Library Learnin': Researching in the Digital Age
My experience in D.H. Hill was exceptionally helpful and it will assist me with my student research. I learned so much about what the library has to offer and how to search books and articles. I found it helpful that you can order books from other libraries to be sent to Hill. I was surprised at how big the library actually is. I had never gone past the first floor until we went on the scavenger hunt. I always study on the first floor so it was very interesting to see that there are so many other places to study. I was also surprised at the amount of books the library has. It sounds sort of strange considering that it’s a library so of course it has books, but the amount is huge compared to my public library back home. I know that during my research the library will be a great tool for me to take advantage of and it will come in handy during the rest of my schooling.
Being a student researcher in the digital age means, that you have access to almost all the information you need for researching right at your computer screen. Student researching in the digital age has both positives and negatives. The positives are that you have quick and easy access to more articles and books than you could imagine. Being able to access these resources so quickly gives students an easier time researching. You don’t have to spend hours upon hours looking through bookshelves trying to find books that relate to your topic. Instead, you can type in keywords in a search bar and find the books and articles you need. This will help with conserving your time and will allow you to spend more time writing. The negatives include unreliable articles and not processing the information. When you search articles in a search engine like Google, you will most likely stumble upon articles that aren’t peer-reviewed or reliable. You may not know this and then use the information in your research. This could cause you to have incorrect information in your project. That’s why it’s extremely important to use databases (like the one the NCSU Libraries offer) that are reliable and offer articles that are peer-reviewed.
The other negative side to researching in a digital age is that our concentration capacity is decreasing. This can be explained in the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? A quote from this article is, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.” The internet is causing us to lose our focus while reading. It’s becoming more difficult to retain information for the long-term. This can be detrimental to research because students won’t want to read twenty page articles on their topic. This could cause them to miss vital information that could be useful for their research project. Overall, it is much easier to be a student researcher now then it was before, but the student must make sure that their sources are valid. The ability to access material so quickly gives student’s a time advantage that people did not have before the digital age.
(The book "Living in the Environment" correlates with my major of Environmental Science)
