Revisiting old Entries

I am also to revisit my entry on the process of finding scholarly information on the last US Presidential Election. Here's my first entry:

Since anyone can post anything on the Internet, it's imperative to evaluate your sources if gathering information on the Presidential Election. Information that has been reviewed and considered sound by a group of the writer's peers is referred to as "scholarly information." Sometimes it's easier for the researcher to immediately limit their search using only sources of scholarly information than having to evaluate previously unevaluated material. For this reason, many people, when researching a topic like the latest Presidential Election, go straight for sources of scholarly information, where they know everything they come across will be logical, reliable, and authoritative.

Typically, places where a lot of research is done, like schools and libraries, love to give lots of options of scholarly information to their students or users. They will use their funding to supply these sources, usually by subscribing to lists of information that is owned by a trusted company who has a reputation for only listing scholarly information. These lists of information are called databases, and can be mind bogglingly large. They can contain many kinds of information of many different subjects.

To find the information you need, you can perform a search. A search is just what it sounds like- you tell the database what you're looking for, and it tells you what it has on those topics. The trick is that you have to carefully choose your search terms. Perhaps using the name of a candidate would work- but make sure to be specific. Searching for "Clinton," for instance, will return scholarly information on both President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2008 Presidency.

Now, let's see what I would change. Since I know now that I should use every available opportunity to educate a reader/learner, I should give more information on the critical importance of evaluative skills, and give a couple examples. Examples are the best way to learn. I give an example on Clinton meaning Bill or Hillary, but I should also explain the difference between controlled vocabulary and natural language searches, and how you can pearl between the two of them for better terms by doing a subject search.

Speaking of examples, I should maybe list a few of my favorite subscription databases (although most of my favorites seem to always end up being the ones targeted for kids, like NetTrekker and Searchasaurus). I can tell them the advantages to these databases (which are also available earlier in this blog, dear reader- I am here to serve you!) and why sometimes it's easier to go to a trusted source than to figure out whether a random source is trustworthy.