LIB 1201 Research and Documentation for the Information Age

I am doing pretty OK on my research parper proposal so far. I need to focus on one question on the topic instead of two, and working on my grammar. My research paper  topic is about online privacy. I mainly search  articles on the internet. Some of them are pretty interesting and useful. I hope I can find more relevant information later on to support my thesis statement. I am start to look for scholar articles and news articles for my paper.  My biggest concern about research paper right now is plagiarize the information instead writing it doe to my language problem.

Chapter 3 of Badke was quite an enlightening read, as I finished the first few subsections I thought about how much I really agreed with him. Every time I search for something in a database it would give me an unreadable amount of sources that may or may not have any use to me. I loved his analogy for keyword searching the “friend” that you can only trust to a certain point because they can also hurt you depending on what information you give them. This is most definitely the same as keywords because if you type the wrong keyword or word it differently sometimes you can get a lot of information that has no use to you and other times the different wording can help you a lot personally I feel this is a trial and error process. By using synonyms for different words can also help you to keep your search centered around one topic but across 2  separate words. also the difference between the search terms are very different when compared to Google when I use or and “and” in a search on Google sometimes I don’t get anything that I was expecting but with a database it seems to work better even if Google is technically a “Database”.

What is a Database? According to Badke, Databases are  any kind of colllection data that can be retrieved using organized search procedures. He explained how many people today can be expert at searching things on the computer by using keywords and other websites. What they do not know is how to search for a Database properly. That is when the search Engine (Information Retrival (I.R) system) comes to play. In Liddy Elizabeth’s article, she explained how researchers and develppers have more advantage of using the system than the consumers. I agree with her because like Badke eplained in the above, people just use keywords and want the system to find what they really want. But that is not how it works. Lets take Google as a simple example. If you are typing a common name such as Washington, Google might give you more than 5,0000 articles about it. And this is  the part where people starts to be lost when it comes to researching. Why? the keywords you used have a lot of meaning to the system and  because you were not specific, it provided you that much information about Washington. Now, what you do is absolutely not wrong but takes too much of your time for the research and I am pretty sure no one wants to stay too long researching something. We all want quick results. To conclude, how do we use Database and Search Engine properly? the key is very simple. ” You need to know that most Database use descriptive records that stand in a place of an actual content when you search” -Badke. In other words, being specific.