Tag Archives: research

Is Wikipedia reliable for research? The best way to use it

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

Everyone needs to find information for some purpose. Therefore, everyone does research. This post, however, specifically means research students do for some kind of paper. What role can Wikipedia play in research from elementary school to doctoral dissertations? Some people seem to think that research means looking at Wikipedia articles. Including people who should know better. In 2016, Apple hired Ruslan Salakhutdinov as its first Director of Artificial Intelligence. One announcement quoted him as saying, “We’re working on the idea of trying to use external knowledge bases, If I ask you something about a particular thing, can your system basically go to Wikipedia, read a few different articles, learn some facts about the world, and provide you with the right answer?” Wouldn’t it be more useful for an artificial intelligence program to extract information from professional literature?

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Artificial intelligence and libraries

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I found another tiresome article about how the library is more than books. It mentioned several kinds of new technology in libraries. One especially caught my attention. One library has its own robotics lab. So I wanted to see if any other libraries did. My search for “robots in libraries” instead turned up eye-opening information about artificial intelligence and machine learning. As it turns out, the topics of robots and artificial intelligence are not as unrelated as it might seem. Artificially intelligent robots may actually become library patrons someday! If rubbing shoulders with them seems too much like science fiction, artificial intelligence already poses social benefits and threats. Libraries will have to learn to deal with both.

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Everyone does research: how to do it well

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A friend of mine always asks if I’m behaving, and I always say yes. Whether I’m behaving well or badly is another question. Everyone does research. You do research. Do you do it well or badly? Research comes in all shapes and sizes. Take medical research, for example. Some people work to discover new drugs. Anyone can see that’s research. Doctors read all kinds of information about drugs to know which ones to prescribe for your condition. They might not think of it as research, but it is. You get your medicine and want to know something more than what’s in the documents the pharmacist gave you. So you look at some web sites to find out more about it. That’s research, too.

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What’s a library without books? Some bookless libraries

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by 4

I read about a library without books sometime in the late 1990s, I don’t remember what college or university in New York  had no room in its library for a computer lab. So it opened one in another nearby building it owned and called it a branch library. Why? Because it was staffed with librarians. In principle, it’s not the presence of a book collection that defines a library. A library simply requires librarians. In recent years, however, libraries have experimented with bookless libraries based on digital technology. That is, they have books, just not printed books. How is that likely to work out?  I’m not much impressed by what I’ve read.

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What happens when you need to look it up?

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I wrote this post for anyone who doesn’t know everything off the top of their head. You have to look things up from time to time, don’t you? Once upon a time, we all looked up addresses and phone numbers in a phone book. We probably all still have them. You can still use print to find a wide variety of information, but nowadays, you most likely look things up online more often. What happens between you typing your search query and the results appearing on the screen?

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