The course online information and retrieval has been a very informative. The challenge of creating a blog alone has been a great learning experience for me. It’s definitely a skill that I would like to develop further. It was a great opportunity to just get started in the blogosphere.
The searching itself has been eye opening. I already knew that there was endless information available but this course has been very useful in breaking down how to navigate the Internet, find reliable sources, use search techniques, and analyze information retrieved.
My favorite search technique was the building block and I also found the citation pearl technique to be very useful as well. Sometimes you are unfamiliar with your topic and you may not know where to begin. These techniques encourage you to either build on your search based on the information you retrieve which can help you either narrow or expand the search. I found the building block search technique gave the researcher more control over the search. I liked the citation pearl because you may be unfamiliar with certain terms on the subject you are trying to research and the citation pearl technique helps you look out for a keyword or words that could really make a difference in the relevancy of the information that you retrieve.
