two interesting blog posts
Two great posts yesterday:
Dutch librarian Wouter Gerritsma posted about a Swedish usability research project comparing students' search behaviour for information with Google Scholar and Metalib on his blog (http://wowter.net/2007/11/14/students-expectation-of-databases/). The 156-page report is available at http://www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_su_diva-1264-2__fulltext.pdf and covers some interesting aspects of MetaLib usability, as well as comparisons to functionality to Google Scholar. They did 4 sets of studies: 2 each for MetaLib &Google Scholar, and for each database interface, they had a group of students who had had no prior training and a group who had had a 45-minute introduction to the interface.
I don't know what their MetaLib interface looks like, so it's not clear that their results translate to other MetaLib instances, but it's very interesting to see the problems / successes Swedish students had with both interfaces.
John Dupuis lists a few interesting articles from the most recent issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on Social Network Sites on his Confessions of a Science Librarian blog. Articles include:
- Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison
- Every Blog Has Its Day: Politically Interested Internet Users' Perceptions of Blog Credibility by Thomas J. Johnson, Barbara K. Kaye, Shannon L. Bichard, and W. Joann Wong
- and these that I think are interesting, too, esp. for UConn Communication Sciences folks ...
- The Impact of Language Variety and Expertise on Perceptions of Online Political Discussions.Kenny W. P. Tan, Debbie Swee, Corinne Lim, Benjamin H. Detenber, and Lubna Alsagof
- IM=Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace. R. Kelly Garrett and James N. Danziger
Blogged with Flock
- Google Scholar & You
Here are answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about Google Scholar. I often get asked what I think about Google Scholar, so I wrote a post on my library's blog in response -- and have referred several students to it. I figured it was worth sharing...
- Library & Information Science Blog Posts
So I got an iPod Touch a few weeks ago, and it's swell. I love having the Internet anywhere in the house or at work, and this makes it much easier to keep up with blogs. Yay! Google Reader has a terrific mobile interface, which makes the blog posts...
- More Library Instruction Or Better Database Interfaces?
My librarian friend Emily Alling recently posted a question on Facebook asking if you were the head of a reference department: which should / would get more priority, more instruction on how to use library resources, or better interfaces for those resources?...
- Helping Scholars Find Material (rant)
John Dupuis, who writes the blog Confessions of a Science Librarian refers us to an interesting series of posts called "Finding Scientific Papers for Free." Written by biologist Sandra Porter on her blog Discovering Biology in a Digital World, they are...
- Citation Tracking
Roy Tennant's excellent library literature abstracting service Current Cites points to an interesting short article about citation tracking: Bakkalbasi, Nisa, Kathleen Bauer, and Janis Glover, et. al. "Three Options for Citation Tracking: Google...