Like Deja Vu All Over Again

I hate that saying. It really makes no sense. And I’m not going to lie, that’s also what I thought when Darryl told us we were having the librarian come tell us how to research using school resources again. As we had already heard from this librarian, I thought it was a bit redundant. However, after watching her presentation again, I am going to admit I was wrong.

The first time we watched it, it was just after 8 in the morning and my classmates and I were all pretty tired and disinterested, because we really didn’t care at the time. At least that’s how I felt. I was sleepy and I wasn’t planning on using much she was showing us, but I still tried to pay attention and I thought I had retained some of that knowledge. But when she came in today to show us how to do things again, I started to see a lot of things I had forgotten. I guess weight isn’t the only thing I haven’t been retaining much of lately.

I had forgotten a lot of the little tricks she had shown us, like using the dollar sign at the end of a term to search all words including those first letters, such as putting scien$ for scientist, science, etc. I had forgotten about using the word “and”, like how it narrowed down the search field, but maybe not in a good way. It was good for her to show us the ways to search more than one word but not exclusively.

I also hadn’t realized the extended list of resources we had at our fingertips. It was cool to see that you can search by magazine, or by newspaper, such as by Time or by The Spectator. It was also helpful to see that we can just simply check the stories we want and save them for later. I am realizing that maybe I shouldn’t always just rely on mainstream search engines, because as much as I have been told that before, it was the presentation today that really brought that idea home.

I am excited to use what I learned in being able to maybe find stories in different magazines and books for when I am working on a story of my own and maybe need to refer back to a report that was done before. Learning what I did makes that process much easier now. I will also use Clusty now when I am researching to help me narrow down my search, because it will help me cut down on time looking through all the search results. That extra time may just help me out one time with a story, you never know. Having tried to use some of the resources without knowing the tricks and how to enter the terms properly, I can honestly say that it was not easy and just made me want to Google it. But now I think knowing what I am doing is really going to help me with my stories because I will have much better sources of information than I used to, and it will look much more professional.

So while I won’t lie and say it was the most entertaining class, I will say I did learn some interesting things and I am glad I came to class.