Assignment # 5 Blog Post

After contacting the reference librarians at “Know it Now 24x7” and Kent State University, I wish I had done so when writing my thesis, as I described in assignment 3. When I began searching for information to write my thesis, my adviser gave me a list of authors and titles to begin my research. However, from there I continued working on my own and never consulted a librarian. I used the references and bibliographies found in the books recommended by my adviser to find more books, and I think having the strategic help of a librarian would have saved me a significant amount of time and been immensely helpful. I also may have found more recent works such as journal articles that had been published on the topic rather than mainly researching with older books.

The reference librarian I spoke with at “Know it Now 24x7” was very enthusiastic and helpful, and was very thorough in giving me tips and advice. I chatted live with this librarian while I contacted Kent State University’s reference desk through email. The question I asked was: “I'm looking for information about the Gospel of Mark as oral literature and researching the connection between Mark and other ancient oral storytelling. Do you have any suggestions of where to start looking?” Both librarians seemed to truly enjoy the process of helping me research this question, and the Kent State librarian even offered to follow up with me next week.

The first librarian I spoke to at “Know it Now 24x7” was very thoughtful in giving me important tips and advice. When she discovered that I was a student at Kent State University, she immediately went to Kent State’s library website to find the best databases for a religion paper. She also made sure I knew about OhioLINK and it’s Electronic Journal Center. She advised me to be careful of biased sources, especially when researching a religious topic using a web search engine, and cautioned that searching a database was likely to produce the most helpful results. She also suggested specific search terms that I should use in order to yield the best search results. Ironically, the last suggestion she offered was that I contact a reference librarian at Kent State, which I did next.

The Kent state reference librarian replied to my email with a very enthusiastic and thorough answer. He, too, suggested specific search terms that I should use to produce the most helpful search engine and database results and suggested I search for items on OhioLINK. He informed me of software owned by the library that may help in researching this question, and suggested that I type in the names of works that I am using into Google Scholar in order to easily find how often those works have been cited by other authors in the field. This would lead me to more articles on the topic and also show the importance of the work in this subject area. The Kent librarian then provided a few library records of books that I might find helpful and offered to continue to help me in researching this question.

I feel that I received excellent assistance through both of these online reference services, and, as I stated above, wish I had consulted with reference librarians when I originally wrote my master’s thesis and began asking this question. These librarians were not only accurate and thorough, but they seemed enthusiastic about assisting me. That enthusiasm seems to be a very important quality for reference librarians to have, as it would make them very efficient in making information accessible to the public.