Teaching student use of academic metadata for resource discovery

Abstract

As distributed research materials on the Web become increasingly popular, metadata becomes central to their discovery and use. This paper will discuss how I prepare students in my information literacy classes and in bibliographic instruction sessions in subject classes to search effectively in online library catalogs and research databases by creating a running list of subject-specific keywords, how to discover additional resources though selection of appropriate Library of Congress Subject Headings, and how to effectively interpret metadata sets as a first step in document analysis.