To encourage students to use scholarly material, professors here at Cal State's Fullerton campus often send their students to a computer lab, where a librarian shows them how to navigate the university's online catalog of databases, scholarly books, and journals to do research in a particular discipline. Many journal articles can be viewed in full online, and material that the library does not have can be borrowed from another library with the click of a mouse, students are told.
That kind of instruction is occurring at colleges all over the country as part of "information literacy," a growing librarian-led movement to make students more adept at locating and evaluating electronic data.
We also hope that a discussion about the resources and tools (and access to a librarian) that ARE available once the student leaves school are part of any university info literacy program.
In other words, remotely accessible databases, e-books/e-audio/e-video, virtual reference, and most importantly live librarians to assist with research issues from special, public, and other types of libraries. It's also important to make clear that many databases are available via the web but contain content NOT found on the web. TVEyes would be an example. Plus, many typically fee-based databases are now available on a pay-per-use/view basis if an end user does not want to pay for a full subscription.
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