Tuesday, July 3, 2012

The Need to Weed

This isn't about books.

As I've been planning my video series (I'll tell you about the two hours' work that disappeared today when I hit quit BEFORE I remember to save later...), I started going through all my presentations.

I skimmed through the Keynote on web-searching--I was very proud of that 5 years ago!  It had animations!--most of which dealt with Boolean terms and other limiters.

Boolean?  Really?  Do we need to teach that anymore?

Searching is far more intuitive these days,  and despite my *excellent* keyword skills, I have--AHEM!--been known to type in a question or two in my day (Usually truncated "how remove grease stain" so I could assuage my search-guilt!).

Then I started looking through my search handout.  Yikes!  The wonder wheel?   Remember that?  I loved it, but it seemed to disappear so far back,  I don't even remember when it disappeared!

OK, so in the realm of library crimes, these are minimal.  But it is a timely reminder:  We need to review our curriculum and handouts just as ruthlessly as review our shelves.

As to the Boolean, this was published on the ALA TechSource today.   I'm glad I'm not the only one going through a pedagogical crisis these days!

1 comment:

  1. grin--I'm posting this for Doug Johnson, who is having on ongoing battle with trying to comment on the blog!

    Hi Jeri,

    Did you see that Google is offering a MOOC (yeah, I had to look it up, too) on searching? Perhaps THE search skill of the future?

    Doug

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