Project Information Literacy

Project Information Literacy (PIL) is a national research study based in the University of Washington Information School. In their ongoing research, they have studied how college students conduct research and find information—their needs, strategies, and workarounds. A November 1, 2010 report Truth Be Told: How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age expands to focus on how students find information and their preferred use of information sources for course work and in their daily lives.

The results may be instructive to not only academic librarians, but to all types of librarians and teachers as well.

Tag! With "steve" and the Minnesota Digital Library

The Minnesota Digital Library has added a tool to allow tagging to many objects in its Minnesota Reflections online collection

This feature, called “steve” (purposely spelled with a lower-case “s”), allows the public to contribute tags to Minnesota Reflections. Tags, or short descriptions of objects within the Reflections collections, are displayed in "tag clouds” that you will see when viewing specific objects on the website. Clicking a tag in any of these "clouds" will retrieve all other items within Minnesota Reflections tagged with the same term.

Creating tags is easy and fun. First, choose an object in a Minnesota Reflections collection to view. Next, click the “Log On” link that appears under the “Tags” icon. This link will take you to the “steve” website, which will ask you to create an account with a password. (The website will send specific information to your e-mail account; read this e-mail and follow its instructions to complete registration. The “steve” website will give you a temporary password that you will have to change.) You are now prepared to create tags within the Minnesota Reflections environment. Return to your object of interest and log on to “steve.” You will now see a box into which you can type your tags to help document our collections!

Tags may be related to anything, from the very personal and specific (names, dates, makes, models, materials) to the very general (composition, emotion, size, shape).

The MDL encourages users of Minnesota Reflections to register and contribute tags they feel may be useful to themselves and to others in searching the Reflections collections.

If you are interested in learning more about “steve,” the MDL plans to host an online “steve” training session in the near future. More information about this online training will be distributed on the MDL listserv, so watch for updates. In the meantime, visit the “steve” website.

The tagging tool used in Minnesota Reflections is a part of the “Steve in Action” research project to explore tagging within a wide range of collections.