Week Three

Hello everyone,

So I just got an email from Mr Kittredge reminding me to post here. Because I haven't posted in weeks, I will discuss each week I missed, starting from week three.

I had been having a lot of difficulty finding papers. I was using Web of Science through UA, and was having difficulty finding even a single paper about my topic, specifically comparisons of eBooks and paper textbooks.

I broke the topic down into paper textbooks and eBooks. In both cases, finding papers about a method of accessing a text often lead to papers in than format. I found myself beating my head against the wall (and don't I just love that idiom?) again.

During the course of this head wall beating, I did learn quite a bit about how to use Web of Science. I watched the tutorials, looked around the help section, and played with other topics. However, I did not find a single paper on my topic.

Late in the week, I decided to stop using Web of Science and Google Scholar and did a basic Google search. Lo and behold, I found a PowerPoint on about a life cycle assessment (LCA) of devices that can be used to read eBooks, and it mentioned several other papers. Here, Web of Science became very useful. I found one paper and searched for all the papers that cited it. This solved my problems with the scholarly papers for eBooks.

Then I presented what I had found and what I had learned from the process to Professor Blowers.

 - Henry