Every semester brings a week of teaching many sections of the writing classes about how to locate and navigate the library's myriad resources. This is the week for Fall semester. I love interacting with students, watching each class respond in their own way to the overload of information. Some of them eagerly participate, others shy and barely responding, others feeling that they know this stuff already and checking out while I talk.
I try to make things as hands on as possible and as relevant to their paper as I can to avoid that glassy-eyed stare and the outright heads on the table snoring! Where do these resources come from and how are they created and what do they offer? So often I discover someone is looking for journal articles in a book database, or looking for books in a subject-specific journal database. It is a confusing maze of tracks that are not well defined, no matter how hard we try to make it transparent.
How happy I am when someone, after struggling to find articles and books about a particular topic of interest, is able to find plenty in a database they did not know existed to which I can point them! These days though, we are much more about narrowing results from a billion plus to a manageable handful - and all without need to travel anywhere to look at unique documents.
Who knew there were so many written materials out there? WorldCat alone has 179 million records! Imagine trying to house all that stuff! Fortunately, all I have to do is point people to the resources that are working on organizing it all, and show them how to use the interfaces. Good thing! I would never be able to know enough in my head to find every possible resource for every possible subject.
Knowing everything about everything - I believe that is God's domain, yes?
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