Things have been busy lately. I was just searching for journal articles on LISA when I realized that I had lost track of which assignment I was working on and what I was doing with the article I was looking at. I stared at the screen and thought, It’s time to take a break and make a blog post. At least making a blog post is not searching for articles. I went to my desk and noticed that the articles for my different assignments were dangerously close to mixing together and melting into one big mess. So, like a good future librarian, I sorted them into folders and decided to quit searching for the night.
Right now I’m working on three final assignments, with one more yet to be handed out. I enjoy the research process, especially when I feel like I’m learning about something real in the LIS field rather than just completing an assignment for a class. And I feel like I’m learning more about searching as I go along, trying to understand how things work a little better each time.
Today the research process helped me to rediscover the joy of browsing. I was in the library getting a book for one of my projects and took a few minutes to browse the surrounding shelves. Afterwards, I went to look for ideas in the current (print) journals and really enjoyed having a full journal issue to look through. I felt as though I had more context for the topic and a better understanding of how the ideas could fit together. It was very different from the disjointed, random experience of searching article indexes. I think I’ll either go back again in the future or at least browse the full journals online once in a while. It’s interesting because I was writing about e-publishing and the different journal models in an assignment recently, so now I can actually see how the information format can change the research process and the development of ideas.
Filed under: Information Seeking, Learning, Research
