Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Database. Such an intimidating word. Most states provide a portal to a list of subscription databases, and I have colleagues who SWEAR by them (Joyce Valenza, Boris Bauer). I can remember sitting in a SCASL conference session several years ago and hearing Boris say, “If you are not offering your users databases, you are doing them a huge disservice.” Edtech Talk webcast show Teachers Teaching Teachers had a three week discussion on the virtues of databases, and how to get our users to utilize the resources. the consensus was we need to make the db sexier to our students. I agree with this, and do feel that if our state subscriptions had the look and feel of Google, they would NOT be such a hard sell. I also think if we sell them to teachers too, perhaps the trickle down effect will transform the students into devoted users. So HOW do we do this? I think the answer is in collaboration with teachers, and our educating our teachers on the usefulness of the clunky, cumbersome tools. Since we cannot convert the subscription databases to a “sexy” mass-appealing simple look and feel, we can create pathfinders that list all the resources for a topic of study that includes books, videos, persons, places, and egads, “databases” (along with search strategies for those databases) in these pathfinders. The homepage of the actual pathfinder can have lettering and simple white backgrounds with the familiar plain lettering in googlized technocolor–a way to surely GRAB the attention of our google freaks everywhere! Soon my school district is changing over to a a new web interface for creating online presence. I am waiting patiently to have web presensence. I am going to googlize the whole concept of pathfinders. Wait and see.