Reading #3

Reading #3
“The Infodiet: How Libraries can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google”
By: Steve Bell
This article touched on the fact that students are depending on search engines like Google for their research instead of the high quality material available in databases through academic libraries. The author mentioned the term “infobesity” as the average student’s research ability which entails low-quality information in large amounts. He says that infodieting is the way to solve the problem of low quality papers, get students to use aggregator databases which have tons of “nutritious” information. The question is how to get students who rely so heavily on the ease of Google type search engines to use these semi-complicated databases. Some have suggested why these databases aren’t more user friendly, why not give the people what they want, why not “google-ize” databases. Some are all for it and others are against it, why dumb down databases when research is suppose to be challenging. College in general is suppose to be challenging teach students how to be net-savvy and to evaluate and use the databases and the problem is solved, but how do you do that? That is the challenge facing the academic community and as suggested it’s the responsibility of not only librarians but professors and database developers to make navigating the quality information easier for students.

This article brings up many valid points especially why databases aren’t more Google-like. I think if they were more students would take advantage of peer reviewed and scholarly resources and therefore have higher quality papers. I was lucky enough to have teachers who were very active and involved with the library staff to make us as students aware of the online databases. Not only did we spend an entire class period in the library learning about how to navigate the resources available we were required on all of our papers in English and communication to use scholarly journals and nothing else. You know how they say “it takes a village to raise a child” well I think that it really “takes a campus community to raise a good student”. Infodieting is a system that must be learned and continuously stuck with to work just like any good diet.