So this has been bothering me for a while and I haven’t been sure how to talk about it. It’s the phrase “the best source.” As in, “Google’s great for some things but librarians can really teach you how to find the best source on your topic.”
So I started really thinking about this one day at LOEX of the West when someone suggested that librarians involved in Open Access advocacy and instruction librarians are sometimes working against each other because open access advocates advocate using sources that are openly accessible and instruction librarians want people to use — the best sources. Now, I consider myself an open access advocate and a pretty good instruction librarian and I hadn’t been feeling that tension. I realized that I don’t think I do teach people to find “the best source” or even “the best sources.”
Really - I don’t even know what that phrase means.
Now, a couple of caveats here - I am not a very good relativist. I have been smacked down around a lot of seminar tables by smart people and foolish people alike for not being a very good relativist. I have had to learn to embrace the fact that my relativism has limits. So when I say “I don’t know what the best source means” it is not because “best” is a relative absolute term and I just don’t believe in that.
Two, I understand the concept of the seminal source. I don’t love the adjective but I get the phrase. I believe in it. I have had some transcendent academic experiences when I read an article, a book - some source that not only got me thinking in a new way, but that unlocked a whole discourse for me because by understanding it I had a framework to understand all kinds of things that came later.
(The Female World of Love and Ritual by Carol Smith Rosenberg. Signs - 1975. Such hard work. So changed my ideas about what history could be)
But that’s not what we talk about in libraries when we talk about “the best source.” And seriously, some of the most impact-heavy sources are also some of the most criticized and challenged. Two seconds on Google and you can find about a million references like this summary of the Big Six Information Needs step: The best source answers the exact research question or problem at the appropriate depth and breadth.
I don’t know what we even mean when we say things like that. And this honestly isn’t my snide hipstery “what would that even look like” voice. I am really asking - in the context of a real search, or a real information need - what would that even look like? Help me understand.
See, to me, the best source on a project is the source that gets you thinking — it sparks the idea, the understanding, or the connection that shows you where you’re going. You haven’t finished thinking yet and you haven’t finished writing yet - but you shift from “omg I’ll never get this done” to knowing what it is you want to say. It’s going to be entirely different from project to project and from person to person. If we could obliviate! memories and give the exact same person the exact same project and the exact same resources I’m guessing they would be pretty likely to find inspiration in a different place the second time around.
When Kate and I spoke about peer review at LOEX of the West, I’d say that our best source was this one article by David Solomon. His framework discussing five roles that journals play in scientific communities was what really pushed us where we needed to be in terms of framing the discussion. He cited another source, which we ended up using just as much in our final paper - so Solomon’s influence wouldn’t even be immediately apparent if you couldn’t get inside our brains but that doesn’t change the fact that for us, in our preparation, that source was probably the best source for us to find.
The point is that drilling down to the best source doesn’t match any kind of search process I’m familiar with. It doesn’t match how I see people exploring or discovering. It doesn’t match how I see people learning. But we say it so much - I’ve got to believe that it’s me that’s missing something. What are the situations and scenarios where we need to refine and refine - to add ANDS and ORs and parentheses until we have identified the single perfect source that answers our research question? What kind of searching is that - what kind of information need allows us to make that determination in advance of the learning, the synthesis, the analysis and the creation? What kind of learning process allows us to reject source after source as not worthy, and to keep those unworthy sources from sparking our thinking?
If I’m not missing anything, I think we need to really let the “best source” thing go. And not in the relativistic sense that there is no best. But to stop using it reflexively and un-reflectively. We need to really think about what kinds of systems, tools, lessons and conversations we can have with people to help them connect to their best sources.
Because I hope it’s clear that I think that there are best sources, but they’re slippery beasts. They can’t be discovered by drilling down, by narrowing and focusing, or by limiting oneself to a pre-selected pool of “best” resources. Well they can, but that’s not the easy way to do it and I think it’d take some dumb luck.
The easy way is still pretty hard. It involves a constant give and take of exploring and evaluating and I think it might be made harder by some of our tools. A lot of our systems in libraries are really good at getting the user to one thing, and not so good at supporting the kind of exploring and evaluating I’m talking about.
I’m looking at the catalog here - at the Virtual Reference Summit here in Oregon recently David Lankes said that the library catalog is the inventory record most organizations hide - and it is.
(Link to the video: http://ptbed.org/downloads/Innovate.mp4)
It’s the inventory record designed to help us distinguish all our stuff from all our other stuff. It is best at helping us find this book and distinguish this book from that book and that other book over there. It’s not as good at helping us explore and draw connections.
Is what the catalog does well, and has always done well, shaping how we think about searching and learning and exploring? Maybe it is. Maybe as a part of all of these conversations about the next generation of catalogs we can also take some time to re-think the idea of the best source.
[...] 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 [...]