Introduction
Ashford university library is a digital library that has been designed to incorporate the physical library such as book, multimedia, magazines and journals. These sources are stored in databases after being formatted into digital form, and are only accessible through a webpage on a computer. The library contains a wide range of materials and is made easy to access and faster. The library is so convenient because one can access the library right from the comfort of their living room. Scholarly and popular sources are all available in the Ashford University Library database.
Difference between scholarly and popular sources
Scholarly articles are a collection of articles written by scholars which include journals and certain books covering on a certain study field and researches. They report on original research experiment to the rest of the scholarly community. Many assignments require scholarly sources to ascertain their originality.
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Popular sources are written by journalists and other professional writers. They include newspapers magazines, websites ad blogs. These sources are not scholarly in nature, though, sometimes they provide reliable information. They are written to cover a certain topic of general interest to inform and entertain the public. The sources are reviewed by an editorial stuff, which is usually for style and format.
When searching for information from the Ashford University Library database, one should always remember that the searches are better than searching on the internet, in that it is more accurate. Internet searches only give general results based on the popularity. Also, some post is just posted on the internet with no reliable information thus misleading the learner. The Ashford University library uses search engines which give accurate results for the search. They retrieve the information based on the command you give, unlike the internet which has information hidden in thousands of pages and are tedious for the learner to get the exact information required, amidst the many results that it gives.
When using the library, it is also important to remember that the database does not guess what one wants to search and only gives the results as per the command. This means that the learner only needs to enter the keywords of the topic. Because of this nature, one cannot type a whole sentence or question, since it searches for the sequence of the words entered. This may lead to no result found since the word matches are sometimes difficult to find. This is why people are reminded to look for the key phrase in the sentence or question and use it to search.
Conclusion
The Ashford University library has, to a bigger extent made studying and research easier for learners as it has an easy way and process of accessing their database, which is complemented with the sophistication of the search engine to give the best and accurate result in one go. The technology used in accessing the information is much better that searching the internet. This is because the publishers often lock the high-quality publication, and only makes them accessible through subscription, unlike the internet whereby anyone can publish anything.
