Finding my voice

My first assignment for Information Discovery was a report on Web-Scale Discovery Platforms. While I found this whole assignment difficult, the hardest part for me was writing the report itself. I come from the essay world - these are what I'm used to. I like the structure of them, the ease of writing that I've always felt with essays. With an essay, you pick your argument, you find your points to argue through your research, and then you argue it. There's no "you" in the essay, no feelings or opinions or judgement. A report, though, is entirely different. This is all about you. It's awful!

I've really had to try to forget everything that I've been trained to do in my previous studies. The whole idea of putting me, or mine, or I into an assignment sends a shiver down my spine. But I did it, and I hated it, and I don't think that I did very well but it's done now and I'm moving on. 

One advantage of looking at Web-Scale Discovery Platforms in my first assignment is that I'm probably in a better position going into the next assignment than some others in the class - now that I know what discovery platforms are (they're the single-box search engine that connects the library collection with the databases that they have access to into one search) I think that I'll be able to use them in a more efficient way when searching for information on my next assignment.

The next assignment is a critically-annotated bibliography, where we find at least fifteen sources on a subject for a 'client' and write up a short abstract for each of them. Because I work for a doctor one day a week, I hit him up for a topic and I'm now researching the use of BOTOX in relieving migraines. It's an interesting subject, but I have no idea what a lot of the articles I'm reading even mean! Medical journals are very technical, written with people who are working in the field in mind, so I think that a lot of it is going to go completely over my head. It's going to be an interesting challenge.

Reflections

I have found this assignment to be a real challenge, but a challenge that I have enjoyed. Having only a small amount of familiarity with a lot of the subjects addressed within the first five weeks, I was easily daunted by the ideas and technologies that we were going to use. However, as we tackled them one by one, I found that they were interesting and enjoyable. I think a great advantage was working within a group, where we were able to support and assist each other as we progressed.

I never thought that I would enjoy HTML as much as I have been! I've never used HTML before, and was scared by the very thought of it! I think that when you see it, without knowing that there is a strict procedure and rules that you can follow, that the very sight of it is confusing. But now, after using it a bit, I'm able to understand it and use it. I'm still progressing through Codeacademy, onto CSS now, which is a bit harder I think but still, easy to understand so long as you follow the rules. This is probably the biggest thing that I'm going to take away from this subject - that I can use HTML, and that I'm actually quite good at it. I think it's the logic of the coding - it appeals to my preference for order.

Other things that I learned through this course

• How to embed a map
• How to use Twitter, why we should use Twitter, and how to embed a tweet (I was very proud of that one, it was my first attempt at HTML, and I was practically giddy with delight when it worked)
• What a document is. I'm still quite interested in that, but I really think that Suzanne Briet's claims about the leopard being the document is the position that I agree with.
• How to use Endnote. This tool is great, and one that I will definitely be using in future studies.
• This one is really just to point out that look, I just made an unordered list using HTML and isn't that amazing?

The biggest thing that I will take away from this assignment, however, is awareness. Previously, I had all of my social networking sites open to the public, all of my information freely available, and I was using only a couple of passwords, often for more than one website. Now I have a lot of different passwords, all complicated and different, as well as changing the settings for privacy for a lot of sites. I think that privacy is going to be a huge issue in the coming years. And it is something that I feel slightly more ready for after this course.