A study spot.  A nook to relax.  A computer lab.  A group meeting pad.  Among the many roles that modern college and university libraries serve for their students, information center may no longer be chief among them.

University of Southern California sophomore Rebecca Gao says her student peers “grossly underutilize the libraries’ resources.”  In a recent column for The Daily Trojan, USC’s campus newspaper, Gao argues libraries’ digital offerings and special collections are especially going to waste due to a mix of student apathy and poor publicity efforts by schools. The result: a Google-only approach to student research that casts aside “in-depth, credible, and thorough” sources for those that are free, easy to understand, and only a click away.

In the Q&A below, Gao outlines what students are missing with this approach and what libraries can do to draw more students into their digital worlds.

Q: Why are students so apathetic about utilizing their libraries’ digital resources?

A: In class, not nearly enough emphasis is placed upon the importance of research and prewriting.  The bulk of teaching centers around forcing a paper through with the impression that research should be the least important and most straightforward part of the process– though nothing can be more to the contrary.  However, this mentality leads to students not making the extra effort towards research when a quick, painless Google search might pass as “good enough.”

Rebecca Gao

Q: What’s your response to students who argue that most of the time Wikipedia and Google are just as helpful and much more convenient than library resources?

A: I’m actually quite the advocate for Wikipedia– within limits.  Whenever I need to get a general understanding of a research project before delving into some of the more complex papers on the subject, Wikipedia is my best friend.  But for anything beyond the most rudimentary overview, Wikipedia or Google just cannot produce the same in-depth research papers that the digital databases and resources university libraries have access to.  Another drawback of a primary search engine like Google is that it returns more results that are websites as opposed to the academic papers I’m searching for.  Often, the hits are websites which supply only cursory information or superficial overviews.  While these sites may be sufficient for a K-12 essay, they are shockingly inadequate for college-level papers.  When students graduate to the professional levels, basic search-engine queries are almost completely useless.  I would also argue that library resources are actually more convenient than using Google or Wikipedia because all the resources are pre-filtered for academic relevance and potentially useful content.  Bypassing Google actually saves me time.

Q: What digital resources within the USC libraries do you most commonly use and benefit from academically?

A: I’m absolutely indebted to ProQuest, a subscription database which filters through thousands of academic reports, journals, theses, etc., to search for relevant scholarly articles for humanities and liberal arts research.  While writing research papers or essays for my general education and writing classes, I always bypassed Google completely and ran ProQuest searches to save time by trimming out irrelevant or insufficiently detailed articles.  I’ve also used USC’s access to the United Nations Official Document System for a research paper on global health and international policy.  Separately, I’ve turned to American Rhetoric, a database of public speeches, for my general education courses.  For more medicine and science-related topics, I’ve used SciFinder and the full text of handbooks from the USAMRIID [United States Army Medical Research Institute for infectious diseases], which are in the USC digital library.

Q: How can libraries better entice students to check out their e-offerings?

A: Many students are not even aware of the convenient digital resources university libraries offer.  Or even if they know about them, most students have never personally experienced how incredibly useful they are nor how much time they save.  In fact, the only reason I discovered USC’s online resources was through my required introduction to writing class, when my professor required us to use ProQuest or other more academic databases.  Most colleges have some level of writing requirement which freshmen generally take.  I highly suggest university libraries collaborate with writing professors teaching relevant required courses to introduce students to digital resources early on.  A good number of classes in both the sciences and the humanities require at least one research paper, so reaching out to professors in general would also prove beneficial.  It could be something as simple as attaching a sheet of suggested digital library resources to the assignment outline.

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4. Campus Beat: The rise in student hipster culture
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