Competency 6.3: Successive Fractions Search, Lexis

My notes said that you can start a successive fractions search with the broadest search term, so I started searching LexisNexis for "MySpace." I quickly got a screen that said my search had been terminated because it would have resulted in over 3000 hits. I added the term "library" and got 904 hits, many of which had to do with the music industry, for instance because of the phrase "digital music library."

I changed "library" to "public library" and got 109 hits. Then I added the word "teen" and got 26 results.



The top five results were either completely useless or only accidentally helpful - they were community calendar pages from various newspapers that happened to have the search terms in them because, for instance, there's a teen advisory board meeting at the library and some other organization down the page says you can contact them via their MySpace page.

But the tenth hit was a very interesting Boston Globe article by young-adult author Lauren Mechling about how she, as an author, feels about libraries reaching out to teens with the internet, music, and other new technologies. If librarians aren't trying to force teens to read, she asks, will anyone read her books? Her thoughts and her description of her local library portray Library 2.0 changes in a way that I think a lot of newspaper readers can understand.

Mechling, Laura. Come for the Xbox, Stay for the Books. The Boston Globe. 11 March 2007, D3.