Often, when consulting with faculty and students in the library, particularly those working within the same discipline or even the same class, I find myself not just returning to the same key resources to answer their research questions, but even the same groups of resources, sets of tools that, when used in a certain combination, can return many relevant results. To locate and navigate these resources, I've compiled several ad hoc databases of links, emails, and notes. Some of these are later incorporated into departmental research guides; many, because of their specificity, have remained tucked away in hard drives or notebooks.When Ed Webb mentioned to me that his Communication, Media, & Identity in MENA students would be maintaining blogs and asked me if I wanted to do likewise, I thought that, since I won't be contributing to the class in the same way that they will, I would use this as an opportunity to publicly log some of the research questions posed throughout the semester and the courses we pursued in our attempts to answer them. By exposing this data, perhaps others with similar (or even dissimilar) questions may also benefit.
Will a blog be the best platform for this endeavor? Will there be enough questions to keep it interesting? Will I expand or narrow its scope? These are the questions I'll try to answer in the next few months.
Posts
