Hello All!
The Carnegie CPD program is a four-week funded program by the Carnegie Corporation New York holding at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. The aim of the program is to enhance ICT skills of Librarians in academic institutions in Africa for research enablement and better productivity.

So, what is the 'is-ness' and 'about-ness' of the program?
Is-ness - funded, research enablement, better productivity.
About-ness - Carnegie CPD program, University of Pretoria, ICT, Librarian, Africa.

About-ness deals more with the important items in a search string while is-ness, although not necessarily part of the search string but only gives more meaning to the about-ness. About-ness is the actual terms that will be supplied to a database(or search engine) in order to retrieve the most relevant information. This is to save users time spent on searching and to eliminate stop words in a given query.

Information retrieval skills is very fundamental in any academic research process. The literacy level of a researcher will determine the quality and quantity of relevant item retrieved from any database. This program has helped us to be better information scientists so we can be useful and be of help to researchers in our various countries.

Need help with retrieving information from any database for academic research purpose?
Please contact me (nnafatimah@gmail.com) as I will gladly help to not only catch the big fish for you but also teach you how to catch a bigger fish all by yourself.

The following are the basic competencies required for information literacy:
i. Know that you need information
ii. Know what information you need
iii. know how to find the information
iv. know how to organise information
v. know and understand the legal and ethical framework of information use
vi. know if it is the right information for the task.

Then, clearly decide the is-ness and about-ness in your search query before supplying it into a database/search engine. Remember that the actual problem in retrieval is the ability to match 'human language(query)' to 'computer language (indexed text)'.
Boolean operators are quite helpful in forming different aspects of about-ness in a query. The mostly used operators are AND, OR, NOT. Each have its own specific use depending on quantity and quality of feedback we expect from the search engine or database.

Now try this: carnegie cpd program AND university of pretoria AND librarian AND africa AND ict
and click 'search'! What do you think?

Keep trying this for your personal research. Remember to determine the is-ness and about-ness and then incorporate the Boolean operators.