Wake Forest Magazine September 2003 - Past Issues - Wake Forest ...

Coates sees the e-mail exchanges as an enhancement toface-to-face contact. He insists that each student come to hisoffice for a personal meeting at the beginning of the semesterand also meets with them individually to discuss their work.And while he’s big on e-mail, he’s not as interested in Power-Point presentations. “I remain rather committed to reactiveinteraction with my students and letting the conversation gowith their questions,” he said. “I’m still very much a chalk anddrawing man. I require students to use the library and thenupdate by going to the Web.”One of Coates’ students last semester wrote a paper onhow British Prime Minister Tony Blair ended up backingPresident Bush in Iraq. “She read all Blair’s speeches since 9/11.Before the Web, she would have had to wade through newspapersand it would have taken forever,” Coates said. “In my ownresearch, now that I am living away from the UK but stillresearching UK politics, I don’t feel I’m away. Doing contemporaryresearch has become much, much easier.The quality ofwhat’s being done has definitely gone up.”Elizabeth Gotha (’05), one of Coates’ students, has takenhis approach to combining library and Web-basedresearch.The junior political science major from Arcadia,California, still searches the library for books and other printeddocuments, saving the Internet for current articles and journals.She appreciates the fact that Internet searches can be done insmaller chunks of time than visiting the library but recognizesthat the Internet can be a very unwieldy tool.“It’s difficult to learn when reading off the computer.Whenyou have the physical, tangible paper and you have a pen, you’reactively reading and underlining.When you have it on thecomputer, it goes into this secondary memory where youdon’t really retain a lot of what you read,” Gotha said. “If wego to just technology and not using it in addition to books, ifwe just let it take over because it’s easier, we won’t have anywherenear the skills we have today. I’m sure we’ve lost researchskills with the Net, since we’re just relying on search engines.”Rhoda Channing, the late director of the Z. Smith ReynoldsLibrary, worried about exactly that problem. “Many studentsno longer use the library as their first step in finding information.Many use a search engine,” Channing said in an interviewbefore her death on July 25 (see related story page 9). “They findfifty articles on a topic and they eliminate any that are notavailable in full text online, much to the detriment of theireducation.They don’t want to have to come to the library toget it off the shelf.The pressure is on for more and more fulltext but there are many that are not available or only from acertain date forward. If you’re researching Jane Austen, therewas an awful lot written about her before the Internet.”Students still need the resources of the library, Channing said.“There is a much greater need for information literacy as opposedto computer literacy. Students are confronted by thousands of hits“I’m still very much a chalkand drawing man. I requirestudents to use the libraryand then update by going tothe Web.”DAVID COATESwhen they do a search in a search engine like Google.They needinstruction in how to evaluate the sources that they find,” shesaid. “With an interview with the reference librarian, you canrefine your search.That’s why we’re here.”To that end, the library staff is now offering nine sectionsof a course called “Accessing Information in the 21st Century.”Reference librarians are teaching students how to developresearch strategies, decide which search engine to use, determinethe words they should use in their search, and how todiscern credible sources on the Internet.Elizabeth Leonard, head of reference, helped teach a pilot forthe course last spring. “It’s not that students are any lazier thanthey ever were, it’s just that there is so much more informationavailable to them now,” she said. “Most students said they nevereven went past the second page of search results.We’re teachingthem how to dig deeper.”The course also discusses the process of scholarly researchand gives students tips such as setting in italics any materialthey cut and paste from a Web site so it will be obvious laterwhich work is not their own. “We teach them that they needto cite their sources not just to avoid getting into trouble butto acknowledge the people who came before them. Many studentssaid no one had ever told them why they should be socareful about citations,” Leonard said.That is not to say the librarians are not thrilled with theresearch capabilities the Internet provides.They love the easySeptember 2003 23