Jamie Rand: Blog Post 4

Discuss what is helpful and what is not so helpful; are there any topics that you wish we would cover in the first few weeks of this course?


To be perfectly frank, while the resources would very much compliment any research I would be doing in other courses, I'm not really doing very much academic research. The assignments I'm given usually require only primary sources--I might throw a secondary source in here or there to lengthen a paper, but as a whole, they're unnecessary for the topics I have to write about.

On the other hand, having access to Gale, Muse, JSTOR, (et. al) makes what research I do much, much easier. My old process was to go to Google Scholar, search for a topic, find the book, go to amazon.com and use the Look Inside! feature, pray that the quote I wanted was actually available in their preview, then use it. Being able to use the new range of academic search engines simplifies that process substantially.

As for what is helpful and not helpful, it's kind of a mixed bag. Like I mentioned before, access to the databases is very, very beneficial, but on the other hand, I found the bibliographical software overly complicated and confusing (especially compared to something like easybib). Not to say those applications were bad, exactly, but they had a steep learning curve, and they were designed for people who do a lot more research than I do. For them, however, I'm sure it's a godsend.