Week Two- Matching Resources

1. Academic books/reference books about biogeography or a literature review on the topics from an academic journal.

Information cycle: Years after—because biogeography is a broad topic

I chose academic books because biogeography is a broad topic and a book would be a great place to start reading about what biogeography is and all of the sub-disciplines. Also a literature review would be a good thing to read because it is a synthesis/summary of the relevant aspects of biogeography and the types of research being conducted.

2. Academic journals from a database

Information cycle: Months after

I chose academic journals because this is where the professor will find other studies down on his topic of interest (the invisible college). Also the academic journals are peer reviewed so the results are valid.

3. Magazine articles

Information cycle: weeks after

Because they combine primary sources with reports and analysis by experts and government officials. They are useful for current up to date information with useful interviews.

4. A book about presidents. A historical article from an academic journal (primary source) Or a Wikipedia search (and use the sources linked below)

Information cycle: Years later

From the sources I provided, I think the wikipedia one is most effective, because it gives you the name of the person thought to be president for a day fairly quickly. And then you look at the citations to find more information on said person. For example, titles of biographies about the man and other academic historical articles about him can be found.

5. Academic journals

Information cycle: Months after

I chose academic journals because that’s where experts and scholars publish their work that is peer reviewed.

6. Court documents, diaries, memoirs, historical newspapers

Information cycle: day of – day after

I chose those sources for primary source information because they are first hand accounts and original works that describe events during the time they took place.

7. Books on honey bees. Electronic web sources

Information cycle: years later

I chose books because honey bees is such a broad topic. Hundreds of books have probably been written about them with all kinds of focuses. More practical is electronic resources like wikipedia and online databases

8. Social media- twitter, facebook, TMZ, Buzz feed

Information cycle: Day of, day after, weeks after

Social media outlets and online celebrity gossip websites would probably have the latest fashion styles of different famous people. A google search of Justin Bieber might show images of him recently

Reflection:

This exercise was helpful for me to narrow down different types of resources I would use for particular events or topics. I have definitely encountered circumstances where I need to find out information quickly and other times where I need to spend a couple of week searching. In the future I will combine different resources together to get the most efficient research done. For example, I might start by googling or entering specific key words into a database to start looking at titles of articles and headline. And then I could narrow my topic in a specific journal or primary source.