Three Clicks Too Many Or Student-Researcher Impatience?
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education revisited the notion that our student researchers are not very patient today. If the students find an online database too laborious, they will skip it. The particular librarian who wrote the article had the following exchange with one of his faculty members: “Brian, I want you to know that it’s getting harder for me to get students to use the library— especially the databases— anything beyond three clicks is just too many.” As Brian put it, "[i]f our super users (history faculty) are frustrated with database interfaces – what does that mean? Many of us spend a lot of time promoting library resources to students, but if faculty stop encouraging (or requiring) usage—what then?" This goes back to my post about print books and convenience . It appears that researchers no longer want to take the time to look in books or spend time really delving into online databases for research. If they can find information through Google