Journal - Week 3

1. For the organizing assignment I felt confident with my organization because it’s one of my favorite things to do. However, I still came out with an organizational system that made more sense if an average person wanted to get something out of my closet. When I did the databases assignment, I felt the instructions were very clear and I followed them easily. Other than the readings and the obvious differences between the two databases it was somewhat difficult for me to understand the field differences. The catalog assignment allowed me to find some great sources from my library. I felt if I just searched for “Propaganda,” that I would find too many results, but when I looked at my college library I only found 37 and most of them were relevant to my topic. I also found some promising sources from my public library, but I had to narrow my search from “keyword” to “title” with the word search for “propaganda.” I was able to find the books I searched for in my college library when I visited it for the academic library visit. The visit was highly beneficial to me because I was able to find some great reference resources; especially since I never really knew how to search in this section to my benefit before. In this case I searched for the word “propaganda” as well and found that the best subjects for this were psychology and history encyclopedias. The librarian also helped me narrow my library book search to “propaganda AND war” and I got some great results from this as well.

2. Since the last couple weeks we’ve had our first assignment due on Saturday, I got lazy and waited till Saturday to see the assignments posted. When I found out my organizing assignment was going to be late, I decided it was time to change my current schedule so I could be more efficient in this class. I know most of the assignments were due Wednesday, but I made sure not to wait till the last minute to do them and I am much less stressed because of it. However, right before I was going to turn in my library visit assignment, the internet in our house stopped working and I that was stressful. I made sure to save everything on word though until it came back on and luckily I was still able to turn in my work on time. I also made sure to read the instructions CAREFULLY this week because I feel like I keep doing everything wrong! It can be hard though, because I need to do one thing in the directions, then another when I write down on the message board, and then I have to make sure I also covered the criteria. I think this can be a bit confusing and I wish the criteria and “what to post” were parallel and were mentioned in the instructions for the assignment. Otherwise, I didn’t run into many problems that couldn’t be figured out. I had a hard time finding ProQuest, but I finally did on my college website. Then I ran into the problem, with the librarian at the Library, that there weren’t enough reference sources for me to easily find my topic, but she made sure I got what I needed anyways. I also learned a lot about sources at my library. When I went to Washington State University, I never was taught how to use the resources at my library at it was always very overwhelming and I never used it properly. I feel much better knowing what I’m doing now.