Week 2

The second week of Library Studies was very informative and informational about online sources. On Tuesday, Bonnie and Amanda talked to us about research guides on the Penn State libraries website. I found this interesting because there are so many different research guides depending on what your topic is. For example, we looked under the topic, "Nutrition". The guide showed the librarian who made up the guide with their contact information. If you needed more help, it would be convenient to contact that librarian who is an expert in the field of your topic. The guides also give you precise databases to do more research about your topic. I love this because you don't have to look on every database until you find the right information. The newspaper sources was another thing that interested me in class because I never realized newspapers could be accessed way after the date they came out. They provide information from the day that something happened and are a great source when you need to cite exact dates. In addition, we were notified about online collections. These can be very helpful to improve a research paper which we will definitely have to do in the future.
On Thursday, the class was taught by Amanda about Wikipedia and reliable sources. In high school, teachers always told me not to use Wikipedia but I never really knew why. Supposedly, any person could go in and change information into false, inaccurate info. Amanda told us that that was true. Not only that, but she actually showed us. She took us to a Wikipedia page about vaccines, clicked on a source, and actually looked up the source. The person did not even go to a real medical school and was not a PhD. It made the information on the page not trustworthy. We were taught that a correct source to use was a scholarly journal, for example, because they are secondary resources and are available after instant news like twitter, T.V., radio, and magazines or blogs. Reference sources like encyclopedias and dictionaries are also of high quality to use. New sources are not always as reliable. Furthermore, the topic that I was most impressed about in class was that I learned that books are not always better than online sources. I always thought if information was found in a book, than it was most accurate than anything. All in all, I now know that I'm wrong and can better improve my research. I will also make sure I have reliable sources for now on!