I’ve heard a lot of people express concern over the effectiveness of discovery tools. While Pete Coco’s article Convenience and its Discontents: Teaching Web-Scale Discovery in the Context of Google definitely addresses some of these concerns, it also emphasizes the importance of information literacy and user instruction as a means to further exploit discovery tools.
While I had always assumed that user instruction was essential to librarianship, I hadn’t necessarily thought of us as educators. I was never required to take an introduction to the library class in college, but I’ve since realized how little I understood about the university’s offerings and how much my research would have benefited from a better orientation to the library’s resources.
This gap between the user and technology is where librarians belong and have really always belonged. Improving access to our collections doesn’t end with metadata or algorithms or user-friendly interfaces. We still need that human element, especially as our technologies and tools continue to evolve beyond the user’s reach.
Whoops, I realized while reading this that I’d misattributed this article when I posted about it! I agree, not including sufficient user instruction really puts students at a disadvantage academically.
I feel the same! I went to college waaaay pre-Internet, and even pre-internal hard drive!
I never learned how to really use library resources effectively because no one ever told me! Coco’s points about how library search is a different animal than Google search have really sunk in over the past week. Library instruction is just as valuable as it ever was.
I think LI is more valuable than ever. There are so many digital natives that, while they may be technologically savvy, that aren’t information literate, which involves so much more than the ability to use a search bar.