Introduction
Users, faced with ever faster, comprehensive, and well ranked results in internet search engines, have come to expect that kind of expediency and thoroughness everywhere (including the library website). Librarians, eager to provide better customer service and serve under served populations, have explored many options, including information literacy instruction, redesigned web pages, interactive tutorials, and metasearching. Metasearching goes a step further than these other options because it puts the burden of finding the best resources squarely on the shoulders of the library, with the help of metasearch vendors, technical staff, reference and technical librarians, etc. Though metasearching has problems, it remains a great solution for simplified searching and promises to be even better in the future. Though metasearching has been rife with problems and setbacks since its inception, librarians have continued pursuing this ideal. Why? Take Bennett Claire Ponsford and Wyoma vanDuinkerken’s (2007) explanation of the process without metasearch:
“Choose a database from an alphabetical or subject list; Search the database by appropriate keywords; Choose one or more citations based on title and abstract; Switch to the library’s catalog; Search the catalog by journal title; Interpret the holdings display to determine location and availability; Go to the shelves or follow a link to a journal Web site (where you then have to browse to a date and issue)” (p. 160).
As the authors point out, this process is “time-consuming, complicated, and not intuitive to students raised in a point-and-click Google world†(2007, Ponsford & vanDuinkerken, p. 160).
This process is complicated enough for graduate students and other experienced searchers who at least know which databases are likely to contain the information they’re after. But undergraduates often have a hard time just knowing the right databases to search, let alone the idiosyncrasies of each search engine. As resources move increasingly online, solutions like information literacy instruction, training as part of the reference interview, and fliers cease to be useful. A well designed website with finding guides and interactive tutorials may never be used by a student with a paper due in fourteen hours. Metasearching provides a way for the librarian to make choices (what databases to search, how to rank results) on behalf of the user.
kmd :: Oct.06.2007 :: Uncategorized ::