Back in my time in New York University I had a lecturer, Michael Warnham. When Micheal had something of major importance to say, he would merely repeat it in the conversation. No change of tone or no change of pitch, simply repeat the item during the normal course of the conversation, simply repeat the item during the normal course of the conversation. This was very effective as it meant that you had to listen intently.
On receiving this assignment I decided on the Jstor database and the British Broadcasting Corporation website as my two sources. As with any comparative situation, we must first lay out parameters as a standard to equate them with. So I logged on to the internet and opened the Jstor.org website and bbc.co.uk to see what they offer.
I picked two keywords ‘ONLINE’ and ‘DATABASE’. Despite the fact that both BBC and Jstor are in existence around the same time, Jstor database came into existence in 1995 while the BBC took their bbc.co.uk service online in 1997. The difference is the former is an search engine for academic writings while the latter is a derivative of the BBC’s own news journalism desk.
My experience with the BBC website is entirely a more familiar experience as I logged into it on a daily basis. I find it well designed and accessible with a high journalistic content. The standard that one would expect from them. The BBC use of a three column grid is similar to Jstor’s. Their aesthetic is masterful, clean and concise with a bold use of colour combined with good typographic treatment. Jstor’s on the other hand is functional, clearly appealing to a different market
While the BBC site search engine returned seventy three hits, broken into four main categories, News, Blog, Learning and TV/Radio. JStor returned 29,500 results to a search with the same key words, split into fifty nine separate categories. From this we must deduce that they are searching entirely different areas of the net. Jstor reaches much deeper into the web through a secure portal, as opposed to the BBC’s universal access option.
During my long absence from academia, a lot of things have changed. Libraries in my day were stuffy rooms full of silence. As I accessed Jstor from the comforts of my own terminal, the implications of what a modern research database can be dawned on me. I felt like a pre-Christian goat herder on the steps of the Library of Alexandria gazing in, another Rubicon crossed on the eternal quest for enlightenment.
The BBC is a cornerstone for Her Majesty’s empire, they are in fact the world oldest national broadcaster. As a news source it is seen as a fair well informed opinion, although there is no doubt that is stance is conservative and in spite of a Royal charter, it is a privately owned autonomous institution.
In many ways British society stands for much I believe in. As a legacy to their empire ‘where the sun never sets’, there is a multi-ethnic society of much political correctness to which the BBC supplies fair comment too.
While my search of the BBC site seemed to return a concise search of it’s own matter from contemporary sources, the corresponding return from Jstor revealed just the tip of the iceberg, it would require more decisions of refine precisely what I was looking for.
On which database to rely on for answers would depend on a number of overriding factors. In an effort to be objective with the comparison we must compare apple with apples. In terms of data returned, they are both are effective but the Jstor results are of course deeper in the web as one needs an academic motive to access it, thus needing a lot more involvement from the recipient.
At the turn of the century Time magazine did a series of surveys to find out the impact on society of a number of topics during the last millennium. The result of the greatest invention category was ‘Gutenberg's movable type’ for its contribution to dissemination of information. With assets like Jstor this takes on and entirely new meaning.
The fact that Jstor results are in PDF format allows for much greater applications for the information returned. Operations such as OCR (optical character recognition), annotation and encryption are native to it’s format. PDF files can also be reverse engineered, if required, bearing this in mind the singularity draws ever closer, the singularity draws ever closer.
No comments:
Post a Comment