Friday, March 19, 2010

Breakfast Keynote: The Mind of the Researcher (Daniel Russell from Google)

Notes from the Breakfast session:

Daniel Russell from Google. First this guy was fascinating and there was so much info in the talk that I was unable to capture everything. Here are some of my highlights:

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading a website of riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. http://www.ted.com/

Baby Name Wizard/Voyager - http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager

Google SketchUp - http://sketchup.google.com/

Google "What's That" feature for phones and searching Google

Google.org - Technology-Driven Philanthropy

Google Trends - http://www.google.com/trends

Maybe subscribe to the blogs: google, searchengineland, searchresearch

You cannot pay attention to everything

Look up the study of rats developing religious postures

Good Searchers ...
1. Choose good search terms
2. Understand info sources
3. Domain (subject) knowledge
4. Search strategy (when to change, to narrow, to widen and how)
5. Assessment of the results and the information
6. Know how system works (search site, database)

Basic skills lots of people don't know about
control F
Using tabs to organize results
Keyword choice /synonimization
Tactics for searching

And
How to detect authority / crap
Hemingway's crap detector quote
Staying on task
Discovery
Notetaking
Data integration
Representing of info


Librarians need to:
Show the info landscape
Teach how to paddle the canoe and dodge the bears
Research is more than 'search'
Learn

Google Scholar is 4 guys and one is only part time. They do not have a "catalog" because it changes all the time with publisher putting things in and pulling things out.

Program Abstract: Breakfast Keynote: The Mind of the Researcher
Research is complicated and has changed significantly over the past century. Search engines have significantly changed our conception of what constitutes research, and yet how common is research literacy? Russell will argue that research is a fundamental skill that we need to understand, and he’ll talk about some of the findings gathered through his research at Google. The range of research skills is broad, and yet not widely distributed. Russell will discuss what we can do to help disseminate these basic and increasingly important skills.

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