December 5 – If you can’t beat ’em, at least show them how to Google better!
We librarians have our love-hate relationship with Google, for sure, but truth be told, we all know that it actually does provide a valuable service in many situations. No, it’s not the first spot I want to see a medical student, doctoral candidate, clinician or researcher going when they’re searching for the answer to a clinical and/or research question, but I also tell the students in our Clinical Population Health Research degree program (the ones that I work most closely with), that to avoid it altogether is likely to find you missing a pretty valuable piece of information or two. Use it, but use it wisely.
Here’s a really terrific infographic from the website, Visual.ly, called Get More Out of Google (Designer: Bobby Bernethy; Published by Hack College). You can see that it provides a number of tips and tricks for better searching with Google, including a whole bunch of operators that most people either don’t know about and/or don’t use. Like many of the infographics on Visual.ly, it’s professional quality and you can easily share it on all types of sites. I subscribe to their email list and get a daily note containing some of the popular graphics on their site for that day. I’ve found a lot that are useful, including this one about Google. You may, too.
Tomorrow may be Saturday, but there will still be treats! Come back.
A Librarian by Any Other Name 