Competency 6.1: Building Block Search, ERIC

I used the Expert Search feature of ERIC to perform a building block search on the topic of technology in library teen services. I chose Expert Search because it was more flexible and let me choose my own number of facets rather than limiting me to three. Fortunately, ERIC includes a little "cheat sheet" at the bottom of the Expert Search screen which lists its truncation symbol and the Boolean operators!

The screenshot looks really small in the blog, so in case you can't read the search terms I used, here they are:

kw: librar* and kw: technology and (kw: youth or kw: teen) and ft: fulltext



The word "technology" didn't appear in the abstract of the most interesting result at all (although it did appear as an identifier). If I were doing a citation pearl growing search, this would make me think I should add "internet" as a search term. Once again, the screenshot is really small, so here's the result:

Searching for Educational Content in the For-Profit Internet: Case Study and Analysis
Author: Fabos, Bettina
Publication: 2002-04-00
Description: 61 p.
Language: English

I won't retype the whole abstract, but the reason I thought this article was interesting is that the author surveyed elementary, junior-high, and high-school teachers about how they used the internet. She found that rather than allowing students to use Web 2.0 features to do things like create their own videos (or even their own web pages), teachers almost invariably used the internet as "a kind of library substitute" - students did research by looking things up on the internet in the computer lab instead of looking things up in books in the library. To me, this points out the need for librarians to take the lead in making sure teens are really information literate, by helping them create content on the internet instead of just using it for research.



This search also makes me think that I might need to refine my topic. "Use of technology in library services for teens" might be too broad - do I mean technology that librarians use to reach teens, or technology that teens use in the library, or...?