed "books for gay teens" into the search engine and waited for the results, I hoped luck would be in my favor.
It was. Google returned nearly 25,000 results to me in under a second, and the first page of results at least looked extremely relevant to my question. The very first result was like hitting the jackpot: Alex Sanchez's own list of Great Books for Gay Teens. This was a great start, and since I've liked Sanchez's books, his recommendations would probably suit my tastes as well.
Another article Google returned was one from the Huffington Post, called 13 Great Books for Gay Teens. Although it was informative for the concept of my search, I found myself realizing that I should have been more specific. This article, Sanchez's list, and the majority of the first page of results were all repeating themselves, and although they were mentioning the classics, I wanted more uncommon answers, and I wanted books that were uncommon as well.
My next Google search then, was "LGBT young adult fiction awards." This returned exactly the kind of results I was looking for. Here are just a few of the worthwhile results I found:
What I learned:
Overall, I thought that using Google was effective. As always, it was fast and easy and readily available. The results that I found were right there on the web to see, nicely displayed, and I didn't have to order anything or make a trip to the library to find the actual article.
There were problems I had with Google search that left me, ultimately, a bit perplexed and frustrated with my search results. The first was that it became quickly evident that the keyword search was ineffective. Even though the results matched words, the content was often not what I was looking for. It appeared to be more advertisements, business websites, personal blogs, or various other mediums where the information was questionable at best. It was evident that I would have to check the information thoroughly to make sure it was correct, which is certainly not ideal and will not save a user any time.
American Library Association
The next step was logical. Who would know about the best LGBT fiction out there available to teens? Librarians, of course. A quick search in the search box of the ALA website brought up this extremely pertinent article from the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Rountable at the 2000 ALA Conference. Not only did it give an insightful list of fiction and nonfiction for gay teens, it also linked directly to the Roundtable page on ala.org, which led to me discovering quite a bit about the group, their project, and advocacy.
What I Learned:
Always trust a librarian. Really, next time I have a question about this topic, this will be the first place I check. The roundtable is a wonderful professional resource maintained by experts who have already pulled together news and information and resources. In fact, everything I found in Google was already cited on this page and it could have saved me a lot of time.
Library Thing
Like the ALA, I assumed that Library Thing would be a great resource for finding lists of fiction for gay teens, and I was right. A simple search for "gay teens" in the tags section of their search page brought up lists of books that other users had tagged with that phrase. From there it was so easy to narrow it down to what I wanted using their feature called "tagmashes" that lets you integrate more than one tag in a search, in other words, you could seriously narrow down a book by topics or genre in one easy click. In addition to that, narrowing down the search was made easier by their "related subjects" section, which allowed me to browse, discover, and pinpoint exactly what I was looking for. I "walked away" from this resource with a bigger list of books to read than any of the other resources I'd tried.
What I Learned in This Assignment:
- Google may be the most convenient, but it's also the biggest time suck. The results returned were often not relevant, which led to a lot of tweaking in the searches and a lot of filtering. Added to that, I still had to determine if the contents of the websites were trustworthy.
- The more specific you can get, the better when searching. Although I did not consult a human being for this project, I imagine it works much the same way as searching tools on any website. The more information you can provide, the more detail, the more relevant your found resources will be.
- That said, there are times when it's easiest to be very general and narrow it down yourself. One reason I didn't use the VPN was that, even though their thorough searches through databases are great, there is such a thing as TOO specific. I knew if I'd tried this search in a database, such as the LGBT life one, I would either get one or two results that perfectly matched my keywords, or a thousand matches if I was vague. Sometimes the search just calls for vagueness.
- Finding groups dedicated to your subject may be the best way to go about finding information. Usually these groups have already compiled resources and it makes research as easy as breathing.
- User created tags are the best thing since sliced bread. And the best thing since user created tags? The ability to combine tags in a search. Genius.
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