[...] look over there! Posted on July 3, 2008 by Anne-Marie So I wrote something today, but I didn’t write it here.  I wrote it over here.  And even better, Caleb and Rachel [...]

3 for 3! And right on, snide hipsteria or not.

I was definitely taught in reference class to think in terms of identifying the most specific source to answer a question, but it was usually an abstract idea. In this case, to answer the question, “what do we mean by ‘best source’?”, I would try to look up the definition of “best source” in the New Dictionary of Libraries and Learning. If we don’t have anything like that, I’d try to find it in the Oxford Companion to Reference & Bibliographic Instruction. There might be an entry under ’sources’ or ‘best’. If that doesn’t exist either, a broader work on library science or education might do the trick.

This kind of thinking might work well for beginning a search, and now I’m not so sure it works anywhere else. I think my reflection above points to part of the problem - what the heck is a reference question? I’ve been thinking and talking about this some and will reflect over the holiday and post more fully next week.

and for me — and maybe it’s about relativism or not, I don’t know — but the ‘best” source is the source that helps me in that moment move forward. As comp scholar and rhetoric professor Lisa Ede always says, “the best thesis is the finished thesis” and I really like that because a project - a paper - cannot be finished, really, because of the concept of the “onging conversation.” No matter what I write - as right now I’m writing for a paper on the intersections of Information Literacy and First Year Composition - there will be sources I didn’t and could not consult and maybe some of them are the “foundational” ones that I “should” have found - but I am making what I can from what I did find, and I did find some pretty useful stuff. So, maybe this “best source” concept is too perfectionist, too Platonic. (so does that make me a relativist?) If one likes the Meyers-Briggs personality type lens, one could say that my position fits perfectly with my preference for what MBTI calls “Perceiving” type - constantly finding more and revising judgment (versus the person who prefers to make a quick judgment and then “don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up”). (And what is it about American politics that disvalues the ability to revise one’s thinking — we all know the contrast of Kerry’s many plans and ideas with Bush’s rigidity - two nice role models for the MBTI’s Judging-Perceiving dichotomy) - well, I digress, as we “P’s” are wont to do — so, for teaching freshmen about research, let us definitely NOT say anything about BEST sources and just say - make what you can from what you find. In fact it’s this notion of BEST that can be a writing block because students want to wait to find that one BEST source that somehow they think exists and can’t start writing. I like to use the grocery analogy - look in the fridge and make a paper from the ingredients that you have. Don’t spend too much time at the store ranging up and down aisles for the one perfect BEST ingredient. Just buy some likely stuff, use some of it and not others. Then you are done, for now, and “good enough.” What’s more essential than finding a BEST source, is what you DO with what you find, the thinking you apply, the interpretation and synthesis.

Well — Thanks! great post.

While not solving the “hunt for the best source” I wonder if we can inch further toward providing connections between resources by taking a cue from Amazon. You know, the section “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought:” If there were a way to capture where someone has come from to get to a source, or has gone to after viewing a source, we could provide a buffet of potential pathways. A step further would be for users to rate their satisfaction with each step, this could make the paths weighted for the most common progressions.

I think part of what we are talking about is that library-think and search-engine-think (and their bastard child, library-catalog-think) doesn’t support discovery-type queries as well as they support lookup-type queries. I’m corrupting this terminology from you and Kate, AMD.

I think you are on the right track, MIchael - collaborative filtering (like Amazon) can support the kind of sideways serendipity that makes light bulbs go on. It should be in our toolbox, but it’s the serendipity and freedom do discover we want, not necessarily the recommendations.

What we get from search engines and library catalogs is lists of things, and for browsing and discovery and exploration and serendipity, what we really want is groups of things.

A flickr tag search for “pie” shows this pretty well. Three clusters show one kind of thing with variations, and the fourth shows something completely different. flickr’s clusters have the problem of having to organize categories into lists, but it’s a start.

And at the same time I think this is really a philosophical problem and maybe even an identity crisis in librarianship. We can’t know all the sources, so how can we possibly know the best ones? And computers? They don’t know anything at all.

The identity crisis part is that we have these tools that rank things in whatever order and all along the lesson of academia (though not necessarily higher education) is to find your own niche and fill it before anyone else can. My heroes from children’s literature are people like Milo, Halla and Max - people who find their own ways, and who know better than to trust anyone’s advice on what the best source is.

Down with relevance.

[...] thing I’d like to explore later is how this ties in with Anne-Marie’s earlier post about “best sources” because in a very real sense the “audience as [...]

Relevance is boring!

This piece, Caleb, saw me all leaning forward and thinking hard - “this is really a philosophical problem and maybe even an identity crisis in librarianship. We can’t know all the sources, so how can we possibly know the best ones?” It echoes ideas I’ve heard in lots of conversations in higher ed.

I think that part of the crisis might actually be IN the very idea that we can’t know all of the best sources. I definitely agree that we can’t - but thinking back at the essential core and canon lists of sources out there I think that for a long time we thought we could. And we’re not alone in that - this is the do we teach people the stuff or do we teach people how to figure stuff out crisis. And the sheer amount of information out there, the growth of subfields and subdisciplines out there - all of that has been pushing our colleagues who teach in the disciplines towards the idea that they can’t teach everything in 4, 5 or 6 years. So maybe the fact that we can’t even keep up with the lists of best sources anymore, because there are just too many of them, is a push we need to rethink the idea of best sources altogether.

Earlier this year I was at a conference about teaching and learning in natural resource education and one conversation between faculty from Forestry departments really stuck with me. They were all dealing with the same issue - state legislatures that had imposed caps on how many credits they could require for graduation in their disciplines. They were having to cut six, eight, twelve, some crazy numbers of credits out of their majors to meet these new requirements. One way of looking at it was - they’d been trying to keep up with how much more stuff someone with a Forestry degree is expected to know now, and that bar keeps going up and up. They keep trying to keep up and eventually you end up with a major that no one can complete in 4 years. Something has to shift. And whether forced by state legislatures or by what they see in their own classrooms, the shift many end up making is away from the idea of coverage and towards the ideas of… critical thinking, engagement, discovery, and experiential learning. Which is scary - it’s giving up not just control over how things are learned, but control over what things are learned.

And in that way maybe this piece is also very closely related to Michael’s suggestion about Amazon - because if acknowledging that we can’t know all the best sources is difficult, acknowledging that someone is just as likely to stumble across the best source they need because a total stranger/ amateur/ potential crazy person looked at two sources together - that’s an even bigger leap. But I definitely agree that tapping into all of that intellectual activity to create new and different pathways for people to follow - that’s a big part of what we should be doing to help connect people with what they need to get inspired and to learn.

yes! i am thinking “we can’t know the best sources, so anne-marie is totally right and we should try to think about this in a different way”, not “we can’t know the best sources, wah wah wah iife is hard”.

On the plane coming back from K Falls today, i was reading the latest RUSA quarterly (summer 2008, vol 47, no 4), and guest columnists David Beard and Late Vo Thi-Beard have a piece about “Rethinking the book: new theories for readers’ advisory” where they suggest that librarians create book displays that “stretch across genres. Pull the Jeff Gorden biographies together with the Harlequin NASCAR romances ….” and all I can think about are mixtapes.

I kind of thought up this short Q & A to help express how I try to match my patrons to the “best” source.

Q. Lets say you work at hardware store and a customer walks in with a wrench. The customer tells you how they just adopted a new dog, how they love the dog very much, and how they want to demonstrate their love to their dog by building the dog a house. The customer then holds up the wrench and asks if you have the best tool for nailing a roof on a doghouse. Do you sell the customer a hammer or do you sell them a bigger wrench?

A. You should sell them yellow paint. Most people think dogs are completely colorblind, but I bet (as an employee of the hardware store), because yellow is so bright, dogs can sort of see it. If you sell the customer yellow paint they will build the most awesome doghouse on their block.

Yellow paint is the best tool for nailing a roof on a doghouse because yellow paint reminds the customer how smart and caring they are.

Fact: Customers who know how smart and caring they are build the best doghouses.

Fact: Dogs with nice doghouses never run away.

[...] students don’t need help searching - that they can find the best sources without training.  Of course, I’ve written before about my skepticism about the whole best source concept.  I also don’t think they can search comprehensively without training.  But how often do [...]