Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Librarian Role in Kids' Searching Skills

There has been quite a bit of buzz this month about Clive Thompson's November 1, 2011 Wired article Why Kids Can’t Search.  Mostly it seems to be a great argument for school librarians:

Consider the efforts of Frances Harris, librarian at the magnet University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. (Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re the main ones trying to teach search skills to kids today.) Harris educates eighth and ninth graders in how to format nuanced queries using Boolean logic and advanced settings. She steers them away from raw Google searches and has them use academic and news databases, too.

Works great if you get classloads of kids visiting your library regularly, but what can those of us in public libraries do to help kids master “crap detection 101?”

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