Tag Archives: badke

Organizing Your Resources

Posted on November 9, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In this chapter of Badke’s Book, Badke introduced “register method” of resource organization. He suggested labeling our resources because it will be easier to retrieve and organize your sources later on. An example is when you have 50 pages of sources from different media; you would want to number the pages to prevent chaos. He also proposed that “you have to keep track of them, including enough bibliographical information” so you won’t need to go back and search again later. He introduced many helpful tips in how to organize your resources. The most helpful tip, in my opinion, is his answers to writing anxiety. I tend to have a lot of information, but I never knew how to start.

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Words of Wisdom from William Badke

Posted on November 1, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I am a regular reader of ILI-L, an email list for librarians interested in information literacy and library instruction, and just came across our textbook author Bill Badke’s recent post offering advice to college faculty on teaching students how to research:

The Top 10 Things we All Should Know about Today’s Research Environment.

1.       Sources of information are changing
2.       Search in today’s databases is complex
3.       Students don’t understand the research process
4.       Students don’t know they don’t understand the research process
5.       Faculty are increasingly baffled by research technology, and that can be corrected
6.       Librarians hold the key to the information kingdom
7.       You need librarians, and so do your students
8.       Today’s academic databases offer so much more than keyword searching
9.       Electronic full text is winning the day
10.   Wikipedia is not Public Enemy Number One

Badke, William B. (2011, October 31). RE: faculty instruction. [Msg 9]. Message posted to http://lists.ala.org/sympa/arc/ili-l/2011-10/msg00266.html

Any comments? You know what to do.
~Prof. L.

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Notes from today, and reading & blogging assignment for Wednesday 10/19

Posted on October 17, 2011 by | Leave a comment

On Wednesday, October 19 we’ll be discussing the research process: needs assessment, preliminary strategies, and topic development. This will be a good way to prepare for the research topic proposal, due next Wednesday, October 26.

Please read Badke chapter 2, “Taking Charge,” and comment on at least one blog post.

Slides from today are available here.

~Prof. Leonard

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Assignment 9 – Search engines

Posted on October 17, 2011 by | 2 comments

I enjoyed all the three readings, especially from Badke. Everybody does searching every now and then and gets more than necessary information (both relevant and irrelevant). Sometimes, even I searched by typing long sentences and got too much of data. But, now after reading chapter 3, I can say that, I can search more efficiently and narrow down my search by just using “OR”, “AND” and “NOT”. The search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, invest plenty of money to make their searching worthy. Websites also pay these search engines so that when people search for information, their site will show up in the top ten searches. This is one way, these search engines make money. Popularity of a site is also an important factor; like how many people are logging on or surfing the site as daily routine. Search engines really work hard to make searching easy.

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Databases and Search Engines

Posted on October 17, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Who knew so much goes into just searching a simple topic? I sure didn’t and it may be the reason why most of the time I end up with a ton of information and not quite sure how to decipher it all. Just recently I had to write a paper about symbolism and character development on a story for my literature class. The professor wanted use a database to find sources that backed up our ideas. If I had read Badke’s chapter on databases I could have saved a lot of time not having to sift through a lot of useless information. Badke has a way of putting things into simple context that anyone can understand. Since we usually search with keywords we get a lot of broad information and not quite the exact information we may be looking for because that keyword can come up in many sources that are irrelevant to what you’re looking for. That’s why we need to add commands like OR, AND, and NOT to narrow our results and get exactly what we’re searching for, which I did not know about. We could also use many keywords that need to be included in the search to narrow the number of results and get more relevant information. While search engines and databases are great tools to use we need to be specific in our keywords so we don’t spend hours going through results that are of no value.

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Search Engines Behind the Scene

Posted on October 16, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Everyone knows how to and what search engines are but not everyone do it effectively. At least that’s what Badke said. Badke also taught me tons of techniques and tricks to efficiently narrow down my search results (e.g. using NOT in search engines exclude unwanted results). The way a search engine work can be compare to a complex factory assembly line. There are many steps and procedures that needs to take place every time we press a search button as mention in “How a Search Engine Works“. I also learned that companies like Google invest heavily their search engine; Google has more people working on their search engine than any other of their projects. From personal experience, I learned that Google makes a lot of money by configuring the pagerank system and putting payer’s WebPages in beginning of search results.

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Chapter 3 Badke…..and the rest.

Posted on October 16, 2011 by | 8 comments

The reading was pretty good. I was dreading reading 15 pages for the Badke reading, but it just flew by. That’s the genius of Badke. I learnt about truncation, the significance of asterisks, parentheses, OR, AND, Maybe, NOT, while searching.(maybe not maybe). I also loved how he explained that keywords are flat, and its the efforts by different websites like Carrot2, Quintura (cool name) and the others (they don’t have cool names so they were put in the etc pile, there’s a lesson here, hope they learn it) that help set up an search heirachy of sorts. Sites dedicated to declustering (or was it clustering) searches. The example that he gave on himself was spot on. I feel the tips and numbered insights (6 or 7) will come in very handy when its time to do the research paper. The other two readings couldn’t measure up to Badke in a million years, but to show how magnificent Badke is, i decided to entertain them, in a condescending manner of course. I found the first reading, which was the longer one, to be….just that, long. It did go into details about the different processes the search engine goes through to provide us with searches. However, i felt this information wasn’t really needed unless i was building my own search engine. The second reading, shorty i call it, because its…..well shorter, i found to be a little more engaging, it provided a brief synopsis (is that the right word?) of what search engines are, and it also provided useful and relevant data about current search engines. Who knew Google made 550 improvements to how people search in 2009 alone (now that i think about it, the yellow in the second o in Google wasn’t this yellow in 2009, and according to the movie, Green Lantern, yellow is the color of fear, so Google is somehow coercing our search, through fear. Hello research topic!!!) In conclusion… i don’t really know how to end, i just used up my last joke and no question is coming to mind. Do i just say bye, i am well on my way to 400 words already. Think (name withheld), think. Google is a massive company, who’s latest earnings call shows them earning $2.7billion dollars in the 3rd quarter alone. Sites like Carrot2 and Quintura exist to make the process of searching even better, yet we have never heard of them ( well i havent). Why is this? because we’ve never taken the extra mile to search for an alternative search engine, we just ingest what the media feeds and and are content with that. However there are alternative search engines out there like Mokoseek that give a part of what they earn to different charities. I say we stop being lazy and do an extra search, for an alternative Google (or Yahoo or Bing).

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Metadata and Tagging

Posted on October 12, 2011 by | 1 comment

The three readings assigned were all surprisingly interesting and yet informative. In chapter 4 of Research Strategies the author Badke explained metadata and it’s capability to retrieve information you need at the moment you want. His detailed explanation on “controlled vocabularies” helped me become a better information retriever. The passage Folksonomy: A Game of High-tech (and High-stakes) Tag has taught me the concept of tagging is a growing fast like the next big thing. Many companies see the potential it has in business, i.e. “Yahoo! is already surfing the Folksonomy wave thanks to two critical 2005 purchases of Flickr and del.icio.us.”  The final article written by Horatia Harrod talks about the success of Flickr, the world’s leading photo-sharing site, and how it came to be. The three articles are tied together by the string called metadata. Each reading, in their own way, explain and showed how metadata works.

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Assignment 8 – Metadata and Folksonomy

Posted on October 11, 2011 by | 1 comment

The reading from chapter 4, Badke apprises about metadata and how it simplifies our search. I agree that when I use Google search engine, I get information that is vast and is spread all over the place. Instead of losing in too much of the information, he showed how easy it is to focus while searching, to get only that information which is necessary, by using metadata (much more organized and simple arrangement of information). To convey his point, he used the example of the database of Library of Congress and its use by most of the libraries in the north. As far as the other readings are concerned, I enjoyed the article on “Flickr” and “Folksonomy”. Both articles talked about tagging and searching using keywords. I agree with the fact that, now a day, tagging is very common concept in social media and people with common interests (like photographing in case of flickr and picasaweb) come together and make these sites worth surfing. Flickr has its own advantages where you can find high resolution photodata, when you search using keyword tags and photos can be accessed by public but public access comes with its disadvantage that anybody can use the photos anyhow s/he wants.

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Metadata

Posted on October 11, 2011 by | 1 comment

I enjoyed the readings given. I found them to be quite informative inspiring if you will. Being a history buff, i’m always fascinated by how different things came about. Flickr in this case was done by accident and it turned out to be a rather profitable accident ($35 million worth). I liked how as a social media it allowed people to connect through similar interests. And how it became a medium for photographers to get some exposure for their work. I also liked how it showed the other side of the coin (or dark side of the moon, like transformers 3, get it? but i digress). The other side being just about anything put on the internet can be used by anyone for any purposes, regardless of how degrading it might be. Which goes back to what the last reading addressed. Do we have Constitutional Rights for things we may put on the internet or the cloud if you will. I thoroughly enjoyed the Badke reading. Its like having ice cream after been fed vegetables, celeries to be specific, for weeks. He was able to get his point across, through various anologies and humor. I totally get the difference and importance between keywords and controlled vocabulary. Why can’t all our readings be Badke, or why can’t the other authors just copy his style. Then again, if everyone wrote like Badke, then Badke won’t be Badke anymore. He’d be Boredke.

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