Hello fellow bloggers and blog readers! This is my eleventh week in the PhD program and my respite is over. This semester will be long, but in the end it will be worth the many hours of discussion, reading, writing, and researching. My two classes this semester are Advanced Study of Worldview and Research Design and Analysis. More on Research Design and Analysis in a bit. The first impression of Advanced Study of Worldview is there will be a lot of reading, I get to write a book review, and I get to read “God is not great: How religion poisons everything” by C. Hitchens. I am really not looking forward to reading the last book, but I am pretty sure it will challenge me, and I am always up for a good challenge.

As a librarian, I live for research. I research everything–buying a new phone, a new car, a new stove, a new computer, couches, desks, books, hotels, activities, etc. I help students research. I help faculty research. I teach how to research. I research for the fun of it. The textbook for this class (as seen in the photo) is “Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research” by J. Creswell (5th ed.). The textbook is full of information, a lot of which I know, a lot of which I don’t. One little thing that bothers me about this book in chapter 3 is a section on how to conduct research in the library. This edition was updated this year–the copyright date is actually 2015–and it is only available in a loose-leaf version. However, the information on library resources is a tad outdated. I am sure some academic libraries (somewhere) still use CD-ROMs to access databases (there could be some). Creswell (2015) even suggests that a researcher “go to the bookshelves” and “scan the table of contents of education journals from the past 7 to 10 years” (p. 82). I might possibly do this while working on my dissertation so that I leave no stone un-turned, however it would only be if my library (I have access to two wonderful academic library resources) did not have electronic access to what I needed or if the only copy of a journal was in print. This scenario is highly unlikely since most academic libraries (including the one in which I work) have removed some print journal copies (given away, donated, sold, etc.) if available elsewhere electronically to make room for other collections, services, or partners, etc. in the library. I realize that not everything is available electronically and in those cases, yes, I will use the print copy to browse the table of contents, but it is only as a last step (depending on my topic).

The author fails to mention the most valuable resource a doctoral student will need–WorldCat–the catalog of almost every book known in the world in every kind of library imaginable, most of which are connected to a lending system. He does mention the Library of Congress, which is a wealth of information (especially their online collections), but it is not primarily a lending library. There is one mention of interlibrary loan which is also of utmost importance to a doctoral student, or any graduate student really. Try as it might, there is not one academic library that can purchase every single database, book, resource, media, etc. in the world. Interlibrary loan covers this by creating a lending library of thousands of libraries across the world–not only for books, but for journal articles, too. I think Creswell should have consulted a librarian on this chapter because this librarian is not impressed.

So, off my soapbox, I am excited for this new semester to begin. Reading, discussing, networking, writing, and researching will be the thing for the next few months.

Blessings to you and yours.

Creswell, J. W. (2015). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.