Research Journal Entry #5

I haven’t updated my research journal because I haven’t really been researching. I’ve been far too busy with a billion other things, frankly, and the thought of dealing with the bland and stale articles I’m going through anymore than I already have is depressing. At some point today, though, I will finally try to get my annotations done. Well, started anyway. I want to get the bibliographic information down in a Word document and do a brief summary of each article and then I’ll see what else I can do from there.

But in the meantime I have to do a bunch of stuff for Cataloging, and also update this blog again about who I’m following on Twitter (stay tuned, folks) and why, work on my book review for Blink, start a new blog (this will be my fourth fully operational and current blog, good Lord…) for the Ashaway Library as my course project for Library 2.0, get some exercise in maybe, make a pie, make lunch for the rest of the week, make dinner, clean my room/house, and maybe try to beat the final level of Angry Birds if I have time.

Research Journal Entry #3

I am at a temporary standstill with my research progress – I’ve read through all the articles I printed out last week, and only half of them were relevant or useful, and virtually none of them contained actual statistics. I’m at a loss. I’ve spoken with the reference librarians at URI, I’ve gone through all the databases I can access. Currently waiting for Dr. Adams to get back to my email(s). I guess I’ll just take the most relevant articles and look through their bibliographies…but there’s no guarantee I can find the full-text of them. Ugh. I’ll tackle that later tonight, after I go for a run and then try to figure out what on earth all the ugly little abbreviations are supposed to mean in my cataloging class with Dr. Ma.

I should maybe (probably) just choose a different topic, but I hate to throw away any of the little progress I’ve already made, and given the results my searches are generating and the issues I’m having with sifting through all the articles, I am even more adament about investigating and exposing the crippling effects of information overload. There is genuine fatigue, anxiety, frustration, a feeling of hopelessness – at least, for me.