Gary “ResourceShelf” Price sent over a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Article on the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library, and librarian’s nightmares.
Students’ increasing reliance on the Internet and declining use of library reference desks for their research have Pitt librarians worried students are missing out on the school’s extensive collection of databases, journals and archives — and that both their research and their education might be suffering.
As a result, university librarians have made the unusual decision to take their resources out to students, said Marian Hampton, coordinator of library instruction for the University of Pittsburgh.
Clueless and happy, aren’t they?
Some of the materials offered at a college aren’t found at a high school, and this may be the reason that they don’t take advantage of many offerings in the college library. That said, this effort to get students’ attention is a noble idea but is doomed to failure. I believe a more effective approach would be to contact professors who teach required coursework for freshmen and sophomores to encourage them to assign papers or other projects that involved searching online databases and digging up old papers that are too old to be digitized. That’s the only way I’d expect these kids to find the motivation to get out of their internet rut.
Re:Clueless and happy, aren’t they?
I agree, a high school library is close to a college library. However the work that is accepted as college level work is high school work. What was once the ‘gentlemen’s C’ is now an A.
If the student is motivated to apply himself then he will use all of the resources of the library, at least those about which he knows. Those are the students that benefit from bibliographic instruction, the rest of the students would be best served with a nice illustrated brochure about Google.
Now, I can only speak from experience at state universities. Harvard and Dartmouth were out of my price range. I think that in the Ivy leagues the full use of the library is probably more evident than at the high schools with ashtrays that pass as public universites these days.
Asking a tenured professor to change his teaching methods so that they require the use of various library resoruces is simply a waste of time. Then again I think tenure is nonsense.
Most of the new college students have to learn what should have been taught in high school: composing a coherent sentence, writing a paragraph, composing a paper with a common theme rather than rambling sentences. Using an academic library is relegated to the later years or unfortunately omitted entirely. Some graduate students I know still fail to avail themselves of the myriad of resources available at the library.
Re:Clueless and happy, aren’t they?
My first exposure to a database was not until sophomore year of college, when my microeconomics professor assigned an exercise requiring the use of the EconLit database. I would have benefited tremendously from a mandatory “How to Use the Library 101” session during the first few months of my frosh year.
You see, in my high school, you only went to the library to serve your detention.