blog #7

The first thing I would consider is doing this search for a patron is to find out that kind of information that the patron wanted and what they needed the information for. I would use the reference interview  to get as much background as I could before making any suggestion or even starting a search on the internet. Another important factor would be the age of the patron and whether they have already done any searching on their own.
 For this hypothetical situation, let's assume a high school student looking for sources for a debate on whether texting while driving should be banned. Let's assume that we are not busy with other patrons and that we have the time to devote to a full search to help our student. He must have at least three sources to use for his position that texting while driving is no more distracting than other other activities.
I would start by explaining that we using his favorite search engine to find some studies . We could use the suggestion in the assignment, "crashes caused by texting." I would remind him that this is just a starting point and that we are not going to find everything we need just by google. I did this and it produced a study by the National Safety Commission. The material looked very promising and is certainly reliable. I then did a search using  infotrac ( we don't have EBSCO or PROQuest but we would have used them if we did.This search yielded some good articles using the terms texting and driving. Finally, I used Google Scholar to see if there were any good academic studies on the subject. I found some very convincing studies from universities that showed that there is a high correlation between driving and texting. I think that this produced some good results and we made the evaluation that he had enough to look at to start his research.
     I think that multiple source are a good approach if you have the time and yields the best results unless the search is relatively simple and just requires a little factual information. A good piece of advise someone gave me was if there are two sides of an issue, try to find them both. I do think that every search is unique I don't have any hard and fast rules about which sources are better that others. I wouldn't rank them because sometimes all you need is a quick google or wiki search. You can even be confident in most cases that the information is reliable if you can find a list of references. Other times the quality of the site is just as important and the content of the information