Johannah Sherrer Memorial Lecture
Andrew Asher
Assessment Librarian at Indiana University
“Discovering Information: Investigations Into How Students Search”
3 p.m. Friday, September 19, 2014
Gordon H. Smith Hall, Albany Quadrangle
Andrew Asher is the Assessment Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington, where he leads the libraries’ qualitative and quantitative assessment programs and conducts research on the information practices of students and faculty. Asher’s most recent projects have examined how “discovery” search tools influence undergraduates’ research processes, how students locate, evaluate, and utilize information on research assignments, and how university researchers manage and preserve their research data.
Prior to joining Indiana University, Asher was the Digital Initiatives Coordinator and Scholarly Communications Officer at Bucknell University, where he managed the library’s open access and scholarly communication initiatives, including the passage of an institutional open access mandate.
From 2008-2010, Asher was the Lead Research Anthropologist for the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) project, a two-year study of student research processes at five Illinois universities and the largest ethnographic study of libraries undertaken to date.
An ethnographer and anthropologist by vocation, Asher holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has written and presented widely on using ethnography in academic libraries, including the co-edited volume, College Libraries and Student Cultures (ALA Editions, 2012). He also currently writing a methodological handbook for librarians on developing and implementing anthropological and other qualitative research methods in libraries.
In addition to his work in academic libraries, Asher conducts research on the meanings and practices of citizenship in Poland, Germany and the European Union.
In today’s networked information environment, effectively searching for and locating information are critical digital literacy skills. Unfortunately, while university students have a variety of powerful search tools at their disposal, they often lack a sufficient understanding how these tools work, as well as their strengths and limitations. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected from students at several universities, this presentation will examine the practices and processes of students as they locate information across a variety of search platforms, and will critically evaluate the potential for bias to be introduced into these processes. This presentation will describe how students’ expectations engender search behaviors that privilege the role of the search tool itself in evaluating information quality, making students vulnerable to biases embedded within search systems. Working under the assumption that a truly “neutral” search system is a logical and technical impossibility, this presentation will then examine the types of social values tacitly embedded within search tools, and will evaluate how these values affect the experience of student researchers and how they may be subtlety structuring students’ knowledge acquisition.