Week 7

8-4-07
Web Searching
From the Bare Bones reading, the metasearch engine "Clusty" sounded like it should provide interesting results, but I chose the Dogpile link, and results were very satisfactory.
Of the subject specific, the WebMD Vortal looked like a good bet: I took so long fishing around I never got to Educator’s Reference Desk
Web Searching was especially irksome. Many results looked great, but having to repeat and reconfigure the search phrase was very off-putting. Search terms and virtual libraries became my enemy. Back on familiar ground with google, the million and a half results were less daunting to me than figuring out how to browse through virtual library subjects.
Evaluating sites:
Many of the sites I’m pursuing are scientific or "official" in some way. It’s amazing that there is so much discrepancy between authoritative sources. Doing this assignment I felt like "I’ve "got it", except for lingering uncertainty about MLA citations. I find I try to apply format for one medium to different types of media.
I found the Internet Archive to be a great tool; I used it over and over again for these assignments. It was fun sleuthing out author identity.
This class has been extremely demanding of my time, in part because the topic is huge, in part because the topic is interesting to me and I end up reading pdf files and web pages and articles in ProQuest, or looking into the reference information I should be simply annotating. I’ve literally spent 10x more time for nearly each assignment than the class description suggests.
Alternative Sources was a good exercise to clean up loose ends. The questions portion did help me in focusing in on relevant research, I found multiple international sources. The non-print search was more of a challenge, but I found one of the key researchers in the field is at University of Washington. I included him as a non-print source.
I was surprised to come across a researcher I had known of many years ago and forgotten about. She has worked on bioenergy research for 40 years, but her site isn’t useful for this project.