Blog No. 5

In this blog, I will discuss these two parts of the required task:

Use appropriate research and data gathering techniques and procedures so that materials and sources of information are identified within time constraints

Check that the materials identified are in an appropriate format for the purpose and technical capabilities required.

For this task, I completed 3 different resource gathering search types. The first search type I used was simply searching the internet. The second was searching through journals through the Swinburne University Databases on their Library site. Lastly, I searched the Swinburne Library in Prahran for resources.

Using the internet to search for information can have its strengths and weaknesses. These are as follows:

STRENGTHS

·         Easily accessible if internet is available

·         Can be done nearly anywhere at anytime

·         Can find information from different people all around the world

WEAKNESSES

·         Information can be unreliable (anyone can publish a website, and put on whatever information they want)

·         Can be quiet arduous with thousands of results coming back, and some having minimal information regarding search terms

·         Can be quiet confusing when going through hyperlinks and remembering where information came from and how to retrieve again

While searching the internet, I came across some videos. These were interesting, but similar to other websites, I could not be certain that the information was reliable. This is why I decided to not include any videos within my blog.

Using Journal article can be very helpful as they are generally from reliable sources. Unlike the internet, published journal article are read and checked by many different people, minimizing the chance of this information being hear say. Being on the internet, again, you can gather information from all over the world, making your research diverse and worldly. The one complication is that again, it can be quiet arduous going through all the results and finding relevant journals. Also it can be quiet difficult to know and decide which databases to look through as there are so many.  Finally, using databases can be somewhat frustrating, as you may find a resource that sounds perfect for what you want, and then the database may not have the full text, just the abstract.

Using the library catalogue is probably one of the easiest, as there is not such a large amount of resources available. The library can only hold so many resources due to space, and due to the fact that the university educates on so many topics, it has to hold only the newest and most used items in the library. It is also possible to have resources brought over from other campuses, but due to time constraints, I didn’t have time to wait.

With all search types, it is essential that the researcher user be able to change the search terms if the results are not what they are looking for. I did begin my search using the terms original alphabet, but at times had to change the terms to history alphabet to get different search results more along the topic I was looking for.

While researching, there were some interesting tables (especially from google search) that when I tried to publish within the blog would not display properly. This is one of the main technical difficulties that I had.