I was impressed with the variety of nontraditional
resources presented in this week’s activities. The first of these I examined
was the political science librarian blogs feed. I was amazed to see a plethora
of different types of information, including news on current events, political
theory, commentary on politics, and many others. I spent some time perusing a
couple of librarians who had collected resources on ISIS and the ongoing crisis
in the Middle East. I found these resources particularly helpful because the
librarians succinctly put together information that gave background, up-to-date
new stories, and commentary. I was able to quickly find all of the information
that I wanted to brief myself on what is happening in Syria and Iraq, and was
also able to find intelligent commentary from professional political
scientists.
As such, I was taken with the
librarian blog feed as a resource. I have never encountered a similar resource
before now, and in all of my classes blogs have been more or less ignored as a
means of finding information. This activity has added a new tool to my
information seeking arsenal. Furthermore, from my experience, it seems that
blog feeds such as this can act as electronic encyclopedias on current events.
However, any librarian using such a resource would want to ensure that it was
coming from a reputable creator, and that it did present information from
authoritative, unbiased sources. Otherwise, using blogs could lead users down long
rabbit trails of bad information.
The link to the MIT Opencourseware
site further revealed to me the breadth of the field of political science. In scanning
the options, it is clear that political science as a discipline spills into the
fields of law, history, and sociology. I was also impressed with the
opportunities presented by the site as a resource. A librarian could use the
Opencourseware as a starting point to help identify material for any of the
fields of study identified by the course’s title. And because MIT is a respected
institution, it can be assumed that the required reading for the different
classes would be good resources, and also useful for providing the reader with
a strong understanding of the topic at hand.
Reddit, too, is a resource that I
have never considered using as a portal to information, and certainly have not
encountered in any of my other library science coursework. The information on
Reddit differed from that on the librarian blog feed in that Reddit contained a
little less breadth, was less authoritative, and had more information on how to
find jobs and the viability of political science as a marketable degree. Thus,
Reddit would be a useful tool to help a patron make a decision about obtaining a
degree in political science, and also to help point a political science
graduate down the right path to career or further degrees. Because Reddit lacks
good authority I would not use this as a primary tool for information seeking,
but it is an excellent one to have in my arsenal.
LibGuides are a resource that I have
only been introduced to in the past week, and I have grown fond of them. They
are an outstanding and succinct way to stand on the shoulders of other
librarians in a given field. As my undergraduate degree is in history, I am
uninitiated in the field of political science. However, scanning through a few
of the LibGuides, I was quickly able to identify major publications in the
field, and also was able to identify how the discipline branches out into
sub-disciplines. I think that these guides are an amazing resource for a
librarian to use for answering a patron’s question if it falls outside their
area of expertise. Already I have personally seen this in my practicum, where I
am using them to become familiar with nursing as an academic discipline. I have
no prior training in the medical field, but by using LibGuides I am gaining a
good understanding of the current state of nursing, and what publications and
resources I should focus on.
The CQ Press Electronic Library was
a far more traditional resource. It reminds me a lot of JSTOR, or the Wiley
databases that I have used in my work both at OSU and Mount Carmel. I think
that it is a wonderful resource, and an excellent finding tool. I particularly
liked the ability to save citations in a personal profile that remedies the
need to perform searches multiple times. This is a feature that JSTOR also
provides, and one I used extensively during my undergraduate research.
Consequently, the CQ Press Electronic Library is something that I would suggest
to patrons for continued exploration of their topic, and as a good tool for
doing political science research.
On another note, the article that I
read from the International Political Science Abstracts, “The Library
Re-Visited,” was critiquing undergraduate political science research in a
manner that was in line the goals stated in the Political Science Research
Competency Guidelines. From both works I gathered that librarians play a
significant role in assisting political science students gather and synthesize
information. Both the article I read and the Guidelines focused on students
being able to identify good resources, and also broaden their search to find
information they had previously missed. As librarians, that is our specialty, and
we play a strong role in helping to ensure that we are teaching our patrons how
to search, as well as providing information. With both the traditional
resources that are usually taught in library school, and the non-traditional
resources introduced in this module, we should be able to help students find
all of the information they need and more.
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