So, starting at the first, and most familiar door: Google.
A search engine that is so widely known and used, it has transcended its grammatical function as a proper noun, and has become a part of our vernacular in the form of a common verb; “I’ll just google it." Identifying the key words and phrases in my question, I began to look for the right key. I selected two key terms from my mind map: “teacher librarian” AND ”inquiry learning”, along with the Boolean operator ‘AND’. While the 10,100 results appeared to be overwhelming, it did yield results with a focus on the role of the teacher-librarian in Inquiry Learning. However, there was no explicit mention of support for classroom teachers or the high school context. Scholarly articles rated first – including two suggestions for texts by Kuhlthau. I found this a point of interest and considered if the Google algorithms had a part to play in this particular search, as I had been previously conducting some very general searches on the topic over the past few weeks. Nevertheless, I needed to refine my search in order to find more specific information to support my inquiry question. After a few attempts at employing different vocabulary choices, I made some gains with the following search string: Search String: “teacher librarian” AND “guided inquiry” AND “secondary school” AND “collaborate” Yield: 1970 While the number of results were still quite high, they were certainly more manageable and focussed. Noted from previous searches, the word ‘collaboration’ was identified in a number of yields, thus I included it in place of the verb ‘support’ from my initial question. This encouraged me to reconsider the wording of my inquiry question: How can teacher librarians collaborate with teachers during the inquiry learning process? Additionally, by adjusting my vocabulary from ‘teacher librarian’ to ‘school librarian’, to reflect the American term, and employing the Boolean operator OR, I was gifted a more fruitful set of results. These included professional blogs, which provided practical examples and helpful links to other content. For my final Google search, I attempted a search string using natural language: Search String: how can teacher librarians support high school teachers in inquiry learning? Yield: 14,700,000 With the knowledge that Google ignores stop words (e.g. ‘can’ and ‘in’), I attempted the full question, with some surprisingly resourceful results in the first couple of pages, and many articles that I had previously noted as possible contenders for my curated collection. The right key? As most of my students are familiar with Google, it would be amiss to not fully explore its capabilities in order to open the door to this knowledge. While it supports more advanced searches using Boolean operators, the addition of truncation could make the process quicker. As the gamut of information available is so vast, users would still need to have competent understanding of information literacy to ensure that the sources they wish to access are, indeed, what they are looking for. Next Door: Google Scholar
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