Kris Alpi gave a presentation on a Libraries Google replication study at the Medical Library Association meeting in Seattle in late May entitled Replicating a Dr. Google Study: Challenges of Reproducing Online Information-Seeking Studies across Domains. She talked about how context-sensitivity plays a role in search tasks, as well as the nature of research collaborations between veterinary students and librarians.
The talk was a small piece of a larger project between Alpi, 4th year vet student George Schaaf, Dr. Carley Allen at the University of Georgia, and Dr. Steve Marks, Associate Dean and Director, Veterinary Medical Services at the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). The group plans to submit the article on the larger study later this summer. The project started when Alpi and Dr. Marks were teaching in the first year vet student Clinical Reasoning course about a Googling study and asked if anyone would be interested in trying to replicate it in vet med. Alpi recalls, “George volunteered and the rest is history.”