Overall, I feel that this opportunity, in a digital humanity course, to gather and organizing data, familiarize with the Carleton College Archive and accustom to the procedure of garnering or searching for metadata is very unique.
Previously, whenever I conduct any research to find valuable sources, the most I would do is to record it through citation or reference, which is very simple and, to some extent, sloppy. Also, the most common tool I would use during research is specifically Google as it seemed most convenient, direct and resourceful.
However, now that I have experienced searching through the Carleton archive, I recognized that Carleton also holds abundant amount of data that cannot be found ordinarily through Google. Moreover, the background information of each source or metadata behind can be very detailed and specific. Even though the procedure of entire process, first to either search the keywords or browse through the categories, then to save the files and to record all the related information or metadata including the publisher, source, and format, can sometimes be time-consuming, this convention allows users to thoroughly analyze and full acquaint with the sources. Having been ignoring the importance of the metadata of the source before, now I feel that, by recognizing and documenting the metadata, my sources can be more reliable and relatable to whichever topic I choose to focus on. Moreover, having a the metadata specifically listed, one can easily “locate” and scrutinize the sources given in the research, which will be helpful in numerous occasions, such as presenting supporting claims or evidence in a scientific argument or research.
Obviously,gathering data in such fashion would bring some extent of disadvantage. Particularly, just as I have previously mentioned, this procedure can be laborious and, sometimes even, painstaking. It would certainly require the user to devote much focus and effort for accomplishing this seemingly simple task. Conversely, such requirement is extremely necessary and felicitous as the benefit of following its instruction still outweighs the cons and one’s effort would eventually pay off and earn him or her great degree of success.
