It has been about one week since I chose to write my cultural research paper on Krista Donaldson. I’ve been researching more about her life and the responsibilities of successfully starting and running a non-profit prosthetic limbs company. The most useful sources I found before connecting with librarians were JSTOR and EBSCO. Both databases gave clear and specific information pertaining to my topic. My high school provided these databases so I had prior experience and was comfortable using them already.

When I first chose this topic, I knew nothing about the medical field or prosthetic limbs in particular. I took it upon myself to widen my search from Krista Donaldson to the medial industry. I found a few problems with the way I was wording my search engine questions. I took my concerns to Answerland.org, where many volunteers responded with helpful tools to improve my research.

One thing I struggled with was contacting actual librarians. All of my questions were answered by library volunteers, which ended up being just as helpful. Before this assignment, I had never known about this online website that had library experts waiting to answer questions. A few of the questions I included were,

“What is the best way to narrow down the sources provided from a search engine question?”

“What are the best databases for specific information rather than general?”

“What is the best way to save the information I get from a database?”

Being able to chat with library volunteers was overall very helpful. The majority of the time I was able to get a response with links to various scholarly websites that helped with my search about Krista Donaldson and her invention at D-Rev.

Thanks,

M. Simich