Reading #4

This article brought up many good points, and I think everything in it was one hundred percent true. Many students today do use search engines over library databases. He used one term that I thought was the perfect term to use for this happening, “infobesity” which is described as too much Googlizing which then creates a junk-information diet, consisting of overwhelming amounts of low-quality material that is hard to digest and leads to research papers of equally low quality. The author brings up the point that the reason why many students are shying away from using databases is because they may find them to difficult to use. He proposes that some universities design their databases into search engines like Google. One experiment that is the process right now is the “RedLightGreen” project. This project presents students with a single search box that’s similar to Google’s. The results screen includes a list of books and suggests other search terms from the database's subject vocabulary that, if selected, could lead to more-relevant material. The author also proposes one way to fix the problem and lead kids back into the library databases is to have the professors get involved. Instead of asking their students to do a research paper with so many sources, the professor should emphasize that the sources should come from a scholarly journal or something from a library database.

I feel that this article hit the nail on the head. I will be the first to admit that I use to Google information for my papers mainly because I felt it was easier to use. Go to Google and type in your search and next you have a ton of info relating to your topic. Library databases require you to take a lot more steps just to get to the searching part and once you search the databases, it seems you get articles that are unrelated to your topic. It is very time consuming to search and find things in the databases. This is one of the things the author talked about in the article is how we get lazy and don’t want to take time to search. As a student I don’t want to take time to research things I am not interested in. That is why Google is a favorite of mine. I have noticed over the last two years here, many of the professors have started requiring us to use the databases and scholarly journals in our papers. So it seems that the professors here seem to be trying to correct the problem of “infobesity.”