Searching for Books and Evaluating them..

 

The thing that worried me the most about that topic is that it is recent. I was afraid of not finding any interresting book about it. However, I gave it a try and I logged in to see the library catalog. I was thinking that it was impossible that such a huge library with so many new articles and books every semester does not contain a book about our reasearch topic. I entered the key word and several titles appeared. Most of them were not really related to the topic, but I wrote down the call number of two or three of them. After that, I went to the library to have a more specific idea about those books.

When I finally located them, I cannot express how happy and surprised I was when I found so many other books dealing with that subject.There were three full shelves of so many books! But then, I realised that I could not take all of those with me. I only have the right to take 6 books maximum. How am I supposed to choose between so many interesting books ? I decided to do the first selection according to the title, so I looked for titles that seemed to me the closest to my research topic. But still, there was too many of them and could not read all of them. Therefore, I decided to look at the table of content and to stop searching if I found what I was looking for. This way, I was only left with 5 of them, then I chose 3 of the 5 to check them out. There was one that seemed to be the most interesting.

It was Dhillon, gurpreet. Social Responsibility in the Information Age: Issues and Controversies. Idea group, 2002. The author is an MIS professor at the University of Nevada. He is an authority in the subject because he conducted a lot of research and he earned degrees in the Management Information System Field. There was also another 22 authors that collaborated with him. The book was published by 'Idea Group' which is a commercial publisher. However, I do not this that the author's affiliation with the publisher biased their work because it is an independent and private publisher company that is not related to the subject the author is talking about. Since the book was published in 2002, it discusses the idea of Information Age from a recent perspective. Therefore, I can use it for current information context. The intended audience are all people interested in the subject. However, I think it is written for someone with little knowledge about the subject rather than for an expert because according to the table of contents, it goes step by step in defining the subject. I think the purpose of this book is to inform the interrested audiences about the social responsibility we have in this new age. I think so because it is stating facts that are true and people can test that. The authors gathered the information from other authors' books. There is a bibliography at the end of evert chapter. It is important to know the author's sources because they give us an idea about the author's reliability. According to all of the above, I still think this book is useful for my research because it deals with the subject of my research. The chapters I think I will use are mainly chapter 6: priacy andd the Internet and chapter 5: internet privacy: Interpreting Key issues. I think those are the most related chapters to my research .

First mission accomplished, the rest is to come ;)