Computer-Literate vs. Research-Literate

Via Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article titled Not Enough Time In the Library, the author Todd Gilman points out an interesting fact; being computer-literate doesn’t mean and/or guarantee being research-literate. Todd discusses the existence and importance of technological tools, such are smart classrooms, interactive whiteboards, Web 2.0 tools, social networking tools, citation tools, and many others. But he states that those are only to convey substantive content. He says,

Research education is not tools education. Research education involves getting students to understand how information is organized physically in libraries, as well as electronically in library catalogs and in powerful, sometimes highly specialized commercial databases. It means teaching students to search effectively online to identify the most relevant and highest-quality books, articles, microform sets, databases, even free Web resources.

Read the full story to see some of his tips and hints on how to augment students’ research skills. Though Todd is a librarian for English literature at Yale Memorial Library, his suggestions might be useful to legal researchers as well.

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