Ask A Librarian

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.