DIY Librarian

The other day, one of our IT staff contacted me with an EndNote question. He told me a faculty member was having trouble importing references from “the CSA web site”.

I explained that the library provides access to several different databases through CSA, and that he needed to use the filter that matched both the database and the provider. So he looked through the filters list, and found the PsycINFO filters. Then he came back and wanted to know which one to use, and I told him to use the CSA one, trying once again to explain the relationship between CSA, EndNote, PsycINFO, and the library.

Now, all this confuses me a bit, and I’m a librarian who uses EndNote almost daily, so I can imagine how the IT person feels. And our faculty member, who is getting this explanation second-hand, is probably even more befuddled.

This kind of confusion is very common with library databases, but I think it extends to other online research as well. By the time they get to a university, most people understand the relationships between authors, publishers, and libraries when they use a book. These distinctions all get very blurry when we’re dealing with online resources.

Cheryl LaGuardia complains about this briefly in her December Library Journal column. I wonder if younger scholars will have an easier time with this, having grown up with online resources. The graduate students I work with seem to have a better understanding, but then they are also required to attend my workshop on bibliographic databases.