LIBE 467: Post 5

As a literature teacher, I love databases. I love the fact that students can have their eyes opened to a whole new world of content and ideas that they never knew existed.

For my senior-level students, the simple act of locating and reading articles from respectable journals relevant to an author, work, or topic that we are studying fills them with the sense of doing "serious work." Students are intoxicated by the idea that they are doing "university-level' work, researching and reading articles from journals (not "magazines") that tend to feature at least a few "dictionary-worthy" words in each piece. In this way, databases provide a quick and easy doorway into the early realms of the world of academia; for students who are keen for this, databases become their best friends. For students to reach this state of "best friendship," there must be some front-loading on the part of the TL or teacher in terms of learning the skills to successfully search, navigate, and locate information--I find that perhaps the biggest impediment to students developing a positive affect with regards to databases is early frustration: if the first few attempts to use databases yield no or little fruit, then--like with many endeavors--the easy reaction is to quit. "Why bother?" ask students, "when I can just keep accessing (albeit suspect) information on the Internet?"

My school subscribes to the following databases:

-World Book Encyclopedia
-Britannica Online
-Thomson Gale suite, including: "Biography in Context," "Gale Virtual Reference," "CPI.Q Canadian Periodicals," and "Global Issues in Context"
-EBSCO

With all these great tools literally at students' fingertips, it bears repeating: TLs and teachers need to spend more time explicitly teaching digital literacy skills to students--help them first experience success, and then watch them continue to experience success.