As I am winding up my first semester of Library Grad School, I’m a bit surprised by now much writing I was able to accomplish. I wrote 86 pages in LIBR 204 Information Organizations & Management and 45 pages in Libr 200 Information & Society totalling 131 pages for the semester. Approximately 80% of the assignments were APA-style, a research style requiring citations, references and bibliographies, and appendices for noted materials and information used in the papers. APA research style writing adds much more time to an essay, term paper or discussion due to the added time for research and fact-checking. I would say that a one-page paper takes about an hour to write, but a one-page APA paper is more like 3 hours, give or take an hour. The researching effort adds a good 2 hours to each page, on average.
Some papers required tremendous reading. I went through about 3 reams of paper printing articles to highlight and read. Many of the articles were in the 10-20 page range and discussed heavily researched information.
Prior to entering grad school, I had very little experience with term papers, other than the few written in undergrad school. I remember going to the library and pouring over stacks and stacks, all the elevator rides, chasing down books that were supposed to be there, but weren’t. I think in that day and age, it took more like 4-5 hours per page to write a paper, only because of the added footwork.
Most techies refer to Web 2.0 as the social web, or social computing, which I think is a correct definition. But there are many layers to Web 2.0 and thousands of applications that create the internet as a platform. Many of these applications are modular, and can be combined with others to form new applications that work synergistically in delivering products and services that help end-users better.
Federated searches are part of the Web 2.0 and so-called Library 2.0 architecture, and libraries use them to great effect. My school’s library (San Jose State’s Martin Luther King Jr Library) has a large network of intergreated library services that employ federated searches to make researching an easy task. Before, you had to trot to the library, use a computer to search, and hunt, hunt, hunt. Now, it’s nearly as simple as a google search, with results leading 90% of the time to full-text pdfs that can be printed and downloaded to your computer for reading. I can download 20 or more articles in the comfort of my bedroom in an hour or two.
Reading them, however, takes much longer.
So that brings me back to those 131 pages. I honestly do not believe it would be logistically possible to have written all those pages (or find all those many sources) in one semester trodding to the library. Web 2.0 definitely has improved the ability of a grad student to conduct more research in the same amount of time as before.
