A Proposed Tweethis

This week I sent an email to Jessamyn West, founder of librarian.net, and named a "mover and shaker" of the library world by Library Journal. She gave her contact information on  her blog and said feel free to email her, as long as it wasn't "spammy." I'm still kind of new at this contact thing, so I just asked her a couple questions related to our project, and I was thrilled that she replied!

The first question I asked her was if she thinks there is value in teaching students Library Research 2.0 techniques beyond the typical research methods. She said  that she thinks it is a really good starting point to teach people that research doesn't have to be complicated and awful, in regards to these methods having good information and being easy to use. She also said it is important to cover the fact that there are still things you cannot get online in doing research. I think she is right, and in actuality we are not trying to do away with the curriculum in place, but rather add to it. I think it would be a good idea to include that idea, maybe even in our tweethis. What if we did something like this:

"Exploring the frontier of Library Research 2.0 will add cutting-edge techniques to the toolbox of the standard researcher." 

Ok it still needs some work, but I think we can get around saying anything about saving time and getting better results because really, that is entirely up to the user. These techniques are still a little underdeveloped as far as if they really will save time, but hey, we're walking on new frontier here. And I'm still a believer.

The second question I asked was if she knew of any university libraries that have tried to incorporate these techniques into their research "helps", since she had some great examples of Library 2.0 on a slideshow she had posted. She gave me the link http://libguides.com/ which has thousands of libraries, mostly of colleges and universities, and their library guide websites. I was not surprised that BYU has a guide on there. She also suggested doing a Google search of various libraries "discovery layers", which I found out are interfaces that libraries can choose as a platform for searching databases. An example of this is EBSCO. One thing I've learned from looking at the examples she listed as Library 2.0 is that Library 2.0 is a bit different than Library Research 2.0, as we're defining it. A lot of Library 2.0 is just libraries making more digital resources available to their patrons, or connecting to their patrons through digital means.