Tech Tools: Power Searching and Instructional Design | Council of Chief Librarians

Contributed by Sarah Raley, CCL Consortium Director

At the Spring 2014Technology Tools workshop in Ontario fifty California Community College librarians learned about searching techniques. Greg Notess, Montana State University, discussed the fact that search engines have de-emphasized their advanced searching functionality (now gone from Google and Bing’s home pages). Librarians are once again using command language to narrow results and doing more post processing after search results are returned. Geolocation and personalization are coming in more play as search engines track our searches over time.

There was some discussion of whether library services as machine learning (personalization) of push, not pull, in the future? If you are concerned about privacy issues, try duckduckgo.com and ixquick.com. Greg also discussed Discovery Services and what is or isn’t discoverable because of vendor contracts.

Julian Prentices, a librarian from Google and adjunct for Chabot College, presented on Google searching. In Google, word order matters but spelling does not. To keep updated on Google search, see www.google.com/insidesearch/ If you are interested in Google webmaster tools, see www.google.com/webmaster/tools/

Alicia Virtue, Santa Rosa JC, presented information on their recent implementation of Guide On The Side, a service developed by the University of Arizona and first presented to California Community Colleges in a CCL sponsored workshop in November 2012. At Santa Rosa they started with three tutorials: one for keyword & phrase searching in their discovery tool, one for how to locate ebooks on a particular topic (again through their discovery tool), and a third on how to gain an overview of a topic using topic exploration. They have now expanded to eight or nine guides.

For information on Guide on the Side, see http://code.library.arizona.edu/
For an example of one of Santa Rosa’s Guide, see http://www2.santarosa.edu/libraryguides/tutorial/sage-explore

Here are some comments by attendees:

It gave me some new information on which I can update my research workshops

The content presented by the speakers were most helpful. Also, the opportunity to network with colleagues was very useful.

Nice to get an update of what's happening with search, tracking issues, and insight into how Google operates

Might be good to incorporate some interactive activities

I wish there was more time to network and chat

Handouts from this workshop have been posted to the Council of Chief Librarians website at http://cclccc.org/documents/2014/spring-workshop-techtools.html