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

Common Craft Blog was an interesting video to watch. I really liked how it compared and contrast the 20th and 21st century. How in the 20th century the news was produced professional and had reporters while it was general and limited. In the 21st century it was professional and personal (having opinions) and basically anyone can be a reporter and publisher which is done often for free. I even agree with this, as time goes on, many things start to change, including the way we get our news from. The very most interesting thing about a blog is that blogs give everyone an audience for their own version of news. Now a days news is everything; including my own life, for those who would want to know about my life. The difference from actual news is that blogs are individual stories even if sometimes it only reaches out to a small number of audience but sometimes people want to hear what others have to say, almost like a Facebook status.

Wikis video, I must say would be a helpful tool to use in the future. It is amazing how everything can be so organized and coordinated by using wiki. I find the video to be so true because emails is not the best way to communicate with people especially to organize a trip or just anything. It looks like it makes it easier for everyone to change what appears on a webpage with only a click of a button. I find wikis to be a site that I would want to use in the future, because it really does seem helpful.

I found Liddy article “How a search engine works” a useful tool for searching on the internet and intranet. This article and Badke chapter 3 helped me search for my research topic. I used quotation to define a term so the search engine will give me better results. I search “privacy” in quotation. I also used deleting stop words such as “and”. This gave me better results because the search engines don’t have to process so many extra words. For example if I was to put “privacy and government” all three terms must be included in the search which would take a longer time to process. I also didn’t use suffixes or “term stemming” which also yields better results. I used some of these tools for my research project which were very helpful to me. I feel that in the article by Liddy could have given better examples of ideas. Badke was more clear and gave examples. Liddy article was a bit too dry and it was difficult to visualize how to use each processor.

I think in the future more and more information will be liberated from many controled sources. But the more we have, the harder to control all that information. Our environment is highly influence by all those information. Knowledge is power, so is information. With a wrong idea, things can be totally different from what they suppose to be. I think with seas of information, many things will be spinning out of control until it reach a certain point. More like a tipping point, just like new york crimes in the 1980s and 1990s, it suddenly changed. I feel that one day privacy will become an exploding issue, when we dont even have control over our own information. Identity theft will become harder to tackel with the new technologies. I think it is more or less going to be like empires or dynasties. Rise and fall. When the time come we will lose control all these information, then we can figure out a way to regain the control.

Looking through seas of information to find what we really need can be extremely tiring. But, from the chapter 5 of research strategies, it made research much easier and understandable. By finding the right catalog, the research can be narrowed down. Using the key words to find related article and journal, and using the library of congress catalog to find what catalog the article belong to, therefore by searching the catalog more related articles and journals can be retrieved from the database. The controlled vocabulary and subject heading will also help in the research process. In any research paper, the key is to stay focus on the topic. After find the needed information, all ideas borrowed or sources used that are not your own must be documented and properly acknowledged.

In this chapter, Badke introduces us to the library of congress and explains to us how Meta data is used and controlled to properly document every piece of work that is stored by libraries in the US. He tells us that meta-data is a word used to describe the: authors, title, publisher information, description, subject heading and call number of any work stored by the library. We also discussed this in class and how there are people who live their lives just collecting and sorting and properly labling books, magazines, periodicals, etc… I am glad they do it because it makes my life much easier when searching for things within databases.

As I suspected when writing my outline I had issues cutting away a lot of what I had written for my draft. There was so many arguments made for both sides that it would seem like a disservice to either side to cut something. I chose to take out those arguments that to me seemed to be the weakest. I managed to get it down to the size needed and I have finished writing my draft.

When writing my outline I found that there was so much information available to me about my topic that it seems to me that I will actually need to hold back when it comes to writing my paper. I used the Books outline as a reference for my own. I will argue one sides point then give the counter arguments. I will do this several time over throughout the paper.

As I was writing my annotated bibliography I found myself having an issue not rambling on too much about what the article was about. I also found myself going to the OWL Purdue website alot to make sure i had the formating of my citations correct. It would have been a pain other wise.

So now that I have my research topic I see that there is not much I can find to help me out with my assignment. I implemented the tools I have learned in class and the ones i learned from reading Badke. But to no avail I have to change my research topic. I read many articles about open source and find out that there are to sides to the argument as to whether open source systems are better or worse than propriatary ones. I will now write my research paper on the these arguments to better understand the position both sides are on.