One of the elements of graduating from SAMS is the completion and submission of a monograph. I'll talk a lot more about this over the next several months as my experience morphs, but the last two days during the introduction week, I can't express how much dialogue my class has received about the monograph. While there is no shortage of hints and advice, one piece that I've been considering is how researching and constructing a monograph of publishable quality in 2012 differs significantly from one that would have been researched and conducted in, say, 1992.
Despite having a massive library less than a half mile from my home on Fort Leavenworth, this crazy, yet likely unknown-to-most tool called "Google Scholar" is great. A few thoughts: 1-search everything from one place, 2-locate it locally, regionally, or via retail, 3-get a strong vibe for the scholarly literature in just about any subject and topic.
Final thought: Does a tool like this, seemingly simple to those of us in 2012 who've used Google for quite a few years, create a "Well, back in my day, research was hard" narrative from those who did research in, say, 1992?
Or, in 2032, will global information and knowledge management be pushed beyond anything we can imagine that I will in fact generate that same "get off my lawn" type of narrative?
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