Monday, May 11, 2009

Why not teach students to use OA resources?

Dorothea Salo asks: why bother teaching students to use toll access databases when they won't have access to them after they graduate?

My perspective: information literacy is a key skill for the knowledge age, and the need for librarians to develop and provide instruction will only grow. But why not focus primarily on open access resources, since this is what they will have access to for sure after graduation?

Many librarians, for that matter, are looking for information on how to search for open access information. The top question I've been getting at recent presentations, where I tend to cover just how much OA there is - more than 4,000 journals in DOAJ, over 2.6 million items available in fulltext from PubMed alone, >26 million publications available through Scientific Commons is: so how do I find this stuff? Hint: great topic for a future conference presentation proposal...

Hat tip to Open Access News.

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