I found this webpage really interesting because it was a lot of rules that I already follow, but I was not completely sure as to why I follow them.  Someone who can get into college can deduce that certain websites are more credible than others.  For example, you can trust something more when you see it on an “.edu” as compared to a random “.com” site that you came across in a google search and doesn’t even have an author.  What I found interesting about this page, and what made me think what the notion of getting to know the website.  Most of us will just take a glance and base our decisions off of what “looks official”.  We need to see where the sources of this websites information are coming from, who is responsible for putting it on the site and why is it there.  For anyone who did not check out this link than I would suggest that you take a look at the website checklist.  For those of you that are students (oh wait, that’s all of us!) this can be really useful in any future research that you have to do.  It is a step by step thorough evaluation of the website and could cause us to take a second look.  Instead of just looking at the website and making a rushed decision this tool allows you to make an informed choice.  I’m sure that you will find a website that you have an initial reaction towards and after using this tool you may (or may not) form a different opinion.  Either way, it cannot hurt you!

I was getting frustrated with this assignment at first because I was trying very hard to use some of the boolean techniques that we learned about in class on monday.   I started by using google and searching some phrases with key words.  My first search was “op-ed public school teachers” and I was able to find a few hits, but nothing prior to 1970.  I tried to use the date function, but unfortunately once I narrowed it down to before 1970 there was not any hits.  I then moved over to Jstor and tried some key words there, and sorting it by oldest to newest.  There were some hits prior to 1970, but I was having trouble find an op-ed.  There were a lot of great articles, but they were all scholarly sources.

After spending a good 30 minutes on this process I decided to try to find a specific incident first and then try to find the op-ed from there.  On wikipedia I found a page about a New York City teachers strike back in 1968.  FINALLY, after finding this incident I began to search for Op-eds.  I went to the bottom of the page at wikipedia and began searching for articles on the topic.  I found one of them and then logged on using the ProQuest access from the Mason Library.  TASK 1 COMPLETE

I then started working on Task #2.

Since this task was more ambiguous, I decided to go directly into research.  Since using wikipedia had been really successful before, I returned to that website and looked up Solar Power. I found out the first documented case was in the 1860’s.  What I did next was google search “solar power 1860”  and a lot of the hits were about the development of a solar reflector in the 1860’s by french mathematician August Mouchet.  The link to this document is right here! 

Finally, I embarked on the final task in the scavenger hunt! On cloud nine after a successful 2nd task I had high hopes for task number 3.  That was until I read the question.  This one was much more subjective.  In all honesty the first thing that I did was to call my mom, who is a resident of California and ask her if she knew about anything.  Unfortunately, she is not well versed in the history of California voting.  My first plan was to pull out all of the un-needed words from the prompt.  Since voting data was a necessity I used the “+” boolean operation on it to make sure that was included.  That left me with a search of “resource history of California ballot initiatives +voting data”.  From here, I was really confused because this search is much more ambiguous than the previous two searches.  It allows for the readers opinion.  I spent about 15 minutes searching through results and evaluating different outcomes.  I ended up settling on a resource that I found through the University of California Berkeley’s Law School.

Overall I found this project to be interesting and a little frustrating.  Im sure that it wasn’t meant to be easy, but I was thrown off because of the ambiguity of the 3rd topic.  I enjoy that all three required us to use different search tactics and rules that we had learned about in class on Monday.

This week, I have chosen to right about the experience of exploring the ProQuest historical newspaper, and I had a lot of fun exploring around it.  One of the things that I did was look up some major historical events to see if they differed from paper to paper.

The first historical event that I chose to research was the sinking of the S.S. Titanic.    I first looked to the Boston Globe article, and it was immediately attacking the decision of the captain and crew, which I found interesting.  Immediately after breaking the news one of the headlines read “Men allowed to enter first boats to leave ship”.  The article goes on to say how they should have made sure that all women and children were taken away prior to allowing men off of the boat.   For a comparison I looked up the article on the Los Angeles Times and not only was the article much more woeful, but it was significantly shorter and not published until 8 days after the crash.  It is titled “Commends Discipline of Titanic Crew”.

I specifically chose to compare these two websites because one of them was very close to the crash and the final destination (New York City) and the other was on the opposite side of the country.   While I am sure that all Americans were upset with this incident, I think that it probably had a stronger effect on those that were closer.   It also could come down to the writers of the articles.  I didn’t live in  1912, but I am sure that every newspaper and news outlet had a different voice such as they do in modern day.