A Reference for That: Six Words

Abstract

Now, what I mean is that we are no longer able to think like regular members of the population when it comes to searching. We have come, more and more—over years on desk—to think like the indexer or taxonomist of a database, OPAC, or website. We do not realize the extent of this transformation—we just get more and more successful at finding things, not realizing how we find them changes or how we, incrementally, discover strategies that work. We are oblivious to these strategies we use until we have an aha moment and realize they are not obvious to anybody else. Although information science has made great strides in natural language searching programs, successful information literacy instruction still involves teaching laymen to think like indexers. However, we may not realize just how much our own thought processes have morphed and how different they are from those of our patrons.