Today I have the urge to address a perennial, insidious, and unnecessary condition that afflicts higher education in this country. It results from the most Frequently UNasked Question (by students) that is also the most Frequently UNanswered Question (by faculty): What is a primary source?

The silence surrounding this question is deafening. Undergrads are oblivious to the issue, think they already know the answer because they memorized a definition in eighth grade (“A primary source was written at the time”), or are afraid to show their ignorance by asking in class or in private communication with a professor. Faculty are far more culpable, in my view, because they assume, based on no evidence whatsoever, that students have grasped the difference between primary and secondary sources at about the same time, and with the same clarity, that they figured out sex.

Au contraire: what with tidy textbooks, packaged compilations of readings — or worse yet, summaries and excerpts — that mix original material with commentary, compounded by a torrent of electronic resources, students are bound to be hazy about what makes anything primary. My hunch is that the problem is at least in part visceral: no pain, no gain in this context becomes no effort (to acquire a primary source), no understanding (of what one is). My second hunch is that, lacking attention to the issue, students will confuse the container with its content. A paperback edition of Romeo and Juliet appears identical to a casebook of critical essays about the play. So if both look like a book, feel like a book, and smell like a book, and if both come from a bookstore, library shelf, or Blackboard site, then they both must be...? My third, and most troubling, hunch is that every IHE confers degrees on some students who are still uncertain about what’s what, sourcewise.

To test these suspicions, I often ask small groups of students to distinguish between primary and secondary sources. Originally I thought their answers would help me cast my own presentation of library research concepts and strategies, but I quickly realized that I was blundering into an abyss of muddle and guesswork.

Here is how the drama usually unfolds. First, there is silence and a close examination of fingernails and keypads. Then a brave soul or two will dig deep and recite a version of the memorized definition. But when I ask them to elaborate or provide an example of a primary source in the context of their course, I am apt to hear such assertions as that a primary source is (a) what they are supposed to read first, (b) the most important piece of their research, (c) the item they should list at the top of their bibliography, and (d) the earliest treatment of their topic. My favorite response of all time came from a class smart aleck who announced, “I’m not sure what a primary source is, but I figure it must be one if it makes me sneeze.” Lunacy or profundity, do you think?

While none of these notions is dead wrong, and while I applaud the attempt to use the etymology of primary as a clue, it is apparent to me that there has been a crucial gap in student learning. Boiled down, faculty reason, and teach, as follows:

--This is what we’re studying.

--This is what we know about it.

--This is what people have said about it.

--Now we’ll consider what it means and its consequences.

What’s missing from this syllogism is a careful look at what it is and at how we might either verify or extend our knowledge systematically. In short, what are the primary sources any college course is concerned with and what are the appropriate ways to engage them.

Faculty in the experimental sciences do the best job of imparting ideas about the substance of their field, along with the rigor, logic, and safety precautions good research demands. Students enroll in laboratory classes expecting to learn about phenomena by conducting guided investigations that entail precise procedures and analysis. But there is rarely an equivalent detailed look at objects or approaches in the rest of the college curriculum. Instead, there may be a research assignment requiring a preliminary bibliography or draft, with scribbled professorial feedback, and some instructions about what to do, but no coaching on how — let alone why — to do it. Repetition over four years will eventually lead students to a sort of fluency, but there’s no guarantee that students will graduate with the same mastery of methods that they have of facts and theories. To judge from the e-mail queries we get from alumni about how to find information in areas outside their major, I have to conclude that many people cannot adapt their undergraduate research experiences to different disciplines or endeavors.

Neither faculty nor librarians, acting as individuals, can impart everything students need to understand about sources or research methods, but we can, and should, talk repeatedly with students about the origin, nature, and transmission of the primary sources they are studying. We must not allow “What is a primary source?” to remain a taboo question.

Where did September go? I ask this every year, suspecting that Alma Mater has teamed up with Mother Nature to play a trick on me. The stretch from Labor Day to payday is always a blur: of eager or anxious new faces, of people asking where-is and how-to questions, of hiring and training new student workers, and of reconnecting with faculty whom I haven’t seen since May. My calendar, instead of being mostly empty as it was in August, is suddenly mostly full, and my task list seems endless, with deadlines or orientation activities almost every day.

Amid the swirl last month, I witnessed two scenes that struck me as portents. One had to do with the economy, one with technology, both with how students in the Class of 2013 will cope with college.

At my institution, all freshmen must present themselves at a sort of bureaucracy fair on the very day they arrive on campus. Some appeared at this event, held on the basketball court of an aging recreational gymnasium, even before they had moved into their rooms. I know, because they asked for directions to various dorms. Many were accompanied by family members who seemed more interested in the proceedings than their child or sibling was. Students unencumbered by relatives tended to travel in small packs, but I met the occasional shy or cocky loner as well. (Hello, Admissions: You aced the diversity test again.) Matriculants moved from table to table to show proof of their identity and visa status, sign or submit forms, register to vote, pick up information from all sorts of university offices, and have their basic questions answered about the honor code, health services, computing, and other facts of campus life.

I helped staff a welcome station during this scramble, with a view to promoting the library open house a few days later. All we had to purvey were lime green bags (biodegradable, by the way) that advertised our event and served as receptacles for all the handouts students were collecting at other stops, a map showing campus libraries, and a sheet of paper explaining how to apply for a library job. This last was a huge success. We are used to fielding the perennial question from financial aid students, “I was assigned to work in Dining Services. How can I switch to the library instead?” — the subtext being they want to be paid to sit somewhere quiet and study and presume the library is just such a place. But this year our flyers were practically inhaled by one and all. Time and again I watched parents take one and hand it meaningfully to their son or daughter with a comment such as, “You need to look into this.” I gather that despite extremely generous, need-based support from the university, more families than ever expect their children to earn their own spending money. That’s my economic observation.

Fast forward to the library’s open house, an optional activity that took place over two days during the jam-packed orientation period. Freshmen could take a brief guided tour of our huge main library, meet staff who demonstrated our online catalog and key links on our home page, retrieve a specific book from the stacks (thereby, we hope, mastering the complex cartographic an orienteering skills involved), and chat with librarians, curators, and archivists over refreshments. We gave away prizes emblazoned with the library’s url, and provided someone from human resources to answer questions about available jobs and what they entail — actually working, for starters.

What I noticed about the young people who chose to attend this event, only about twenty percent of the freshman class according to our headcount, was that most were either international students or Americans who seemed intensely, refreshingly curious about the resources—human, physical, and virtual—the library offers. (We asked students where they were from and what they hoped to study, just as a way to break the ice.) I can only hope the other eighty percent of the class will be as engaged as these students were.

But about technology: in our non-competitive game during the open house, we gave each student a call number and quick explanation of how to translate it into a floor and general stack location. Then we turned them loose to fetch their specific volume and return with it. When they did, we checked that they had the right book, asked if they had any questions about the navigational process, and dispensed a sturdy vinyl portfolio as a reward. The thing students learned about technology from this exercise is that, in many areas of our building, one needs to find a light switch to illuminate the aisle. They were incredulous when we told them this was a circa-1948 energy conservation measure. The thing I learned about technology is that some 18-year-olds don’t follow instructions: instead of bringing the assigned book from the stacks, several students used their cell phones to take a picture of it in situ, claiming that was sufficient evidence they had figured out our system.

In my generation, we equated photocopying an article with having read it, but at least we had touched the physical source. Now I worry that students think a tiny snapshot of a book’s spine is worth several hundred pages of erudition. What would Plato say?

Within hours of my introductory post, I received a request from a reader who described herself as an adjunct at two institutions, a university and a community college. I gathered from her message that in both places she teaches composition courses that include a research paper. She is clearly dismayed by her colleagues’ traditionalist approach to that task (what I call the state–your–thesis–make–an–outline–annotate–your–sources–write–a–draft regimen) and by students’ uncritical rush to the Web for all things.

Her request was for two sets of guidelines — she called them Ten Commandments — Dos and Don’ts to help writing faculty reach a common understanding about the research part of the research paper. Just as cogent academic essays require complex thinking and skill sets, so does the process of discovering appropriate sources on which to build an argument. In other words, my correspondent wants my thoughts on the concepts students should master and the habits they should eschew in today’s electronic world.

Instead, I would like to offer just one list of precepts, all in a positive vein but doing Moses one better. Whereas the Children of Israel were never admonished to critique their own behavior — Just read the tablets and follow the rules, already! — the children of the 21st century must learn to search thoughtfully and judge sources wisely lest they too wander for decades in a metaphysical desert or accept mirages as reality.

Here then is my Hendecalogue, with a twist. These are matters that I, as a college librarian, would like undergraduates to know (or at least know about) before I encounter them:

1. Knowledge, information, and opinion: what they are and how they relate. When, how, by whom, and in what form are ideas and facts communicated, preserved, and made accessible.

2. Research is the process of planned inquiry, not haphazard gathering. Focus will change as research proceeds, as will confidence and excitement.

3. How to ask fruitful questions throughout the research process and speculate about likely means to answer them, including extra-library sources (e.g., experts) and methodologies (e.g., survey techniques).

4. Primary and secondary sources: an understanding of their nature, distinction, variety, and use in all fields.

5. Types of fact, finding, and hybrid reference tools: characteristics of each type and familiarity with specific titles from actual use.

6. The logic of discovery: a basic strategy for identifying and locating pertinent sources, with a notion of how to modify it.

7. Catalog fundamentals: information on cards and its purpose, the role of subject headings and classification; how to determine subject headings; common filing rules; how catalogs, indexes, and bibliographies differ; some exposure to book, fiche, and online catalogs.

8. Databases: concept and experience retrieving citations or data; fluency in Boolean logic.

9. What resources, services, policies, and procedures to expect in any library. The variety of physical formats: how they are acquired and stored. Procedures for locating periodical or newspaper articles and for finding books and government documents. How to examine a book critically and browse creatively. Some library jargon — e.g., “serial,” “subject heading,” “classification,” “union list.”

10. The importance of accurate citations and a research log. How to describe sources in standard note and bibliography style and, conversely, how to translate citations from notes and bibliographies into catalog entries.

11. Principles of selecting and evaluating sources: the effects of history, context, and viewpoint on the authority of reference tools and sources. The relationship of library research to critical thinking and of both to good writing.

Before you light up the IHE server with your comments about my grip on technology in #7, terminology in #9, or adolescent psychology, I have a confession to make: This list first appeared, verbatim, exactly twenty-one years ago.* At the time I was co-editor of a journal, since defunct, devoted to what educators now call information literacy, a phrase I find irritatingly affected and woefully inadequate. We needed a short, instant item for a blank page in the issue, so I did a brain dump, based on about a decade and a half of experience helping students grapple with library research projects. My notions fit the bill, and that filler hit a nerve. Interestingly, the majority of responses I received came from high school librarians who were then, and are still, concerned about the preparation of their own students for college-level research. More power to them.

How would I revise my commandments today? Or would I smash my tablets in frustration and need to start over? Actually, I would not add, delete, or rearrange anything, but would just update the details—and downgrade my expectations. Big time. I now know better than to think undergraduates, regardless of their year, will already be fluent with all eleven desiderata. The sanguine yet sensible part of my psyche tells me to relax and concentrate on working with faculty to instill these ideas into every syllabus and conversation about research.

Is that mission impossible, do you think? Will my wishes ever come true?

Questions? Send them here.

*Mary W. George, “What Do College Librarians Want Freshman to Know? My Wish List,” Research Strategies: A Journal of Library Concepts and Instruction 6, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 189.

This is the first of a series of occasional posts I call FUNQs, for Frequently UNasked Questions. These are perplexities that anyone new to an institution — whether faculty, freshman, or employee — is sure to have about the campus library. Some FUNQs, like that below, appear to be straightforward, one-time issues. After someone has discerned the answer, they think they can check it off their agenda for good. But no. Unlike species on a birder’s lifetime list, certain FUNQs need to be checked off anew for each library a person confronts. Many arrangements, both physical and virtual, vary from library to library, some to good purpose and some to no purpose. All a fresh student or scholar can do is accept that the campus library is not Walmart and proceed with caution as they would when encountering a foreign culture.

Academic libraries try to ease and expedite the FUNQ-demystification process with orientation programs, about which I will have lots to say anon, assuming I survive the one I’m running later this month.

Chronic FUNQs, more difficult to address and more perilous to ignore, can be either matters of fact or matters of knowledge-plus-experience, but mostly a blend of the two. In any case, they are deceptively complex. A chronic FUNQ is a question that students, in particular, will rarely articulate on their own, leading faculty to assume (hope?) that students know the answer, causing students to be even less likely to ask: a pernicious cycle anywhere, but especially in academe. If students do hazard a question, they ask another student, often equally clueless, or they pray to Google or Wikipedia. Either of those gods will reply, and instantly, thus reducing anxiety, but with what intellectual consequences, one can only guess.

Anyhow, I’ll focus on chronic FUNQs in the future. For now, here is one that seems to be of the fast-fix variety, cast in the words of a typical freshman.

FUNQ: How do I find out what stuff the library has?

Let’s ignore the word choice and philosophical nuances of that sentence. What the student who is not-asking this question really wants is the library’s home page and the promising leads it should provide to resources (study spaces), services (food), job opportunities, hours, and perhaps even books. And for sure, they want all the options for getting help — as remotely and as 24/7-ly as possible. All this information should be presented in a clear (no jargon, please!) and inviting way.

Simple desire, right? Not if you’re a newbie at Emory, Haverford, UC Santa Barbara, West Point, Yale, or (I’d wager) scores of other campuses, and are expecting to see a library link up front on the institution’s own Web site. I recently scrutinized the home pages of fifty colleges and universities, all rated highly by U.S. News for their undergraduate programs. A dozen of the Web sites I examined do not have the L word in evidence, and some that do effectively hide it because you need to scroll or squint to find it. In most of the twelve cases, you have to spot and click an Academics or a Quick Something link to open a menu or navigate to a second-level page. But why Academics as opposed to Research, a top link almost every school also provides? Does that imply that one needs the library for teaching and learning but not for seeking new knowledge? I won’t go there….

The worst obfuscator in my survey — are you ready for this? — is Harvard. Who in a million years would think to look for Libraries on a menu headed Offices? Granted, the Harvard home page has few choices, so you are likely to figure this out quickly, but what kind of scary category is Offices? (Speaking of scary, when I first made it to the actual Harvard libraries home page, a congeries of pixels, a truly gruesome little image presented itself, an illustration from the digital collection Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. The scary part was that I read the last word as Academics.) I suppose Harvard should be forgiven because it has so many libraries to keep track of, some far from Cambridge. Concealing abundance and organizational complexity under a mundane, if mysterious, label may be an act of modesty the rest of us should applaud. Or not.

School’s starting. Do you know where your [library’s] home page is?

I know vacation is over when the U.S. News “best” colleges issue hits the fan — I mean the newsstand — followed in a nanosecond by stories on the home pages of the most favored campuses, followed in a millisecond by objections about methodology from those who deplore the very idea of rating institutions (and whose employer or alma mater didn’t make the cut), and Schadenfreude disguised as aw-shucks disclaimers from officials whose institutions came out to their satisfaction. This annual farce amuses me no end, although the actual commentary gets tedious.

What doesn’t amuse me are an exclusion and an omission in the categories U.S. News uses. The exclusion is library resources, the omission is a student-to-librarian ratio.

I don’t much care how anyone defines library resources these days, as long as pollsters state their meaning when they collect data, analyze numbers consistently for each type of institution, specify the weight they give to various factors, and report their findings clearly. I have never believed that volume or database counts (about which parents of prospective students sometimes ask) or the size of the acquisitions budget (about which only senior scholars coming to interview ever inquire) have qualitative significance on their own. Before such figures could be useful for comparing institutions, they would need to be correlated with, for instance, how many students major in a field and the college’s requirements for independent research. These would be difficult calculations, but are certainly worth the effort to offset the hyperbole one finds in admissions literature and on institutional Web pages.

As for the student-to-librarian ratio: here we’re talking not just a fraction but real expertise, as with the student/faculty ratio that U.S. News does take into account. If you divide the number of undergraduates at a college by the number of full-time, professionally-trained librarians who work there, you will have a meaningful quotient, telling you the relative value each institution places on the human intellectual record and on assisting students to connect with that record. Yes, that ratio would be a proxy and an approximation, but it would be more helpful to serious college-shoppers to include it than to pass over it in silence. The academic library, with its tailored collections and specialized staff, has a more central role in higher education than do most other units on campus. Housing, nourishment, health services, public safety, custodians, administrators, and — I wince to mention it — athletics are all essential to the contented functioning of the institution, but only the faculty, research labs, and library distinguish a college from a resort, or from a minimum security prison.

No sooner do I bristle at the college rankings and decide to ignore them for another year, than along comes the Beloit College Mindset List, guaranteed to make me feel both antediluvian and out of touch with the new clientele. Ouch!, I thought, when I saw item #4 for the Class of 2013: “[Students born in 1991] have never used a card catalog to find a book.” Now that hits home. It’s not the obsolescence that disturbs me—although I’m emotionally attached to anything that measures 3-by-5 inches — but my suspicion: have college freshmen used anything to find a book?

I don’t doubt young students are all literate to some degree (we’ll discuss their writing ability another time) and that they have all read books, but I seriously question where and how they get hold of them. Are they required texts they purchase at a bookstore, or more likely via Amazon? Are they volumes they find at home or receive as gifts? Do they browse shelves in their school or public library, a big box store, used-book shop, or flea market? Do they download a novel to their Kindle? I’m completely in favor of all those tactics, but my experience as a reference librarian tells me that most freshmen and many older students cannot search an online catalog fluently and don’t know how to proceed when they do spot a book they want.

The fashionable thing in academic libraries today is to overlay the catalog with a Web 2.0 interface. Implemented well, such software can reduce the number of frustrating searches, those that retrieve nothing relevant, and allow researchers to succeed with their own terminology, but it will not help students judge the items they find. But then neither did the card catalog when that was the sole means of discovery. It’s just that now alphabetical order and a grasp of standardized/stilted subject headings are less important, while spelling, synonyms, and typing skills are more so. So this year’s Beloit list reminds me that when it comes to exploring the library’s collection, the challenges remain the same, both for me as a teacher and for freshmen as learners.

I welcome library research assignments in any field and at any level. I will analyze some of these (either anonymously or not, as each submitter prefers) in this blog, suggesting ways to foster student understanding of the source-seeking process. Please send the context and wording of the assignment to mary.george@insidehighered.com, with your own comments on what aspect of the project you would like to strengthen. --MWG

I write, not from the dead, but from the depths, that murky blob marked library on your campus map, that innocent but somehow chilling link on your institution’s home page, that awkward corner of uncertainty in your otherwise confident professional psyche. Nothing else inside higher ed both unites and repels in quite the same way: everyone seeks information — which is simply the recorded experience and advice of our forebears — yet everyone trembles when they venture beyond the few narrow paths they already know. The campus library is the Great Grimpen Mire of academe. I know it well in all its slippery dimensions and hope to save you frustration as you create new knowledge through your research and transmit the best of old knowledge to your students.

Teaching faculty have immense persuasive power; we librarians do not. What we do have are sweeping views of what scholars are up to, a grasp of how researchers do their business and what evidence ensues, and a knack for identifying and locating that evidence. By and large faculty and academic librarians respect one another’s expertise and collaborate happily. But where and how do our apprentices—either undergraduates or graduate students — learn the process and logic of source seeking? That is the question that haunts me and inspires this blog.

The nexus of knowledge transmission, of teaching, is the assignment, the place where faculty intent becomes student incentive. One thing I hope to do in this blog is to suggest ways to invigorate library research assignments that don’t seem to be working. For that, I solicit examples that include:

• the wording of your assignment, exercise, take-home exam, or other task that requires students to identify information
• a brief description of the ideal student performance, including what online or print resources you expect students to use
• an equally brief description of why you are dissatisfied with the results and what you think may be the cause
• any strictures you have about fixes I may suggest, for instance, regarding the amount of class time involved

You can, if you wish, send me your entire syllabus as an attachment, calling my attention to the section you are concerned about. In fact, doing so would be extremely helpful for context. Write me at mary.george@insidehighered.com and be sure to say whether I may use your name, course title, and/or institution if I address your assignment in my blog. Unless I am inundated with submissions, I will reply via e-mail to everyone who writes.

In addition to analyzing assignments, I will use this forum for other matters, such as general musings on what it means to be an information seeker in today’s world; consideration of library research concepts and tools that deserve more attention in the curriculum; responses to some of the Frequently UNasked Questions researchers, especially novices, have about how academic libraries function or about how one discovers “what’s out there”; and occasional exhortations.

A bit about my experience: my background and comfort zone are in the humanities and more qualitative social sciences, but I consider myself a generalist, meaning I’ll tackle any question that comes my way, apprise the researcher of the types of resources available, mention specific tactics to try or tools to explore, and offer to show how those tools work. Then I will refer the person to a colleague, a local faculty member, a scholar elsewhere, a special collection, government agency, organization, Web site—to whomever or whatever may further their inquiry. Especially when I advise students, I consider it my obligation to explain (briefly) why I recommend a particular approach and to suggest how they can judge the sources they discover. Of the three traditional tribes of reference librarians—pointers, fetchers, and teachers — I belong to the third.

This blog begins at a time when I am seriously challenged by my own work predicament, to be the acting subject specialist for a discipline in which I have no formal training: political science. For the next few months I will fill that role as my institution searches for an expert librarian in that field. My duties, typical for such a gig, will involve liaison with the Politics Department faculty, students, and staff; collection development; conducting small group instruction sessions, primarily for juniors, on the essential reference works and resources in the field; and numerous individual research consultations by appointment. I expect to be stimulated, perhaps overwhelmed. But mostly expect to learn a lot from another view of the Great Grimpen Mire, and I look forward to sharing both my missteps and my insights.

Mary George has been a reference librarian for almost four decades, working at two research universities, one public in the Midwest (Michigan) and one private in the East (Princeton). At both, her interactions have been more-or-less equally split between undergraduates and more advanced researchers. Most weeks of the academic year she spends several hours at a service desk, answers dozens of e-mail queries, conducts classes in the library to go over tools for finding—and principles for evaluating—sources, and confers with individuals at all levels by appointment. She has survived various middle management and acting positions in recent years in specialties ranging from the visual arts to interlibrary loan to music and now political science. She has an M.A. in English and is ABD in library and information studies. She has been an adjunct faculty member at three library schools, taught a freshman writing seminar at Princeton, and is the author ofThe Elements of Library Research: What Every Student Needs to Know,published in 2008 by Princeton University Press.