Make sure You are Reading the Keyword Blog

Dennis O'Connor maintains a Keyword Blog for the 21st Century Information Fluency project. The material on search patterns is illuminating.

You may want to enroll in the self-paced online course: Investigate Searching 20/10.

I also discovered the worthwhile article How to retool yourself--a roadmap of at least 16 ways by Joyce Valenza .

Once again, everything I find and share comes from following amazing educators/librarians on Twitter. If you haven't started to set up your Personal Learning Network using Twitter, there is no better time than now. Play with the basic Twitter interface for a week or two and then do yourself a favor and download the Tweetdeck when you are ready to get serious. This does URL shortening automatically and has other user friendly features. (see a previous post re: Tweetdeck).

Mashtabs

Hey everyone,
Check out Middlespot.com - a new visual search engine.
Mashtabs is a new tool that allows you to present and share your search results.

Play with it and figure out how to use with student research as a starting point for gathering keywords.

Keyword Builder - Library Instruction Wiki

The Keyword Builder is a useful tool for illustrating how concepts and synonyms can be combined with Boolean terms AND and OR to create search queries for library catalogs and article databases. It was created by North Carolina State University Libraries. Try it with students and link it to class assignment pathfinders.