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Maine Samplers addendum

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963
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Part III - REFLECTING ON NET RESEARCH

Unfortunately, there is an worrisome attitude circulating: "Our school has internet access now - why do we need a librarian?" Regardless of all the other things we do, librarians generally are experienced in search strategies and should be able to apply these strategies to internet searching. One graphic rebuttal to this type of statement might be to get the administrator on the World Wide Web and ask him or her to find some specific information. Most novices are surprised and frustrated to find that navigating the internet is far more challenging than expected. They find a diverse, chaotic and decentralized tangle of information. Assistance is much more welcome after a frustrating voyage.

A concept that has great ramifications when using the internet is the difference between recall and precision:. RECALL: has all or most of the relevant information been recalled? PRECISION: is all the found material considered relevant? For example, some of the Web pages with the best information were not found using the first two sets of key words! "Recall" effectiveness is based on the quality in understanding of search terms. Other problems with recall involve the amount of data returned. One of the best sites I found upon researching church arson came last on a list generated by my third try key words following 94 other places. Ninety-four "hits" are a reasonable number to work with but frankly, many people don't get to the bottom of the list. The number of internet hosts tripled in the past year, certainly it's easy to contemplate not staying with a search through the third priority list. (See Gray: "Measuring the Growth of theWeb" http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summary.html). "Precision" issues emerge due to homonyms, idioms, multiple uses of works and rewording of phrases. For example Lycos recalled a site on black and white physiography "Bill's Burning Man" and "Evaluation of Carbon Black Slurries as Clean Burning Fuels."

Relevance has a great deal to do with the method of categorizing webpages. (There are no master catalogers on the internet.) Some services (Lycos) index the first 100 words while some "look at" the whole page (InfoSeek and AltaVista). And what about the term "best," as in the phrase that search engines often use: "'best' sites are listed first"? Who selects the best? They may be determined by the number of times the requested word is found on an entire webpage or by the location related to beginning or end of the page. Some search engines summarize the pages; some merely repeating the first few lines or by pulling out "key statements" with the document itself.

Just as we learned which dictionaries in our collections include foreign terms within the body of the work and which contain a separate listing we will need to have a clear understanding of how the major search engines work. Here are a few examples that illuminate the scope of the searching problem:

  • To find words that are close to each other in: - AltaVista under Advanced Search and the conjunction NEAR. This will recall separate words if they are within ten words of each other. - In Infoseek use brackets to find words within 100 words of each other.
  • Lycos doesn't allow searches for numbers but many other search engines do.
  • Some recommend using only lower case letters (AltaVista) while others (infoseek) suggest capitalizing proper names.
  • Several search engines expect words that need to be part of a phrase to be in quotes and some ask the user to put hyphens between them.

A search on "black church NEAR arson" pulled up 17 pages while a search on "black churches NEAR arson" found 21. Therefore it's a good idea to teach students how to use the "wild card search" technique": type in the keyword "church*" This will recall church, churches and other words with church as the root. ¥ Some search engines allow Query-by-example while others don't. The theory here is to find the best hits for your information needs and request similar pages or files. For example, Infoseek adds to the recall list an option called "Similar Pages" so that Dole as a political candidate can be separated from the fruit company.

There are a variety of other types of problems incurred during a search.

  • Even novices know that some servers will be down for repair, are backing up or are unavailable due to heavy use. One search netted me the frustration of finding the 8 of the first 10 apparently relevant sites had "no data available on server!" Perseverance pays off; the net user who is not willing to invest some learning time will most probably leave in frustration.
  • When working with students we've all heard the wail, "There isn't anything here!" Upon further investigation, we find that they have misspelled the keyword. However, as an experiment, I entered the misspelling "white AND supremecy" [sic] in AltaVista and 23 sites were returned. Most likely a student would think that they had found what they were seeking and not ask for help.
  • About one in ten of the returned sites on another search were links to talk shows or to specific news articles which cannot be accessed without paying a fee. Taylor Subscription Talk was one such service that charged $10 for 10 hours of "listening" time. The readers could choose from a long list of broadcast topics but to order took 2 weeks.
  • Scrolling through some of the long lists was time consuming as the relevance to the church burnings was not always obvious. I was tempted to give up on it. But when the search probed "deeper" into the links first suggested, the rewards were quite good. This is where thinking skills strategies need to be stressed. Only by associating very general topics (e.g. Racial Hatred) with the specific topic (Black Church Burnings) was I able to find productive links.
  • Originally I thought that the key words "black," "African-American" or "Afro-American" were crucial in my search on church arson. However, one government web page which was rated "low confidence" included the general profile of victim churches and a list of how to prevent violence. There were no references to race in it all but it supplied excellent information.
  • Result lists are artificially expanded when newsgroups are included. (Note, these personal opinions can provide fruity and divergent points of view.) Some messages are returned only because the keyword is found in "next " and "previous message." Be sure you and your students know how to follow a thread . (A thread is the chain of response messages that contain or address the same topic or subject. They are made by "replying" to a message in newsgroup.
  • This example began using AltaVista's Advanced Search Form. It's the favorite engine of many educators. Look under Net Search or use this URL:
    http://altavista.digital.com/ To get to the Advanced Search option in Netscape 2.0 or higher, click on the box labeled "Advanced." This may sound obious but on first glance it looks to be part of their logo!) Alta Vista also contains an excellent HELP section with explanation of their searching terms , helpful tips, and FAQs - well worth a visit.

Recent research shows that students at all levels experience major difficulties in identitying key words and designing Boolean searches, expecially on the internet. (see Hahl and Harada (1996) "Composing Boolean search statements: Self confidence, concept analysis, search logic and errors." School Library Quarterly 24 (2). 199-207.) For instance, students get frustrated when they type NOT while searching in Alta Vista. Their term is AND NOT.

While these activites on The Watsons Go to Birmingham are intended to make suggestions for teaching internet research and on using some assessment techniques that may be new to you, PLEASE remember that these are merely starting points. As in all these guides, this is not photocpy-ready material. Instead we suggest that you start with some suggestions and ideas and adapt them to your needs and the knowledge and developmental levels of students. You might also wish to use this as a model for expanding on a TV news story, textbook chapters, a magazine article or even another fictional work. These are exciting times. Let's make the best use of our intenet connections!

Other topics: Increasingly, many Americans find they don't easily fit into any racial group. But will adding a new "multiracial" category on the census take away the effectiveness of the count? http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/july-dec97/census_7-16.html

Gestures: Mama covered the gap between her teeth with her handhttp://www.stenhouse.com/0073samp.htm

FURTHER RESOURCES:

* On-Line News Hour: Race Relation Reports: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/race_relations/race_relations.html

Hate Crimes http://www.adl.org/presrele/HatCr_51/CD_51.html

Explanation: This note taking form is designed to make the PROCESS of research visible to students and therefore advance their self-monitoring skills. While researching in pairs, one will be focused on content and one will watch what is happening successfully or dismally. With librarian and teacher guidance this tool serves to focus the student on reflective research work.
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