From an OU Student: Media Consumption and Info Tree
February 7th, 2010 by hagmanBy Alexis Malure, Journalism/PR
“Scholarly sources required” — a phrase most students sigh, cringe, or roll their eyes at when read or heard uttered by a professor. Although such reactions are common and initially signal to the prof. a lack of interest, intimidation and ignorance are guised under their apathetic reactions. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that many college students are in fact illiterate when it comes to online academic learning and researching.
Throughout years of research, the Nielsen Norman Group, led by JakobNielsen, has conducted numerous experiments regarding Web experiences and consumer aspects of new technologies. The results were startling. In his work, The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein summarizes Nielsen Norman’s findings, “People seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. They judge what they see not on objective traits of the content delivered, the quality of the language and image, but on the subjective traits of familiarity and ease”.
Considering the above, professors are far from shocked when a student hands in a reference sheet in which Wikipedia is a listed source. Students who do not know or care to learn how to manipulate and utilize information engines, such as Ohio University’s InfoTree, often resort to Wikiality. A phrase comedian Stephen Colbert coined back in 2006, Wikiality refers to a pseduo-reality in which information is turned into believed credible fact if enough people agree with you. Rather than referring to scholarship found in LexisNexis Academic or in Ebsco’s Academic Search Complete, students often look toward civilian-created ‘knowledge’, such as information found on Wikipedia, solely because it is easy to find, understandable, and comfortable to digest.
Fortunately, Ohio University’s Libraries have undertaken the task of making their academic search guide, InfoTree, more visible to students in an effort to combat e-illiteracy. Boasting an easy-to-use interface, students are able to first locate academic databases by major/subject. Once a topic is chosen, then one can either pick a database directly, or continue to refine their search by browsing databases by topic. Ohio University Libraries hope that by making InfoTree more visible, accessible, and user-friendly, students will eventually turn to its databases rather than resort to comfort and ignorance of Wikiality.
*Image by Flickr user Will Lion. Used by Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial No Derivative license.
It’s midterms this week and we can tell – the library is getting busier, especially in the middle of the week. Here’s a look at what’s been going on around the library this week.


The fourth week of the winter quarter is already coming to the end. The library is getting pretty busy. OU librarians have been busy too, answering your questions and keeping up with all the resources we know you need for your classes.
Welcome to yOUr Library Week in Review for January 22, 2010. This week, we’ll continue to look at some of the work librarians here in Alden do, but also some news stories from around the Ohio University community.

On February 10th
On August 26, 1971, Ohio University was the first library to go online—to press the button to produce catalog cards using the OCLC Online Union Catalog—now known as WorldCat, and Lynne Lysiak was there when it first went live. “There were nine of us who started around the same time,” Lynne recalls. “We became a pretty tight group, like members of a class… There were many manual steps and processes in the beginning. “As we started to use the offline system, we continued to maintain our battery of typists. When the cards came in, if we didn’t like something on them, the typists would take their hand-held electric erasers—erase and retype information. Stacked up, the books waited for the cards to arrive, and then we matched the cards and released them for physical processing.” And so it all began.
Alden Library has
