Research Journal Entry #9

I spent most of last week writing my protoproposal – I’d estimate that it’s approximately 75% done right now, perhaps a little more. I’m not totally sure how this is going to affect my ability to write regular journal entries on it, but I’ll make it work somehow. Anyway, it’s going fairly well so far. I’ve blocked everything off into sections, so all of the results and the researchers’ reflections on those results are categorized according to the advantages and disadvantages of the internet, the gift and curse of technology, the effects of information overload, and the role of librarians in the Information Age. All of that is, of course, sandwiched between an introduction paragraph (or two), and a conclusion with notes on the strengths and weaknesses of the research I used and a lot of suggestions for further research. I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s what the paper is supposed to look like anyway, according to the syllabus, so unless that’s just a pack of lies…I should at least get points for following directions, doing a hell of a lot of reading, talking about it to my friends constantly and annoying the crap out of them, working through my lunch breaks, and trying my best.

Anyway, there’s more to do tomorrow and all of next week – gotta start on the 2.0 paper ASAP!

Oh, PS – you may have noticed, I just posted my book review for Blink a few minutes ago, too. I will also be tweeting it on my class Twitter account sometime on or around the 30th, so prepare yourself for a barrage of updates coming at you. You have been warned.

PPS – I really should have mentioned this way earlier (see: weeks ago) but it kept slipping my mind – I created a blog for the Ashaway Free Library as part of my course project for Library 2.0, and you can check it out here!

Research Journal Entry #6

Well, I’ve hit another road block regarding my research. Basically, I’ve read approximately a dozen articles, but only four of them are direct reports of research done by the authors themselves, and I need at least five. Sugar fudge.

Besides that, my annotations are going pretty well. It’s difficult for me to gauge what the strengths and weaknesses of each study are, but I’m managing. Figuring out the intentions of the researchers, the methods, and the results is pretty easy.

My goal is to finish the annotations by tomorrow afternoon on my lunch break, and then finish my readings for the Library 2.0 Literature review by Friday so I can start putting both of these projects together by the start of next week, and hopefully finish both of them by the end of June, so then I’ll really only have to worry about Cataloging for the first two weeks of July and then I’ll be g-o-n-e.

But in order to finish the annotations, I will probably need to figure out a fifth article…and there just isn’t that much research out there already on my topic specifically. Lots of information on how it relates to marketing, lots of information on how to manage it, but not a lot of information on information overload itself, which is weird.

And in order to finish my readings for 2.0, I will need to be able to stay awake while reading for more than half an hour at a time. Ugh. Easier said than done. The topic (how Facebook/social networking has affected interpersonal relationships) is actually really interesting to me, but I am not a natural reader. I am a natural sleeper.

Anyway, time to make dinner (mixed veggies sauteed in garlic and olive oil with whatever spices I can find in the cabinet…I wish I had some kind of sauce to go with it, but alas, I am a poor girl and a poor meal planner sometimes) and start on all that homework.

The Terrible Twos

This week’s reading was by Greg R. Notess, of Montana State University, and it was entitled “The Terrible Twos: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and More.” It tried to cover the basic tools that help to make the internet as we know it today possbile, such as AJAX (which allows for nearly constant refreshing of information without having to fully reload a program) and APIS (which allows for interaction between cooporating websites and the flow of products from one to another). It also discussed the importance of Long Tail, which tracks all of the items that are not necessarily the most popular and are frequently overlooked by many but when grouped together as “unpopular” actually dominate the market, and of tag clouds, which uses different sized fonts to illustrate the frequency of a particular word (or product) on a site.

All of these elements led to the author discussing the impact of Web 2.0 on the world, especially in school’s and libraries. I thought that some of the ideas sound spot-on, especially the concepts for School Library 2.0, which include “student reviews via blogs, interactive calendars, class wikis, and insturctional screencasts” (Notess 42). I’m a big believer of interactive learning and learning-by-doing, and I know that a lot of people are, but I also realize that not everyone is built that way. Therefore, I think that Web 2.0 has an extraordinary capacity to be used to enhance everyone’s use of the library, their ability to learn, and to improve their way of life, as long as it remains a tool rather than the whole enchilada, and as long as personal interaction and our subsequent humanity is not lost along the way.