Sunday, September 1, 2013

A500.3.4.RB_Powell Exploring the Hunt Library

Exploring the Hunt Library

Embry Riddle Aeronautical University has many avenues, tools, and applications available for its students. From their physical campuses to the World Wide Online community ERAU offers access to state of the art resources. The Hunt Library is one resource that has helped me learn and grow as an Eagle.

Taking its name from one of EARU's earliest presidents, Jack R. Hunt, this online library offers access to thousands of articles, books, journals, DVDs, links, and services from online "Ask a Librarian" to research guides. The library offers a search engine on its main page that provides hits to key words and topics. Similar to other online search engines like Google or Bing thousands of matches to key words pop up from a search request, but Hunt differs in a very important way. Hunt Library provides a very specific collection of the links to articles, books, journals, and documents within its database. While Google searches the entire web for key words Hunt keeps you on track with scholarly references. In other words, Hunt Library lets you become the librarian!

For example, this week in my course of study I had to research Organizational Leadership. First, strictly out of habit, I Googled this topic and got 34 million hits (in .18 seconds!). That sounds like more than enough material to thoroughly gather information, but let's be honest, I won't venture beyond more than the second page of links. Also, I got links to universities, Wikipedia, ads to apply to Masters programs (sorry already in one), and other sites that wouldn't really help me in my quest. Now, entering the same search criteria in the Hunt Library resulted in 320,648 hits. This is still more than I will use for my research, but Hunt offers me a way to filter out mediums or refine my search criteria. I could search newspaper articles, dissertations, magazines, or books. I could use these field independently of each other or group them together for a more broad reference bank. Google didn't offer that!

Overall, I am truly lucky to have any of this information at my finger tips. Hunt Library offers me, and all Eagles out there, a very real and functional research system. My goal in taking this course of study is to better my self as a person, student, and ultimately a leader. Having the Hunt Library in my tool box definitely will help me get there.

Library on my people... library on!

JP

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