Metasearching: Instruction

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Metasearching Instruction

• Amy Kindschi
• Wendt Library
• University Wisconsin-Madison
• March 2006

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Some librarians do not teach metasearching.
Respondents 33 academic librarians (Lampert and
Strober Dabbour, LITA presentation October 1,
2005)
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Librarians who said no cited similar reasons to
why they dont teach in classroom.
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Reasons given for not teaching metasearching

• Loss of controlled vocabularies and specialized
  features of individual databases
• Suspicion of the precision and recall of
  metasearching
• Not all databases can be metasearched
• Difficult to do author searching
• Cant distinguish scholarly vs. popular

Valid concerns
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McCaskie, Lucy (2004) What are the implications
for information literacy training in higher
education with the introduction of federated
search tools?, University of Sheffield (M.A.
Thesis)
Reasons for teaching metasearching

• Resource discovery
• Find out which resources have highest results
• Engage students/faculty
• Citation verification
• Jump off to personalized Metalib features

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Resource discovery

• Her Sociology teacher told her to go to the
  E-Resources Gateway. But student had no idea
  how to use anything but MadCat.
• Student has taken comparative literature class,
  but said she was only taught MadCat.
• Wow. I never knew about this database! (about
  Proquest Historical Newspapers)

From Kindschis usability interviews February 2006
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Resource discovery

• Find database with more results
• Saves time
• One interface to learn up front
• Example Nondestructive test and aircraft

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Engage students

• He was thrilled that he was searching multiple
  databases at the same time. He judged his search
  results as being better than recent searches hes
  done on his own.
• Student judged search results to be good and
  more than I expected to get.

Bruns usability interviews February 2006
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Engage studentsCompetition with Google

• Id rather they were engaging at least shallowly
  with some of the databases weve spent money on,
  than going straight to Google and ignoring us
  altogether. a librarian

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Citation verification
Where did I see this article? Pedestrian
tracking with shoe
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Jump off to personalized Metalib
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Teaching metasearching transferable skills

• Database selection (by subject)
• Boolean searching
• Truncation
• Limiting by field
• Look for additional subject terms
• Evaluation of results
• Go to the native database for more in-depth
  searching

McCaskie, Lucy (2004)
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Old strategies still work - example
intercontinental ballistic missile and intercept

• Boolean
• Truncation

• Improve search with new terms. (Found Subject
  missile defenses)
• Limited to SUBJECT field with new term

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Continue to use native databases

• Student stated she would use QuickSearch sets if
  available but still use Find Resources and MadCat
  so that she didnt miss any resources.
  (Freshman)
• When asked Where would you go to find more
  information on this topic? Student clicked
  through to native database.

Bruns and Kindschi Feb 2006 Usability interviews
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Who knew there were so many Goodenough articles ?
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Biggest problem doing library research ?
Metasearching can help.

• What database should I search?
• How do I know when to stop searching?
• How do I know what is the best article?