LIB 1201 – Research & Documentation for the Information Age – Section 3930

With the professor’s advice about my draft, I made some changes in my research paper. I added about Sound Scraper that was the website making enable to download the music file of streaming media including SoundCloud. It helped to mention the streaming media was not the best way to protect illegal downloading. Also, I fixed my works citation by looking back the MLA formatting guidelines. To follow the main theme, I managed the idea and information to support my research paper strong. As a result, my research paper reached 1722 words and finally finished.

After the annotated bibliography, I started writing my draft. Because of the annotation having summary of  each information source in the annotated bibliography, actual writing was much easier than creating proposal. There was only process to organize the idea with the information source I got last week to support my main theme, SoundCloud’s unique action about the copyright infringements.

After I wrote the new revised proposal with new main theme, copyright infringement in SoundCloud, I started to look up the information source to support my idea. Finding the scholarly sources was the most difficult for me because there were a lot of journals and scholarly sources written about the problem of copyright infringements. Then, I recalled the class the professor lectured us how to find information with our library resources and scholarly searchers. By using one of the scholarly searchers, Academic Online, I could search the suitable journals with narrower topic of the copyright infringements in internet. Without the class lecture, I think finding scholarly sources was much harder. After gathering the information, I started working on the bibliography with MLA format. In this process, the guideline from the website, Purdue OWL: MLA Formatting and Style Guide was really helpful for me.

I came up with the idea to write my research paper about SoundCloud because it was interested for me to know why the company is growing so much faster than any other service.  However, my proposal was too broad topic to write.  After I got the professor’s advice, I made much narrower topic about SoundCloud. Then, I decided to focus on SoundCloud’s action against the copyright infringements.  Because Megaupload was shut down by the government, I thought this topic was good to know the recent situation of the copyright problem. After the focusing on the main theme, I started working on finding information source in first week.

In Chapter 9 of Research Strategies, Organizing Your Resources to Write your Paper, the author, William Badke suggests to make our own index to organize the information source to write better research paper. At first, to get the material, asking the librarian or professor is the fastest way to get useful source after the students decided the main theme of his or her writing. Then, making index helps us to manage various sources by taking a note. Because of this process, creating bibliography will be easier. I totally agree with his idea. Librarian and professor knows how to use the library efficiently. Because there are too much information in the library or internet to look up specific information source, it was really helpful for me that the professor tells us about how to find the scholarly sources in the class. Also, William Badke’s suggestion which is taking a note worked well to me in the process of creating research paper. Even though I got information source, it was difficult to handle of all of them without notes. To use each source efficiently, I needed my summary and comment of the resource. Thus, I conclude the Chapter 9 of his book was really good to organize the information to write a good research paper.

I must say whenever I have another research paper to do, I know I would want to see this video again in order to help me out, in searching for resources or information. This video went straight to the point; nice and simply in teaching a useful way to use search engines in order to find information on the web. Using keywords is mainly important because they make a difference when searching for something and using the right words and gammer. I also learned a lot from this video that I didn’t really know about; how using quotes helps to search for information that is related to the topic and how putting a dash (-) means that its not something you want.

Library Catalogs and Journal Databases is a chapter that will be helpful to everyone, especially when using the library. Library catalogs organize and make it easier for people to search for books. When searching for a library catalog you are searching for the metadata record created for each book which includes like the title, author publisher, etc.  Using keywords is helpful in order to cut down resources and trying to approach your topic easier. Word choosing is very important because they can make a different when searching for something.

Analyzing information isn’t really easy, but I guess maybe it is. As cornell explains and shows us how to analyze information to determine whether or not it is a usefulness source to have in one’s paper. Basically what they say is that the first thing one should do is to look at the bibliographic citation which contains three parts to it: author, title and publication information. Looking up the author is very important because it says a lot about the person that wrote it and it does show wether or not the information that the person wrote is appropriate and relevant. The date of publication is also useful because when one is writing a paper one would want something that is written recently then compared to something that has been written maybe 20 years ago; information has to be updated and things do change time to time. Analyzing can just make it even easier to write a well proper paper.