Information Studies

week 13

2010-12-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

i am very happy overall with what i have learnt in this module as it is a subject i had never studied before,
i learnt a lot about the learning objectives such as
• Understanding information seeking as a process and applying this process to everyday information queries.
• Appreciating the structural characteristics of subject literatures and communication dynamics within research communities.
• Identifying the characteristics of a selected range of printed and electronic information resources, including Web 2.0 resources.
• Identifing and analysing the structure of the information chain, particularly within the European environment as well as at a global level.
• Identifying, locate, evaluate, and use information resources effectively for everyday information seeking.

week 12

2010-12-12T07:21:00.000-08:00

this was the final week, we spent this week gettin everything together and we had one final meeting this week to make sure everything was sorted for our assessment submission. turns out classes were cancelled this week because of the weather so i did some revision of some of the topics we had covered in clasws that i had found most interesting.
• To explore innovative means of information seeking
• To examine the strategies of successful information seekers

I looked at the different theories behind information seeking behaviour...
e.g. Zipf's Principle of Least Effort, Brenda Dervin's Sense Making, Elfreda Chatman's Life in the Round - seek to understand the processes that surround information seeking. i found these to be very enthralling.

week 11

2010-11-30T05:16:00.000-08:00

We had a test this week on the friday... I had done a lot of preparation for it... mainly just reading through the 'information pathways' book...and reviewing and learning notes we had made in class... I was quite happy with my overall result..
I practiced using a few different resources for the last part of my information hunt as in the first part we were recommended to discuss more about our usage of OPAC etc. I fiddled oround with OPAC, wikileak, search engine watch, brittanica and the internet public library.
we recently went to the health science library to complete question 3, we actually found it quite hard to find the information at first but we finally did and we found that OPAC helped us a lot. i had never used the health science library before and found it quite nice and modern

week 11

2010-11-24T11:22:00.000-08:00

Found the wednesday leacture great, its was all aon about the information created electronically such as youtube, facebook, email etc. We were shown some great clips on youtube, i you tubed many different things after this, it amazed me how many views some stuff had eg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs

over 73million! was funny but not that funnY!

week 10.

2010-11-23T11:03:00.000-08:00

In class we got our results back from the 1st 2 questions. I was reasonably happy but wanted to try push everyone to work even harder to do even better in the final task.
I had a good look at where we went wrong in the 1st 2.
In class we had a look and many different types of info sources that were handed to us eg leaflets on the lisbon treaty, world maps, bank publications and looked at what they offered to us. This weeks class made me ask myself some questions.
How can we be more innovative in finding the information for our tasks?
What's the best strategy for us to be successful?
I re read chapter 9 in information pathways too along with the book.

we did question 5 as a group
5. In a group, visit the General Record Office (GRO), Dublin. Locate the marriage certificate of Joseph Plunkett and answer the following questions:
a) Where did the couple marry?
b) What are the full names of the bride and groom, as listed on the marriage certificate?
How did you prepare yourself to locate this information? What information about this marriage is available in other print and electronic resources?

interesting question. learnt a lot about the gro.
The General Register Office is the central civil repository for records relating to Births, Deaths and Marriages in Ireland

Their records of marriages other than Roman Catholic marriages date back to 1st April 1845!!! .

week 9

2010-11-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

We met on the monday to put togethr question 3 and get started on the next task.
I felt quite happy with the question and very excited to move on to the next.
I did some further information seeking exercises on newspapers and the impact of this information publication and control.
I love the NLI on kildare street i thought it was very stimulating and was a great library mainly because of its innovation.

week 8

2010-11-23T10:54:00.000-08:00

we spent this week preparing for the 3rd question which I found very interesting as I am very interested in the area of braodcasting and radio. We had some trouble locating the letter to the editing but using effective search stratigies we have learnt such as we eventually found it.
The topics for this week were information publication and control. I had a look through a lot of different types of newspapers eg tabloids and broadsheets and compared them noticing how but better the broadsheets such as the irish times were.

week 7

2010-10-29T05:43:00.000-07:00

we spent this week just trying to get everything together and making sure everything was right, week had our final group meeting and went over any problems we had about the 1st 2 questions, we felt the 1st 2 questions went okay and we started to discuss the 3rd and how we would go about doyffing it. we decided we would meet up today(friday of week 7) to get started on it. I think i have learnt a lot so far, stuff I never knew before about research and information that I feel will be very useful to me in the furture.... I did some more reading to deepen my knowledge in hope that I would improve for the next few questions (eg, Case, D.O. (2002). Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior. London: Academic Press.) I am looking forwars to the second part of the assesment in the coming weeks........

week 6

2010-10-24T06:36:00.003-07:00

Last week before the first part of the assigment is due. So we are trying to make sure we have everything together and looking back on some parts we were a bit confused about, eg, the effectiveness of our search strategy. Going through in class the differences between worldcat and google helped us more for question 1 part b.
unfortunetly I was unable to make the friday class so I, of course, read all of chapter 5 and learnt a lot about the three traditional forms of bibliographical control.

week 5

2010-10-24T06:36:00.001-07:00

This week in class and outside of lecture time I learnt heaps more about locating electronic information. i found this was helping me a lot in my assesment as I was improving my search skills so much more. I went to my local libray and found a great book entitled 'Teaching web search skills' by Greg R. Notes.
Many things stood out to me in this book for example, the search strategies that they did not recommend;
• browsing searchable directories
• following links to sites recommended by heavy use.
I do both of these! So the book really deepened my knowledge of alternative means of web searching.

After improving my search strategies I felt a lot more comfortable about the imformation hunt. and so we began our next question where we had to go to pearse street library.
(reflection on that task)

week 4

2010-10-24T06:35:00.001-07:00

This week was all about developing our search skills which I was happy about because as I do commerce in ucd i do not feel that I am as up to date with search strategies as I should be. In my own time I surfed the internet trying to teach myself about different search strategies. I came acrosss some helpful information, for example, this tutorial.. http://www.learnwebskills.com/search/
or these simple ten steps
http://www.webliminal.com/search/10steps.htm.
I found myself practicing different search skills for a good couple of hours.

The next question we decided to concentrate on was question 2 on the citizens information centre. Through google, we located the closest one to us which was in stillorgan and so we rang up to find out there opening hours. Surpriseingly they had very limited opening hours, only opening an hour and a hlaf each day. We all decided to meet in stillorgan and I was excited to see what we would discover as I had never used a CIC before.
(ask the others)

week 3

2010-10-24T06:34:00.003-07:00

We had out first proper group meeting. We discussed our plans for our assesment. I read chapters 3 and then some of chapter 4 from the text. I went to the james joyce libary and looked at the question we had to do. It was interesting because in class we had discussed the differences between brittanica and wikipedia namely being that brittanica was created by subject experts and for wikipedia anyone could write anything that they wanted. And now we were being asked to compare different ways of accessing infomation in the libary. We had to compare finding the book, using google books and then using world cat. After I did this question i found that there were some big differences between the three modes. Some ideas that came to my mind were:

• was extremely quick and easy to access the bibliography of bibliographies on both google books and world cat. finding the hard copy in the libary took a little longer
• world cat is very easy to use and it amazed me that it was able to show collections held around the globe.
• google books is like worldcat in that it allows us to locate books but what put me off it a bit was that in the book 'information pathways' a piece was written about how copyright issues were connected with scanning and putting up the whole of the book. This is very unlike world cat. Then again, it is handy...
I thought about the different problem solving techniques we had learnt about such as abstraction, brainstorming, hypothesis testing, research, lateral thinking and trial and error and how I could use these ideas along with other means to give the best answer possible. It was a good challenge.

Further reading i did and found of use:

getting started on info hunt....

2010-10-24T06:34:00.001-07:00

We were asked to work together and answer each question in 6 different parts. I went through each part and thought about how I would answer on it...

1. Describe your analysis of the question: Basically just how did u interpert the question and how you would go abouut answering it...
2. Plan a search strategy before searching for info: What was our search strategy? Was it good or bad? Did it work or not? How did we find our information what sort of resources did we use? Why did we use this strategy?
3. Give the answer...
4. Second Resource? Electronic? reliable? current? coverage? simple? relavant? why?
5. Citations? make sure I have all sources of info included and you have properly citated it!! use the harvard style you learnt last year?
6. Which source was best?? and why... organisation of info? bibliographical control...

week 1

2010-10-24T06:31:00.001-07:00

Dear blog:
I have never done a module on information studies before but it's something that i have always been very interested in so i decided to give it a go. In the first lecture crystal asked one simple question, 'What is information' or at least it should have been simple but i found it quite hard to answer or to define it in a couple of sentences. so in the first week i took out the information pathways book and read the first chapter to try to get a feel for it and I found it quite compelling. The quote from page 7 from samuel johnson really made me think,

'Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it'

It came to my attention that we need to know how to find all sorts of information in this world and so when we were given our information hunt I was very excited to get started on it.