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.