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

This chapter gives us many useful tools that we should put in our research arsenal. One of the major benefits of doing research in our time now is that we have so much of it at our disposal. Anything we can hope to find is at our finger tips. This advance in tehnology and the increased amount of information we are exposed to is also the greatest drawback. we are exposed to so much information that finding excatly what we need is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Having a good set or researching tools is vital to anyone doing a reseach project.

When looking at all the different topics that fall under open source, I felt a little overwhelmed. I then decided to narrow down my search and I wound up finding the topic Open Source and ethics by adding a few key words to my open source search. The idea came from my Philosophy of technology class. We were talking about ethics and how the ethics certain people have are different than the ones others have. So I decided to add the key word ethics to my search.

It is important for people to know how to properly tag things. Being user generated allows flaws because some people aren’t careful enough to label them properly. I underestimated the importance of folksonomy and metadata. The more detailed the metadata is the easier it will be on us to find what we’re looking for. People ultimetaly put things online so everyone can see it. If your not going to put effort in labeling, the content will be hard to find, and  it kind of defeats the purpose of putting it online.

This article spoke alot about the use of copyrighted material by educators for projects and as teaching aids. I can see how it can become an issue for some because it is their work being used but at the same time alot of material that is not mainstream will not have the same inpact that non mainstream material would have. I do feel that Fair use rights are vital to allow the use of higher quality material to stimulate and guide our youth.

Badke gives good databases and free academic search engines. I agree with his advice to try another search engine after using Google. Although Google is the biggest search engine , it doesn’t cover every website. Another search engine like AskJeeves might have different more useful results, you never know. The page rank technique is very interesting bringing the most popular sites first.

Knowledge is power, but power corrupts people. Just like what Lord Acton had stated:”Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” People use knowledge and information like some sort of tools to manipulate their environment, try to control it the way as they plan. Knowledge also creat fortunes, I think this is another reason why the research is more focused in some areas than the other. I think research should be more opened into all the field of studies. This will not only benefit large coperation, but also benefit the whole human society.

Fister’s the devil in the details: Media representation of ritual abuse and evaluation of sources makes a good point about the reliability of sources of information in the media.  She gives examples of how books, newspapers and other media usually don’t have reliable information. Popular culture reference a lot of unreliable sources. Fister suggests that many people who never research their sources to back up a claim. According to Fister, reliable sources are very difficult to find but FBI, students and other professional need to their research.

Grimmelmann’s the Google Dilemma also makes reference to the fact the Google is not a reliable source of information. Google creates a ranking system which can make or break some business. People can also create links to change search engines rankings. If a government doesn’t like something written they can change it.

I feel after these two readings one must do extensive research on what information is gathered on a specific topic. I feel like I need to do a lot of research before using information for a paper or a book. I feel that using tools such as the search engines needs to be done with caution.  I also feel people don’t look extensively to where they are getting there information from.

This video explains how the idea of copyrights was established, and the recent situation of the copyrights in the funny way. The main idea of copyrights is to protect the authors’ right until their death. However, the big company, like Disney makes extend the length of the copyrights longer and longer. I think this situation is like a monopoly and such a tendency will keep continuing as long as the big companies having a lot of money. They don’t want to lose their business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBOYwNF1Frw&feature=endscreen&NR=1

1 Pray

2 Dial 911

3 Stay as low as possible to prevent friction of smoke

4Make sure there is a wet towel cloth on each end of an exit door to prevent fire expansion

5 Open all windows if any.

6 Wait paitently

7 If caught on fire do not panic !!!! Stop, Drop and Roll

i believe that search engines is very essential to us and is a very big part of the internet. it is a means of finding an easy way to look up for something. the issue with it is that many users are being violated by their privacy by companies wacthing their every move on the computer which is bad