According to Bell’s 2004 article, titled “The
Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google”,
students are lacking “substance” in their information “diet”. Comparing quality
information to healthy food or “salad” and quick searches and secondary
information to “fast food” , Bell believes that students today want fast, easy
access to research. He states that the current generation wants instantaneous
everything, including research that requires no critical thought or evaluation.
He recognizes that it is not simply the students that have this mindset. He
discusses the impact the “aggregators” have in this process by their lack of
simplicity for research. He believes that in order to produce quality education
all must work together. Aggregators should work on developing search systems
and interfaces that provides a balance of the sophistication of library
catalogs and databases but also the ease of a quick search engine so that the
databases are more user-friendly and accessible.
In the 2010 study of college students and their
use of information, Head and Eisenberg found that students in fact did care
about the quality of the work produced and the approach taken to find
information was consistent and thoughtful. The use of search engines such as
Google ranked the highest for everyday searching, but the biggest issue was
that student’s expectations of research were skewed from high school. Since
most of the interviewed students reported that their research routines were
reflected from high school, students in college are assuming that good research
simply meant finding “the answer”. Obviously information is more 3 dimensional
then that, it is understandable why college students are resorting to the
secondary sources, which had met their teacher’s expectations, to base their
research on. With this in mind, one can begin to see the motives behind the way
college students are conducting their research and can begin to conceptualize a
solution for a simple problem: students are not being taught properly how to
research.
When starting a research paper I tend to begin
searching Google and pulling up my topic to see what it brings up. Mostly, it
leads me to Wikipedia and I comb through the articles quickly and search for
related links and terms. After I feel as that I have a specific purpose for my
topic I then will go onto the library databases and search with specific terms.
If I need help I usually will ask a peer or email my teacher but I rarely have
turned to a librarian or library worker for help. With the two articles above,
Bell states that the students have a “fast, quick” mindset when doing research
because of our instantaneous lifestyles and Head & Eisenberg found that it
was the “concept” of research that was disabling proper research. Both have
valid points concerning today’s modern college student, even if they had
different WHYS. It is important to focus on the ending of each article. Although
starting from different angles, both agreed it was necessary for teachers,
librarians, and database companies to intervene and properly teach a quality
research process. Both authors agreed that classes (like LIB 105) that
implement correct research process is imperative for a quality of education.
