LIB 1201 Research and Documentation for the Information Age

Today we delved into a discussion on process documentation. Slides from today are available here. Your last blog post of the semester is due on Thursday! Please write one post of at least 100 words in response to the following:

Locate one example of process documentation in any format, read it, and write one 100-word blog post in which you describe, summarize and critique it. Does it document thoroughly and completely the process that it claims to document? If you choose a video, please embed the video into your blog post so that we can all view it easily.

You may find it helpful to review the Edge and Robinson articles to guide your selection of a good quality example of process documentation.

In class I announced the new CUNY Service Corps, which offers opportunities to students to work on projects contributing to education, economic development, or the environment in New York. Applications are due June 1.

The final drafts of your research papers are due Thursday, May 9 by 2:30 p.m. As always, please get in touch if you have questions about this assignment.

~Prof. L.

The article talks about the function (purpose) of Documentation. According to the article, Documentation has six mutual exclusive purpose: acknowledgment, attribution, tracing, validation, protection against accusation of misconduct, and tangential substantive commentary. This article also explained the importance of references and footnotes in a piece of information. The main reason why those little comments made by others are so important is because it might actually help the reader to get a much more better understanding of the information in a very short amount of time. And as human, we all want quick and fast result in almost everything we are trying to find. That is why footnotes and references were created.

Howard speaks about link rot studies. Not all link’s used to cite your sources last forever. Many times when you return to your references, you may not find the information you used in your work. Link’s do not last forever, Howard suggests you print the article you used as a reference, this way you can always go back to it even when it’s link rots. According to Hauptman you must cite your sources no matter how small their work may have influenced yours. Failure to do so may result in plagiarism accusations. He also believes all work has been created, or built upon the works of a predecessor. This is very true in the case of scientific works. Many times scientists look over their peer’s lab results and create new experriments to gain better or similar results.

My research paper is currently underway. Progress is being made everyday. I have become far more acquainted with certain databases that are essential for my topic. They have provided me with my necessary news sources for the paper. The internet and scholarly sources will accompany the paper along the way, but not without my own words, of course. Some changes will have to be made to my annotated bibliography because I replaced a source a while ago with newer ones, considered to be “scholarly”. The two news sources I have now have much more depth than the two previous I have had. The bibliography will be updated as well; it needs to be, for the better of the paper.