Selection Materials

The selection tools portion of our project was very interesting.  The 2 sources that I examined - perma picks (print) and curled up with a good book (web) - I would not consider overly helpful.  There were some positives from both but also negatives.  With the web based site - a monthly “e-zine” - the reviews were very detailed and well written but the writer could be anyone - there’s no way to know the credentials of the reviewers because anyone can submit a review sample to the e-zine’s editors. The e-zine did seem unbiased - positive and negative reviews were accepted - which was a positive. The “Perma Picks” catalog was my print source that I got from the media coordinator here at the school that I work for.  She uses it alot which I can understand because the information inside is very well organized and up-to-date, and very concise.  Concise almost to the point of not giving enough information.  The catalog gives only annotations for each material but does have a section called “starred reviews” where it tells you if there are positive reviews available at certain reviewing agencies for that material.  I suppose this would be a good source if you had zero time to do research as a media coordinator and needed to make quick decisions on selections (assuming you trusted their organization and the way they organized their top picks.)  I think that I would have a really hard time using either of these sources to base selections on because of the lack of information.  Actually, after thinking about it more, I am going to have a hard time choosing materials that I can not examine personally...but I suppose with repeated good experience from certain sources, you can feel more comfortable with their recommendations and your own decision making.