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  3. The Gulf Between College Students and Librarians Students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. This is on

The Gulf Between College Students and Librarians Students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. This is on

admin2012-08-10  29
问题             The Gulf Between College Students and Librarians
    Students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. This is one of the sobering truths the librarians have learned over the course of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic (人种学的) study examining how students view and use their campus libraries. The idea of a librarian as an academic expert who is available to talk about assignments and hold their hands through the research process is, in fact, foreign to most students. Those who even have the word "librarian" in their vocabularies often think library staff are only good for pointing to different sections of the stacks.
    The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic libraries) project contains a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois’s Chicago and Springfield campuses. Instead of relying on surveys, the libraries included two anthropologists (人类学者), along with their own staff members, to collect data using open-ended interviews and direct observation, among other methods.
    The goal was to generate data that, rather than being statistically significant yet shallow, would provide deep, subjective accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of the library and each other at those five institutions.
    Exploding the "Myth of the Digital Native"
    The most alarming finding in the ERIAL studies was perhaps the most predictable: when it comes to finding and evaluating sources in the Internet age, students are extremely Internet-dependent.
    Only 7 out of 30 students whom anthropologists observed at Illinois Wesleyan " conducted what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search," wrote Duke and Andrew Asher, an anthropology professor at Bucknell University, who led the project.
    Throughout the interviews, students mentioned Google 115 times—more than twice as many times as any other database. The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources.
    "I think it really exploded this myth of the ’ digital native,’ " Asher said. "Just because you’ve grown up searching things in Google doesn’t mean you know how to use Google as a good research tool. "
    Even when students turned to more scholarly resources, it did not necessarily solve the problem. Many seemed confused about where in the constellation (云集) of library databases they should turn to locate sources for their particular research topic: Half wound up misusing databases a librarian " would most likely never recommend for their topic." For example, "Students regularly used JSTOR, the second-most frequently mentioned database in student interviews, to try to find current research on a topic, not realizing that JSTOR does not provide access to the most recently published articles. "
    Unsurprisingly, students using this method got either too many search results or too few. Frequently, students would be so discouraged they would change their research topic to something that requires a simple search.
    "Many students described experiences of anxiety and confusion when looking for resources—an observation that seems to be widespread among students at the five institutions involved in this study," Duke and Asher wrote.
    There was just one problem, Duke and Asher noted: " Students showed an almost complete lack of interest in seeking assistance from librarians during the search process. " Of all the students they observed—many of whom struggled to find good sources, to the point of despair—not one asked a librarian for help.
    In a separate study of students at DePaul, Illinois-Chicago, and Northeastern Illinois, other ERIAL researchers deduced several possible reasons for this. The most basic was that students were just as unaware of the extent of their own information illiteracy as everyone else. Some others overestimated their ability or knowledge.
    Another possible reason was that students seek help from sources they know and trust, and they do not know librarians. Many do not even know what the librarians are there for. Other students imagined librarians to have more research-oriented knowledge of the library but still thought of them as glorified ushers.
    Influence of Professors and Librarians
    However, the researchers did not place the blame solely on students. Librarians and professors are also partially to blame for the gulf that has opened between students and the library employees who are supposed to help them, the ERIAL researchers say.
    Instead of librarians, whose relationship to any given student is typically ill-defined, students seeking help often turn to a more logical source: the person who gave them the assignment—and who, ultimately, will be grading their work. Because librarians hold little sway with students, they can do only so much to reshape students’ habits. They need professors’ help. Unfortunately, faculty may have low expectations for librarians, and consequently students may not be connected to librarians or see why working with librarians may be helpful.
    On the other hand, librarians tend to overestimate the research skills of some of their students, which can result in interactions that leave students feeling intimidated and alienated (疏远的). Some professors make similar assumptions, and fail to require that their students visit with a librarian before carrying on research projects. And both professors and librarians are liable to project an idealistic view of the research process onto students who often are not willing or able to fulfill it.
    By financial necessity, many of today’s students have limited time to devote to their research. Showing students the pool and then shoving them into the deep end is more likely to foster despair than self-reliance. Now more than ever, academic librarians should seek to "save time for the reader". Before they can do that, of course, they will have to actually get students to ask for help. "That means understanding why students are not asking for help and knowing what kind of help they need," say the librarians.
    "This study has changed, profoundly, how I see my role at the university and my understanding of who our students are," says Lynda Duke, an academic librarian at Illinois Wesleyan. " It’s been life-changing, truly. "
When searching for resources, many students have experienced the feeling of______.
选项 A、helplessness and despair
B、anxiety and confusion
C、happiness and excitement
D、comfort and satisfaction
答案B
解析 当查找资源时，许多学生描述自己有过焦虑和迷惑的经历，故答案为B
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