Archive, special collections & digital collections/ research 101

Assignment 22: Blog Entry: Have you ever done original research before?  Based on what you learned in IM 204 or your own experience, what makes original research different from library research?  How does library research support or guide original research?  What are the pros and cons of library research, compared to original research?  What critical thinking skills are involved in both types of research?  What critical thinking skill, in your opinion, is the most important for library research?  For original research?  Why?

Nope, I have never done original research before.  Original research is totally different from library research. In original research, one should go to the field for research, should deal with people of that specific population. One should develop the right research design and ask right questions to the people who are connected with that population. Such research gives more accurate data than library research.

Before doing original research, library research support or guide researchers by giving some information about them and helping them to create list of right questions which will give accurate result after research. Compared to original research, the cons of library research are there is lots of information, so that it is difficult to get the accurate result for my research. I should know all the possible words to search something like for the word gay I should know the possible term like “homosexual”. I should have the good knowledge about the keywords and truncations. For e.g. use the word teen* for teenagers. All the researchers used different terminology to express their feelings. However, the database has particular descriptors. When both of them don’t not match then it will be difficult to search for accurate result.

  The critical thinking skills involved in both research are observation, interpretation, analysis, inference and evaluation. For library research evaluation, interpretation and analysis are applicable. For original research evaluation, observation and inference are more applicable.