Reading # 5

Information Navigation 101
By Andrea L. Foster

The recent reading takes a look into the inability of college student’s usage of peer-reviewed articles and scholarly journals. It comes to the attention of professors and campus’s that current college students have become less informed about the quality of information they are finding and where they are finding it. College students have begun to favor Google or Wikipedia as a source of higher education information. The disappointing fact of the matter is these students find this information acceptable. This has stirred and activated a many campuses to promote the use of scholarly materials found within the campus library or databases. Cal State was among the first of colleges to create a program that injected students into the scholarly material and provided instructions on how to navigate and use the university’s online catalog and databases. This imitative has spread to an additional 22 campuses, promoting the information of how to find, sort, analyze, and communicate information.

It is really has been shocking to me how much I have relied on Google and Wikipeida to locate information for college. Library 103 has introduced scholarly journals and databases to me, and they are really just as easy to use as Google. The great thing about these databases is they are user friendly to narrow down search results, so really it is even better than using Google. It has been a great experience to learn how search engines work and understand what to look for when accessing online information. I believe these are all skills that will help student in college and in the future when accessing information. I could really see a large impact if a course similar to LIB 103 was required such as freshman seminar is.