Below are details about a piece of anthropological research on the way in which students use libraries (The ERIAL project, and two news reports about the findings of the research). This is project is of value on two levels – firstly in encouraging you to reflect about yourselves as users of libraries and information retrieval systems – and secondly as a case study in applying anthropology in a workplace.

FORMATIVE EXERCISE
In your formative exercise for this week, please reflect upon the ERIAL project, the articles (which are basically the same) and the comments generated (which are different on the two sites) in light of the material covered in this week’s session on info retrieval and management. How detailed is/was your knowledge of how to retrieve print and electronic information? Do you recognise your undergraduate-self or your peers in these reports? Will you approach anything differently in future? What do you know now that you didn’t previously know?