Yesterday I talked at a meeting of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a library association in Ohio. (Librarians are so much fun to hang out with. Plus, library associations are one of the few groups I address where there are more women than women, except, of course, when the family is home for dinner.)

I heard two presentations, both excellent. One was by Carole Palmer who teaches in the grad program in libary science the U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Palmer has been researching how scholars in the humanities and sciencies actually use resources when they work. Among other findings: Neuroscientists spend the most time exploring outside their domain — 54% of their time. She argued that “contextual mass” — relatively small collections that provide context — can be as important as critical mass. [I am of course not doing justice to her presentation. Nor will I with the following:]

Francis Jacobson Harris, author of I Found It on the Internet: Coming of Age Online, said kids tend to take in lots and lots of information and then eliminate what they don’t need, as opposed to doing highly targeted searces. She went through screen captures of a library catalog system that has zero tolerance for differences in how we think about topics: “Cooking” gives only a handful of hits while “cookery” gives thousands.

Francis also talked about her efforts to help students figure out the sources of Web pages and has the killer example: www.MartinLutherKing.org looks like a legit site but is actually run by the white supremacist group, Storm Front. Sites like About.com (see their Folkmusic page) continue to be taken in by this. It’s also about the fifth hit at Google on “Martin luther king” (no quotes), perhaps because people don’t know to use “nofollow” links: If you add “rel=nofollow” to your link markup, Google won’t count the link as a sign of the site’s popularity.

Anyway, both were excellent presentations. I wish I had taken better notes. [Tags: research libraries taxonomy nofollow multitasking]

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