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MARY O'KELLY: Good afternoon, everybody.
This is Mary O'Kelly with Grand Valley State University
libraries, and I'm here with my colleague, Colleen Lyon,
from the University of Texas at Austin.
And we are here to do a presentation for you today
about a little workshop we did at Grand Valley called "Using
Google Like a Librarian." We'll run for the next hour.
You should have audio.
And you should be able to see chat in the right side.
If you have any issues while you're doing this,
please let us know.
And I'm going to hand it over to Colleen.
COLLEEN LYON: Thank you, Mary.
I'm hoping everybody can see the first slide of our
presentation right now.
Sorry about the delay here.
We had a few little problems with our technology
to start off with.
But I think we're going okay right now.
So, as Mary said, my name is Colleen Lyon.
I'm the digital repository librarian at the
University of Texas.
But, before that, I was the science librarian at Grand
Valley State University, and I worked with Mary.
And we started some Google workshops that turned out to
be a pretty big success.
And so what we wanted to do today is share with you what
we did in our library, why we focused on faculty for these
workshops, and why we think that's important.
And then also we want to broaden out the conversation
to the role of librarians as search experts.
And why that definition needs to be expanded beyond the
traditional library sources that we normally think of.
So what I'm going to start with is a short demo just to
show you a little bit of what we were doing with the faculty
in the classrooms for these workshops.
So bear with me while I switch out to Google.
Okay.
What we wanted to do was to really talk to faculty about
what we were calling "Advanced Google." So those are the
options that are beyond just sticking in some key words.
We wanted to show them how they could use Google more
effectively.
And some of the ways we did that was showing them some of
the shortcuts that exist in Google.
So, for instance, if you wanted to know the population
of Hawaii, you don't need to go to the Census website.
You don't even need to go to Wikipedia.
You can just type in, "population--
Hawaii," and there you go--
1.295 million people.
Really easy way to get to that information.
Likewise, if you wanted to know when the sun rises in
Grand Rapids, [TYPING]
you just type in "sunrise, Grand Rapids." And then you
see 7:20 AM.
If I had a friend who was living in Tokyo, and I wanted
to know if now was a good time to give her a call, I
can just type in--
"time, Tokyo,"--
and I see that its 3 AM in Tokyo, so I probably don't
want to call her right now.
One of my favorite shortcuts is the "related" shortcut.
So, if I need some news information, but I'm tired of
CNN and I don't want to go there anymore, I can type in
"related" and then put in www.cnn.com and I can see all
of the news-related websites that are similar to CNN.com.
So likewise, if I was shopping and I couldn't find what I
wanted at Macy's, it but I wanted to find similar stores,
I'd put in "related" Macy's.com and I'd get
Nordstrom's and Bloomingdale's and Kohl's
Another thing, I'm sure, that we've all run into are the
websites that have really kind of terrible search interfaces.
And so you go to them and you really can't
find what you need.
Well, if you run into that, you don't need
to use their website.
You can use Google.
Your can put in "site," and then the
website you want to search.
In this case I'm searching Michigan.gov. And I want
geographic data.
So I just type in "site, Michigan.gov, geographic
data," and I am getting the results right from the
Michigan.gov website.
And with the earthquake that just happened recently on the
East Coast, if you wanted to know what earthquakes had
happened recently, you can just type in "earthquake" and
it's going to show you the most recent earthquakes that
have happened and all over the world.
You can see we've had a couple in California.
And then there was one that was in Papua, New Guinea.
So, let's say after the end of this webinar, I decide I want
to fly back to Michigan and kind of talk
over things with Mary.
I can just type in Delta, and a flight number, and it tells
me that the flight leaves at 2:07 PM, an hour from now.
So I doubt I'm going to make that flight.
But if you know the flight number for any flight you can
find out whether or not it's on time and where it's coming
from and going to.
This one has become so handy to me when I'm cooking.
So if I'm looking at a recipe and it calls for three
tablespoons or it calls for a third of a cup and I need to
translate that, you can just type that right into Google
and it'll tell you.
In this case, 2 US cups would equal 32 US tablespoons.
So it's a really great way to get conversion numbers for
measurement.
If I want to know the unemployment rate in Travis,
Texas, which is where I am right now, I can just put in
"unemployment rate, Travis County." And I get 7.4% .
If I want to see how that compares to Kent County, where
Mary is, we can see that that is 8.9%.
I can also do this for states.
So you can do it for counties and you can do it for states.
And it looks like right now, in Michigan, the unemployment
rate is 10.9%.
I can tell you, start playing around with the population and
the unemployment statistics and you can find yourself on
Google for quite a while.
Those are fun ones to play around with.
Now, another thing, I'm going to be going to New Zealand
next month.
And I want to know what's the conversion rate between
dollars and New Zealand dollars.
So I just type in $100 in New Zealand dollars [TYPING]
and I find out that 100 US dollars equals about 121
basically, New Zealand dollars.
And you can do that for a lot of different currencies.
So I could do that for euros, too.
[TYPING]
Oops, typo.
And that your 100 US dollars equals about 73 euros.
We had quite a few of these advanced Google features that
we were showing the folks in our workshops.
And we had, a handout, actually, that went along with
it so that they could follow along, if they wanted to on
paper, take notes.
Or if they wanted to they could just follow along on
their computers with us.
We just wanted to give you an example of what we were
calling "The Advanced Google." The next thing I want to show
you guys is Google Scholar.
[TYPING]
So one of the main things that we wanted people to know about
Google Scholar was the Scholar Preferences because, in our
experience, people just aren't using that.
They don't know it exists.
Probably the reason they don't know it exists, probably, is
that it's up under this little wheel on the
right part of the screen.
And if I click on Scholar Preferences and scroll down,
there's this "library links" section.
And that allowed me to fetch the library that I'm
associated with to my computer.
So that every time I get into Google Scholar anything that
my library, in this case the University of Texas at Austin,
anything that my library subscribes to full-text online
I'm going to be able to access.
If you don't know that this option exists, and you just do
a regular search in Google Scholar, then you're going to
be missing out on a lot of the full-text access that your
library subscribes to.
And, so, it's really, really important stuff.
Particularly when people are using this stuff from off
campus But it's usually when you're on campus, the IP
addresses link up.
And you can get those links.
So if you're not on campus, you're not going to see those.
But that's the one thing that really wanted
to point out here.
That people just don't know about, are the Scholar
Preferences.
So I'm going to go straight into Google Books, now.
[TYPING]
And one of the great things about Google Books is that you
can actually use it to search the books you have on the
shelves in your library.
So, for instance, if somebody was doing a paper on old
scientists, historical scientists,
not necessarily old.
They can search for a book that maybe
somebody told them about.
MIcrobe Hunters has a lot of stories about scientists from
the 19th and the early 20th century.
But maybe we have it on the shelves, but they don't have
to come into the library because it doesn't
have what they want.
So they can click on
Microbe Hunters.
And they can actually search within the book.
So they can say, okay, is there anything about
rabies in this book?
And it's going to pop up every instance of the word,
"rabies," in that book.
We can clear the search.
And , if they want, they could just look at the table of
contents and find out, Oh, okay, we've got a couple of
different chapters here on Pasteur.
So we probably do have the information that we need.
And in that case, even though this book isn't completely
available online full- text, now that the person who was
searching knows that it's got information about Pasteur,
it's got information about rabies, and they can go to the
library and check it out.
It's a really kind of neat way to be able to search full-text
the books that are already on your shelves.
Another thing that somebody showed me one time that I just
think it's really cool is, if we search on the Origin of
Species, which, since it's a pre-1923 book, we have access
to the full text online.
And we can download that if we need to.
And I'm going to go ahead and click on this one, term 1864.
And, again, I can search within this book.
And I'm going to go ahead and search for the word
"evolution." Because everybody associates evolution with
Darwin, right?
And with this book that he wrote about natural selection.
So I'll do a search for "evolution." And up at the top
you can see no results for the word "evolution" in this book.
Well that seems strange.
Maybe it was "evolving." No results for "evolving." Let's
try "evolve." No results for "evolve." This is seeming
really weird, right?
Well, if I look for "evolved" I can see it shows up on page
425, which, if I scroll down, turns out to be the last page
in the book besides the supplement and index.
So the word "evolved" only showed up once in this book.
And it was the very last word.
I just think that's really interesting considering the
really tight association between evolution and this
particular book.
And that's something that I've showed in classes before and
my students have always kind of gotten a kick out of.
Now another thing that we can do, especially with the books
that are available full-text online, is you can download it
if you want.
You can download through PDF or an EPUB.
You can share the link.
So if you wanted to email, hey, check this out, to one of
your friends, to a colleague.
Let them know that this book is online and they can look
through it.
You can send them that link.
You can actually clip text.
And then I get this option that allows me to actually, if
I want, to go to Google Translate.
Sorry.
Having a little technical difficulty here.
So I can go right to Google Translate.
And I can translate this from English to Spanish.
Now, the translations aren't always perfect.
But they are pretty good.
And so if there was something in a foreign language that you
wanted to translate into English, just to get a sense
what it was saying, you can use Google Books and Google
Translate kind of together as a group.
The other thing that you can do, if you have a website that
you want to translate.
So, for instance, if you wanted to know what was going
on in French newspapers but you don't read French.
You could go to the website.
And right now I'm having it translated into Spanish.
Let me fix that and put it back to English.
And so you can actually view the French
newspaper in English.
And that's a really neat way that you
can use Google Translate.
Mary's used Google Translate b to look up recipes.
So, for instance, if you wanted to look up recipes for
lasagna in Italian, you could do that and then you could
have them translated into English so that you could
actually read them and try them.
Now in our actual workshops, we also
went into Google Finance.
And we did a large section on Google Docs.
And I'm going to go ahead and skip that for right now, just
in the interest of time.
And this is just to give you a sense of what it was that we
were showing those folks.
But I did want to let you know those were a couple other
things that we were sharing with them.
I'm going to go back to my presentation now and talk a
little bit about why we did what we did.
So, Mary and I shared an office.
And we had a lot of discussions that would happen
about the classes that we had taught or the reference
interactions that we had had.
And one of those days Mary was telling me about a class that
she had just taught.
And she had started out by asking the students, "So,
where you guys start your research?" And it was silent.
And then finally one student spoke up.
And he said, "Well, I use Google.
But all librarians hate Google." And, of course, there
were a few giggles in the room.
That student probably--
MARY O'KELLY: It was very funny.
COLLEEN LYON: Yes.
And Mary told the students that, actually, librarians use
Google every day.
And they probably know a bunch of shortcuts and advanced
features that the students have never even heard of.
So, far from hating Google, we're probably one of the
heavier users of it.
That led me to tell Mary some stories about classes that I
had taught where I'd show Google Scholar.
And I usually start by asking the students, how many people
use Google?
And everybody raises their hand.
And then the next question is, how many
people use Google Scholar?
And usually 40 to 50% of the room would raise their hands.
And then the last question is, how many people use Google
Scholar and actually set up Scholar Preferences?
And if I even got one or two people that would raise their
hand, that was impressive.
Most of the time nobody had ever even heard of Scholar
Preferences.
And so I would go in and I would show them how to set
those preferences and explain why it was important.
And, suddenly, you would get all of these faces like, "Oh.
That's how it works." They'd been using it from home.
They hadn't been able to get any full text.
It was really frustrating.
They didn't understand what the big deal was.
And it just turns out that they
weren't using it correctly.
They weren't setting those Scholar Preferences so that
they could get to the access that the
library had already provided.
And so we talked about it as kind of a side door into
library resources.
Both of us, Mary and I both, were surprised that A,
students would think that we hated Google.
And, B, that so many people, students and faculty included,
were using Google incorrectly.
Or maybe just not using it to its full potential.
And so we started to look into it.
And we wanted to find out what was being
written about Google.
And we found some things that were surprising and some
things that weren't so surprising.
So, from the Perceptions of Libraries study, an OCLC
study, they found that 83 percent of college students
start their research with a search engine.
And then an additional seven percent start at Wikipedia.
So you get 90 percent of people who are starting their
search with either a search engine or Wikipedia.
An observational study in Sweden found that researchers
there, most researchers there, were using Google for
everything.
Not just a few different things.
They were using it for everything.
And they really weren't aware of the services that their
libraries or their librarians were offering.
Project Information Literacy showed us that students
consult their instructors first when looking for
research information from a person before they contacted
the librarian.
If they contacted anybody at all.
And then lastly, Mary and I gave a presentation about
these Google workshops at the Michigan Library Association
Academic Libraries Day this past May.
And Rick Anderson gave the opening keynote address that
ended up being a really great intro into what we planned on
talking about.
He said that Google isn't trying to make users better.
It's making Google searching easier.
And he also said that when it comes to making it easy for
users to get at what they're looking for, Google
is eating our lunch.
Which is kind of an off thing.
But it's an opportunity that we're missing out on.
It's also actually kind of funny.
So what we're left with is that students go to their
professors with questions.
We agree with the researchers' recommendations that
librarians need to actively identify opportunities for
training faculty, which we've done.
And, as an extension of that, we personally feel it's
important not to focus only on the database in the library
skills training, but focus on all aspects of
the research process.
And if Google is as ubiquitous as we think it is, using it as
a training topic is definitely worth our focus.
And since there seems to be this strong need for Google
Education, we mentioned the idea of teaching faculty about
using Google to our instructional
technology unit on campus.
And the library had been working with them for the past
few years on a series of library workshops for faculty.
And the instructional technology folks thought it
sounded like a great idea.
So we moved ahead with our first workshops in
the spring of 2010.
And I'm going to let Mary go ahead and tell you why we
think that those were such a success.
Let me switch it over to Mary.
MARY O'KELLY: Okay.
You give us just a second here.
What we're going to do is have you start seeing my screen.
COLLEEN LYON: Sorry about that, Mary.
Here you go.
MARY O'KELLY: Well, thanks.
Okay.
All of you should've just had your screen go blank.
And that's fine.
What you are now seeing should be the "Why it Works" slide.
We're going to continue with the presentation, and moving
from what we did and why we did what we did into why we
think it worked.
First of all a little bit more about the presentations
themselves.
Who attended?
Well, it was a real mix.
We marketed it to faculty.
But because of the way that our notification system goes
out on campus, the notification went to the
entire university community, which actually turned out to
be a wonderful thing.
We had a mix of faculty, of budget staff, clerical staff,
student workers, people from all across campus.
All of them seemed to use web searching in their jobs in one
way or another.
For example, one administrator I talked to wanted to know how
to search college websites for curriculum reports.
Someone else admitted not feeling comfortable searching
at all and was hoping for some tips just to get started.
Much to our surprise, we had waiting lists to get in.
It all became very exciting very quickly.
And in the workshops themselves, we tried to keep
that excitement going.
So Colleen and I did some very deliberate planning to work to
keep everyone's attention.
These workshops were 90 minutes long.
To us the 90 minutes was very short.
We could've easily gone on for two hours or more.
But an hour and a half was long enough, both for their
attention span and for the busy professionals we were
trying to work with.
So Colleen and I each presented
for about 20 minutes.
And then we switched off.
We very deliberately scheduled our workshops in a computer
lab on campus.
We could not imagine trying to do this as just a lecture.
We really needed to give everybody hands-on,
in-the-moment practice.
We also realized very quickly that this diverse mix of
professionals also had a highly diverse set of skills.
Some were two steps ahead of us most of the way.
And others needed a bit more direct.
And some even needed some one-on-one instruction.
As a result of this, we are thinking that, for future
workshops, we may split it up so that we have an
introduction to Google and then we allow some of the more
advanced, faster-moving features to sit
in a different workshop.
It was a lot of fun, though, I do have to say, talking with
the faculty in the classroom about how they plan on using
this with their students.
It wasn't a conversation about, "I'm going to tell my
students never to use Google." Instead, it was, "Hey, I could
use Google Translate with my foreign language students."
So we found research that backed up what we were doing.
We had practices that allowed us to catch everybody's
attention and get all these people into the library.
And really what that was about was getting them to connect
us, as librarians, with the entire research process.
Ithaca SNR did a survey, the Library Survey 2010.
There's a link right there.
If you go to Ithaca.org, look over on the left side of the
screen, you can see all of their recent reports.
They found that library directors feel that the
library has an important role in facilitating teaching and
learning, but that faculty see the library's primary role as
purchasing agent.
I, frankly, was rather shocked to hear that, when I think
about my teaching load and how that really is an
emphasis for me.
If the faculty don't see, if they don't understand the
library's role in teaching and learning, then they won't
think of the library when doing research.
And they won't refer their students to the library for
research help.
There's something else I read on the Ithaca website.
I'm quoting from their website here.
"Basic scholarly information use practices have shifted
rapidly in recent years.
And, as a result, the academic library is increasingly being
disintermediated from the discovery process, risking
irrelevance in one of its own core areas."
For me the key word there was disintermediated.
This suggests that we need to market ourselves as highly
skilled mediators.
We need to get serious about marketing the librarian's role
as a research, meaning literature search, expert.
Google is where faculty and students start their research.
So we need to be there at the beginning.
We've talked already about some of the research, pointing
out that folks start with Google.
But what Colleen and I really started thinking about when we
were planning this was how many people actually associate
librarians with Google searching?
I mean you have that story of the student who said, "Oh, no.
I don't use Google.
And I don't talk to librarians about Google because Google,
librarians hate Google."
Well, it's a reality nowadays that web search is a critical
part of the research process.
And Colleen and I started to be afraid that we weren't a
part of it.
If you think about it there are misconceptions and
assumptions all over that.
So we started exploring what are some of the misconceptions
that exist regarding searching?
Okay, we thought, I found it on Google so it must be true.
Or, I found it on Google, it must be false.
If I don't find it on Google, it doesn't exist. If it
doesn't come up on the first page, it doesn't exist. If I
can't find it no one can find it.
Or, if I can't find it I can't ask a librarian about it,
because Google is so easy he or she will think I'm stupid
because I can't find what I want.
And that is the absolute last thing we
want anybody to assume.
So, we thought about all of those assumptions.
What are we personally going to do to address them?
Then we thought, what about the misconceptions that exist
regarding libraries and librarians?
There's a, I can't ask librarians about it because
they don't like Google.
Libraries just house books and librarians
just know about books.
Everything is free online, so why use libraries?
And what are we all doing to address those misconceptions?
And then think about ourselves as professionals.
She and I got very honest. We sat down.
I remember going and sitting down and
having a cup of coffee.
And what we were talking about was, why would
we even teach this?
Why would we do a workshop on this, because everyone already
knows how to use Google, right?
That it's frivolous to teach Google.
We have more important things to teach.
And if we teach it, we're driving them
away from the library.
Aren't we?
Now, we thought, now wait a minute.
We really need to challenge our own assumptions on this.
This is an opportunity to get to the basics
of information literacy.
The basics of selecting using and is evaluating web sources.
Why use Google?
What are we going to use?
What's our tool?
How to use Google correctly.
When is Google not the appropriate resource and why?
So we can start teaching some of those very important
critical thinking skills.
People outside of academic libraries are probably even
more dependent on Google for their research needs.
Much of our academic collection is behind expensive
subscription walls.
And we understand that not all libraries have
that kind of access.
But, to us, this opens an opportunity for all librarians
to have a very rich opportunity to teach people
how to get the most out of Google and, yes, other search
engines, other sites, other web search tools.
And, in the process of teaching them, we remind them
that librarians are the search experts.
So this is the part where we were hoping for a little bit
of feedback from you.
I don't know how many of you have seen the recent book that
was just published open access called, Hacking the Academy .
It was one of the first crowd-sourced books.
It all happened [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
I read through it.
It's got some very intriguing, very provocative information
about libraries.
Some thinking about library's been different.
But I'm more interested in the idea of that.
As if we put our collective heads together, what can we
come up with on how to integrate web searching as
part of the entire research process.
And how librarians, as a professional,
fit into that process.
We brainstormed a couple of ideas.
Academic librarians, for example, could do a shortened
workshop on the uses of Google Scholar.
Demonstrate how it can help readers discover faculty
research in their institutional repository.
We were thinking of ways that public librarians could create
a workshop on using Google to find up-to-date health
information.
Or how to use the code site colon.gov to search for online
government documents.
Maybe you could teach recent immigrants how to use Google
Translate as a tool.
For K-12 librarians, what about teaching kids how to use
Google the search for news information using Google News.
Or do image searches.
There is the Google search education website, of course,
that we've looked at.
They've got lesson plans there, too.
If you just do a Google search for "web search education,"
their lesson plans will come up.
Special librarians, they could use some advanced Google
techniques to show people how to search for corporate
financial or stock information.
Or how to search dot edu sites for PDF reports or Excel
spreadsheets, if you want to see how other K-12 districts
are doing in their budgets.
In a nutshell, what we wanted to do with this Google
presentation is not teach the participants how to use
something other than the library, but how to use web
searching as a back door into the library.
How can we use this as a supplement?
How can we thoughtfully and critically use all of the
technological tools out there to make the search process
more efficient and more effective and, in the process,
establish our role as search experts?
Does anybody have any thoughts?
Colleen, I'll let you jump in here if you see anything on
chat or any of the questions.
COLLEEN LYON: Sure.
So we do have one chat question.
But I want to encourage everybody at this point, if
you want, to send us your questions via chat and we'll
try to answer those.
But we have a question, "We're working hard at the high
school level.
Have you seen any non-novice searchers?" So, at the college
level, have we seen students come in who really kind of
know what they're doing?
And I would say, and I will let Mary chime in when I'm
done but I would say, absolutely.
I've had several students who've come to me on a
one-on-one basis, who already have the Google part down.
They know what it's good for.
They know that they need to use library resources when
they want to kind of go beyond that first level of research.
But, unfortunately, I think, probably, the majority of the
ones that we see in our classes don't really know how
to translate what they're finding on Google and to
search for maybe more in-depth literature.
And that's, of course, what we're there for at the
university to do.
Is to teach them about that.
To teach them, OK here's where you started.
And here's where you need to go after.
But they're definitely are students who come to us who
get that and who just need to help with the more in-depth
literature searching.
MARY O'KELLY: Yeah, I would agree.
I have seen some students who are a couple steps ahead of me
the whole way.
And I've had some students show me things that I didn't
know on how to do some advanced web searching.
When we did this for faculty and staff, of course, we found
that that microcosm very closely reflected what we were
doing in the classroom of students, where we had some
students who needed to get up to speed and we had some who
were already there.
COLLEEN LYON: So I just got another question, "How did you
market this to faculty?" And I think we
touched on it real briefly.
But we had developed, the library, had developed a
relationship with our instructional
technology unit on campus.
And they had access to the all-campus email.
The illustrious all-campus email.
And through our relationship with them, and through the
workshops that we had kind of hosted jointly with them, were
able to pitch this idea of having a Google
workshop for faculty.
And then were able to, using their all-campus email, send
out the message saying, hey, there's this workshop coming
up about "Googling Like a Librarian." If you're
interested, just go ahead and sign up.
So that was invaluable to us to be able to use that
connection that a relationship that had been established to
get the message out to faculty.
MARY O'KELLY: And also there is a question about building
excitement and how would we get, how would we get people
to come when they may have thought, now I already know
everything.
And, to be honest, that was kind of why we wrote the title
the way we did.
The title of our workshop was, Using Google Like a Librarian.
And we figured by doing it that way, what we're telling
people is, you may already know how to use Google.
But do know how to use it the way we use it?
And we hoped that that would give just a
little bit of intrigue.
That, well, maybe there's a way to do it that I don't know
how to do it.
I don't know.
That could be part of the reason why we had so many
interests that we had.
COLLEEN LYON: There is a question about, have you seen
faculty using this with their students?
And there was a faculty in the biology department who,
through the Google Docs part of our discussion, had
realized that he could use Google Docs with his students
as they were working on a big project.
And this was a way that they could all kind of work on the
project together.
But he could be invited to the documents that they were
working on and could look at the history and see who was
contributing what.
That's one that I know of where the faculty has decided
to use Google in the classroom based on the
workshop that we had.
And I know that there were a couple other faculty members
to asked that I teach Google in their classes
based on the workshop.
They were in the workshop.
They thought the information was great.
And when I came to their classroom they wanted me to
include that as a part of the discussion with the students.
MARY O'KELLY: I see there is a question on whether that we've
given any thought to offering ILI and how to use Wikipedia.
And integrate teaching evaluation skills.
And we've been doing teaching evaluating websites and
integrated in terms of our instruction for a while now.
We don't currently have plans for a workshop on Wikipedia,
but we have talked about it.
There's a little bit I admit, on my own part, of wanting to
do it simply because so many faculty
say, don't use Wikipedia.
But I think that it's getting used, and it's getting used
very heavily.
And if it's going to be used, it should be
taught how to use well.
How to do some, perhaps, citation chasing, perhaps
using the references at the end of the Wikipedia entry.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity for doing that.
Right now, we don't have any plans to do it.
COLLEEN LYON: There's a question for clarification on
Google Books, and whether or not you could tell that a book
was on your library shelves.
And I think the way I've seen it used in the past and the
way I've used it myself is, I've been searching in my
library catalog, and I found a book.
But I have absolutely no idea.
There's no link to the table of contents.
There's no full text.
They don't really know what's in the text.
You can take that title, put it into Google Books and you
can see the table of contents and you can
search the full text.
You might not be able to view the text but, you can at
least search it.
And then, if then, what you've discovered through Google
Books you can decide whether or not you actually want to
get the book off the library shelf.
There is a link in Google Books that will allow you to
check and see if your library has the book.
The link takes you to WorldCat.org and that process
of linking sometimes becomes a little bit bumpy.
But there is that option.
So you could go to WorldCat.org, find out if your
library has it, and then see if its available.
It's a multi-step process, but it is there.
MARY O'KELLY: In regards to the question, "Did you create
any online resources for asynchronous instuction?" We
have a worksheet that participants could fill out,
either on their own or afterwards.
And we do give the answers.
It's just walking through all the
different skills we taught.
Sort of a different store-way to practice all of that.
We had some background readings.
We had some handouts from Google itself.
And all of these we put into a Blackboard site.
Grand Valley uses Blackboard as its
course management system.
So we were able to create a course in Blackboard, upload
all of the documents, including the presentation, to
that, so people who weren't able to make it could use it.
It was not so much an interactive tutorial, but a
repository of background reading and handouts and the
presentation and other materials they may need to do
a refresher or to catch up.
COLLEEN LYON: Okay, so there's another question.
"What would you recommend about how to start teaching
this to students and teachers in middle
school/high school level?
And I would say, this is a little outside of my area of
expertise because I worked in universities for the past
several years.
But I think that talking about Google is just a really great
opportunity to discuss what Google really is.
It's a search engine.
It's directing you to other websites that actually have
the content.
And so you could kind of talk about it in that way.
So that the students understood that they were
using it to find resources.
And then you could, perhaps, if they wanted to search for
images, maybe they have an art project coming up, you could
show them how to search Google Images.
Or, if you really just kind of wanted to get to the meat of
how to evaluate resources.
you could start with just a regular Google search, and
start talking about what was coming back in those searches.
MARY O'KELLY: They're also, if all of you haven't seen it
already, when we were doing our background research on
that, we found that Google actually
has a wealth of materials.
They have some lesson plan guidelines and
they have hand outs.
And they were actually very helpful in getting us some of
the materials that we needed to start teaching.
COLLEEN LYON: There's a question,.
I love this one. "How do you retain your status as search
experts when giving away your best secrets?" I think that's
a great question.
And I think that that's always the concern.
Well , if we tell them how to do everything, they won't need
us anymore.
But what I have found is, when I have students who would come
to me one-on-one, and we would start with Google, and we
would start with, okay, let me show you how you can search
Google Scholar with Scholar Preferences.
Or let me show how you can search these
shortcuts and Google.
And they would be so amazed and they would love it.
But then they would come back a couple weeks later and they
would say, okay, well, you showed me this, but what if I
wanted to do that.
And so then that would lead to more discussion.
And showing them well, let's get into this library database
and let me show you how to search this database.
And then sometimes a friend would come in and they would
say, My friend Sally was in here last week and you showed
her how to use Google.
Can you talk to me about that?
So, yeah, we're giving away our secrets,.
But they're being shared.
And, once they see us as the search expert and not just
library resources, but also where they're starting their
research, and I think they're going to come back for repeat
business whenever they get stuck on something because
they've had so much success in the past.
MARY O'KELLY: I agree wholeheartedly I had someone
from our legal department who wanted to come, wasn't able to
come, who made an appointment with me. who then told another
colleague about how helpful we could be.
I've had people from offices all over campus saying, I've
heard about this can you show me how to do this other thing.
And so it seems to be a really good entree into what we're
trying to teach.
When I said we could go on for two hours we could probably go
on for weeks on how to really in depth searching, how to do
web evaluation.
All of the information literacy core competencies
that we teach.
All of the standards that we try to address.
And I would like to think that it would take more than an
hour and a half to get them up to the level that all of us
have. But it's very true about, if we teach them how to
do what we do, will they need us anymore?
And I just hope not.
COLLEEN LYON: There's another, I think there is, acutally, a
couple questions about, you know, Google's core business
is really advertising and was there any discussion about the
implications of the commercial process behind Google.
And in one of our sessions, one of the faculty members
brought it up when we were showing them Google Docs.
And they said, well, I already have a Gmail account and I'm
searching Google every day,.
And now qualified documents are it Google Docs.
You know she was just concerned that then Google
knows too much about her.
We, as a group did kind of discuss the pros and cons of
using a commercial tool like this, even though it free.
But it wasn't really the focus of the workshop.
I think that could be a whole separate [? workshops. ?
Discussing the privacy issues related to Google.
The commercial.
issues related to Google.
But it would really, it wasn't the focus of the issues.
It did come up.
But it wasn't the focus.
MARY O'KELLY: If someone else pointed out that teaching a
student to develop queries with advanced Google syntaxes
can be useful in introducing them to many driven
proprietary databases, and, I completely agree.
If this goes back to that whole notion of Google being
very accessible, and very relatable, and a lot of people
knowing what it is.
You can stand around the coffee pot in the morning and
say, hey, I just found this great Google search.
And you don't have to explain what Google is.
So because it's comfortable, and because it's ubiquitous,
and because so many people have tried it in a very low
key, comfortable, way, it seems to be that if a student
can be shown how to have success with something this
familiar, when we throw them into something like a Proquest
or an UBS database we could say now remember how you
structured this in Google?
You can do that here.
And you can actually do more over here.
Let's take you up to the next level.
So it seems to be a really nice, what I heard our Google
host, Tasha, explain once, as a stepping stone resource,.
That it steps you into some of more advanced activities.
COLLEEN LYON: Mary, there was question about what are the
next steps?
How you're going to continue marketing the search expert
angle to faculty.
And I'm going to let you handle that.
MARY O'KELLY: OK this fall, at Grand Valley, we will be
offering this workshop again.
Now. we have it scheduled for twice this fall semester in
late October and because Colleen is at Houston and now
there's another colleague at Grand Valley who will be
working with me on that.
We're going to continue with the same
marketing that we've done.
And we've actually run these same workshops, I think six or
eight times now, and we keep getting people and we keep
filling up.
We do want to try to expand it a little bit.
We're thinking we might drop a little bit of the Google Docs,
because there's someone else on campus are in the
presentation we don't want to do a whole lot of overlap.
Instead we want to focus really on how this connects to
the library.
So we're going to be leaning a lot more on Google Scholar,
Google Books, and in using Google web searching to get
into some of the resources that are mentioned elsewhere.
I know one thing that I started doing And I have
already tried it out this semester is, I'll have
students who come in from pop culture, or something very
modern something very simple, or something like a Time
Magazine article or something from the newspaper, or
something they saw on a Facebook status.
And say, okay.
Let's find out more about that.
If it was someone from movement science is talking
about crossing the mid-line and using
that to increase alertnss.
What does that even mean?
Why don't we look it up?
Why don't we do a search?
Why don't we get some key words?
Brainstorm some key words.
Then bounce back into the library It's okay, now that we
have words, now that we see how people are using these
words on websites, in encyclopedia entries, in the
online, articles.
How can we search for those terms in the library?
So it's a lot of fluidity.
It's a lot of moving back and forth.
And so far I'm finding that it's working quite well.
COLLEEN LYON: There's another question about if you were
doing a basic Google class, what would you cover and where
would you draw the line between basic Google search
and advanced Google search?
And I think, with the basic search I would probably start
with, again, what is Google?
When you do a search what's coming back?
How are things ranked?
How can you tell the difference between a dot/org
site and a dot/gov site and what does that mean?
I think I would include what we were calling the advanced
features in a basic search like maybe just "major
population, Hawaii." or "unemployment rate," Michigan,
depending on what the focus of the class was, what the
subject area was.
I think there's a blurry line between basic Google and what
we were calling advanced Google.
And I don't think there's an easy way to divide the two.
I think it really depend on the grade level of the
audience or maybe the computer knowledge of the audience.
And what they wanted to get out of it.
A lot of our instruction is based on actual assignments.
And so it really, really depends on that.
For faculty, though, I think we kind of we kind of skipped
all that basic stuff and went to kind of basic-plus, or what
we were calling advanced.
MARY O'KELLY: There was someone who asked about
whether or not our workshops are available online or in
person only.
And right now they are online, or I'm sorry, in person only.
We do not have an online version.
We have a few online courses at Grand Valley, but not many.
And so far library instruction is on campus.
But we do hold it on multiple campuses.
We have a campus right in downtown Grand Rapids, and we
have the main campus out in Allendale, Michigan, closer to
Lake Michigan and it's about 15-mile difference.
And I travel between the campuses to
give the first workshops.
Are there any other questions?
Well if that's all you should see our contact information up
on the screen, and feel free to get in
touch with us any time.
COLLEEN LYON: 5 was just going to say Tasha our host from
Google, apologizes are open to apologize for the technical
difficulties at the beginning and see what everybody knows
that she's going to be sending out an email afterward and
have a link to just confirmation and I think
you're going to be able to link our PowerPoint with the
location information there.
So If you have any questions, you can contact us or you can
contact Tasha and she just put her email
there in the chat box.
It's tbm@google.com And we thank you for sharing your
time with us today.
Thank you very much.
We hope to talk to you soon.