Church of Google and Information Seeking Lesson Learned

Church of Google

HA! Wow this site makes me laugh but I must admit I've sounded like a fanatic myself at times. Mainly I appreciate the information organization and communication tools offered by Google such as email, chat, calendar, documents, reader, and blog. Also there are very cool things going on with Google FastFlip, Google Health, and Google Wave. I do fear repercussions from becoming so dependent upon one corporation but so far so good ? :S

Information Seeking: Google is not God

While it seems one only has to rely upon Google to acquire all information needed this is not the case. Ultimately you have to rely on all sorts of information sources to successfully complete research. At times Google is helpful but cannot be relied upon solely. There are much savvier ways of searching the net that many in the general public are not familiar with. This is where information professional come in handy. I'd like to design a web search strategies workshop but I have a lot to learn myself.

The other day I spent an hour with a student researching an amendment for a recent bill being debated in congress. We were making use of Thomas a Library of Congress database for federal legislative information, but it is complex with many types of information being archived. We went back and forth from news stories found on the web providing some overview to the Thomas database trying to identify the exact text in this proposed amendment.

I found the Thomas database, by the way, from doing a keyword search to "matthew shepard hate crime prevention act" and finding the link in a Wikipedia article. The student didn't see me do this at first and then she was like, "how'd you get there(Thomas)" and I'm like "ah I'm not telling." Because you don't want students thinking that's the "be all to end all" resource. I told her eventually, but showed her how I accessed the much more legitimate database.

At the end of the hour all we had located was a new story discussing how the bill had passed but this particular amendment dealing with the death penalty had not. After the student was gone I realized Thomas had pretty advanced search options and I was able to take the senator's name (learned from the last article) and search by that and the type "amendment" along with keywords "death penalty" and located the specific text of the amendment. Regardless the student was gone and I didn't even know her name. While I am glad to know about such a great resource for federal legislation and how to search it, I wish I would have been able to do so when the student was there (and not immediately jumped to keyword searching as has become so habitual). I also wonder how much of it should be left up to her to discover.