Project Evaluation

My searching project was very enlightening to me. I’ve been interested in cybersecurity and privacy issues for a while – ever since I began reading about the work of Edward Snowden to expose privacy violations within our government – and I was very interested to see what I could learn about this controversial and ever evolving topic. Searching through the vastly different databases has shown me how wide reaching this topic can be and how many different disciplines are affected by the need for online security infrastructure. I was very surprised to find that these searches lead me to investigating topics like cyberpsychology – an up and coming field centered on how we interact with the world online – and software standardization.

Searching so many different databases shows that you never really know what you will find in these unique databases. For example, I wasn’t sure what to search in PsycInfo and ended up learning about the previously mentioned field of cyberpsychology. This project put into my arsenal of tools many new databases that I would not have spent much time working with. Now I know how to search in these databases if or when I received a specialized question. Learning more about how to manipulate limiters was also an important element of this course for me. While I always knew they were there, practice makes perfect and having to search so many databases, each with their own set of unique limiters and abilities, really made me aware of what exactly each limiter was doing and how it was affecting my search.