Sunday, June 17, 2012

A500.3.4.RB_MedinaM


The Jack R. Hunt Library – Worldwide site consists of many different scholarly informational sources of any topic. It’s just like the city library but online. This online library, made for ERAU Worldwide students, allows students from anywhere around the world to find scholarly articles or books at any given time of day. Any searched information can be found in 6 different forms. It can vary from books with hard covers, to full text resources to even DVDs and videos. If by any chance the searched information isn’t available or found, there’s an “Ask a librarian” help area located at the right side of the main page. The “Ask a librarian” area allows students to call, chat or send an email to the worldwide librarians asking for the unavailable information. Typically, librarians respond within 48 business hours with at least 5 different sources of the asked information. On the main page, students can also recommend websites, articles, or any new material to be available in the library. They can also access websites recommended by the librarians. For example, they can find links about any subject such as Aviation, Engineering, Business and so on. The Hunt library also allows students to request and borrow information from other libraries.

When using websites, such as Google or Bing, to find research on broad topics, too many results come up with just the searched term in them. Google can be very handy for certain quick need-to-know information that might not necessarily be needed for creditability purposes. Unfortunately for students, many of these articles or websites shown as results are not creditable websites or peer-reviewed articles for proper research. For example, when I search the word leadership on Google, I find a variety of results. These results vary from the definition of the word, to quotes, to even magazines with articles containing the word leadership. Websites such as Wikipedia containing “everything” about the term leadership come up. Some students use this site for research purposes, when in reality non-experts of the subject have posted the information. Some users of Wikipedia also manipulate the information for their own purposes. When I search leadership in the Hunt Library, I find many peer-reviewed articles on leadership and even about the different leadership styles studied. Therefore, it is always best to use creditable websites, such as the Hunt library, to find creditable, peer-reviewed information on the topic of research.

As a graduate student of the Masters of Science in Leadership program, I will find the Jack R. Hunt Library – Worldwide to be very useful towards my studies. This library is full of ready to use scholarly information available at any time. It saves the students time and a trip to the local library to find articles and books that in the past have already been researched and reviewed. All of the articles and books found through this library are creditable, and peer-reviewed information made for students by experts. Therefore, throughout my studies I will be taking advantage of the Hunt library sources to find creditable sources for my research. A library always beats Google on creditability on any topic any day!


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