Discussion Question 2: Federated Searching 's Effect
Do you believe federated searching will have a positive impact, negative impact, or no significant impact on student information literacy? Why do you believe this?
posted by Christopher Cox at
5:35 AM
1 Comments:
I believe that federated searching will have a negative impact on student information literacy in the short term. I work in an academic (university) library, and most of us still struggle to teach students the difference between journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, web sites, etc. Established database vendors like CSA and Ovid have created sophisticated search interfaces which students can learn to use to locate the types of materials that will be most appropriate for their needs.
I think federated searching will generate large sets of items and that students will scan through them until they think they have found enough materials for their purpose, never realizing that they could have found smaller sets of more relevant materials by using other tools. This is the approach that most students use to searching the web on general - reviewing the first ten or twenty sites that appear.
In the long run, the definition of information literacy will probably change in ways that we can't foresee. I can imagine federated searching having a positive impact on student information literacy in the future.
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Anonymous, at 12:26 PM
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