College Students as End User Searchers: One University's Experience.

Abstract

College students were trained to do database searching in a mandatory freshman research paper course. Bibliogra phies from the research papers, search transcripts, ques tionnaires administered to the students, the university li brary's serials holdings, and interviews with the teacher and librarian provided information for an analysis charac terizing the students' database and library searches and evaluating the relationship of database searching to the re search process. The students gained a working knowledge of searching after minimal preparation but had difficulty with search strategy. Forty percent reported difficulties lo cating material in libraries and those that did locate mate rial used nearby libraries in conjunction with the univer sity library. Students' bibliographies contained few citations from the database searches. Since 60 percent of the students reported finding materials from the searches in a library, the question arises as to why the database search references were not suitable to include in the pa pers' bibliographies.

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No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.