Week 1

Generally I have never been good at searching library catalogs for research; up until my freshman year of high school I used Google for everything that I needed to do research for. No one ever told me that I couldn’t use Google and that it wasn’t a very good use of my time. Ironically, I was told that Wikipedia was not a good source to use in a bibliography. I never knew, and never cared, what kind of sites I found—if it answered the question I was ultimately trying to find, then I used the information, whether it was a good source or not. The most that I got out of Thursday’s lecture was the spot on the Penn State Libraries site where it listed several search engines that are good for looking for research articles. I only know of one other good source that is appropriate to use for information. I was also surprised that there are so many different ways that you can find these search engines; there were several different spots on the website that takes you to several different sites and many of them were different types of sites or for specific things, which would be helpful when looking for a specific topic. Another thing I found useful was the discussion about indexes. I never knew that they were available and I see how they can be very useful when you are looking for a specific topic and the article seems like it is over a broad topic. I found it helpful to also think about using the words in the index to search if you aren’t finding the information you need with the original search. Also if you search for something and you don’t have any hits, making a broader subject search is a good idea, I usually don’t think of it like that. I change the words so it means the same thing; usually a very specific search. Overall the lesson was helpful and I learned a lot.