Friday, March 06, 2009

Miss Information is not a mathematician but this seems wrong

This semester Miss Information is taking a course on online searching. The first assignment involved 4 sample searches using Dialog. Now don't feel bad if you haven't heard of Dialog. It's irritating as hell and not nearly as pretty as Google, but Miss Information thought she had a pretty good handle on it.

Last night she got her paper back. Of the four searches she messed two of them up very nearly completely. She misunderstood one of the questions so her search results were sort of right or to put it another way--almost entirely wrong. In another question she used the wrong syntax and the wrong limit--so the results were spectacularly wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

So, to review:
4 questions - 2 wrong answers = B+

Really?

10 Comments:

At 3:26 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

welcome to the world of Library School... where you'll nearly never receive a mark lower than a B+ and a B should be considered near failure

 
At 5:15 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Augh. You're doing Dialog.
I had that for my Retrieving Information class in library school. I honestly don't think it helped improve my information retrieval skills. Maybe with regards to learning Boolean terms?

Best of luck to you...

 
At 9:19 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's archaic syntax aside, you can do some amazing searching with Dialog especially regarding patents and such...

 
At 10:07 AM, Blogger MySillyWinks said...

Dialog was awesome!
I found those assignments were marked mostly on effort. lol.

 
At 9:00 PM, Blogger kittenpie said...

That's grad school for you... where you don't have to be thinking, just busy.

 
At 12:01 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

When I got my first assigment back in library school, I was totally delighted with a B - considering I was back at school after a long absence. One of my (over achieving) colleagues said - don't worry, you'll do better. Who needs to do better, I thought?? I'm happy with that. and so it continued....

 
At 9:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dialog is retarded ....now imagine taking a timed test (online) on the crap!!! I even used it at a government job ...very archaic

 
At 10:18 AM, Blogger Kathy said...

Dialog. My favorite. *Insert sarcasm here* I do not like it either. I am currently taking an extra searching course in my library program. What school are you at?

 
At 11:39 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

dialog? you've got to be kidding! I work in a library and you are never going to use it! learn how to search products from ebsco /proquest/csa, etc...now that will be useful in an interview where we will ask you to demo teaching one of their databases.

 
At 7:02 AM, Anonymous Text Messages said...

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