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The Research Assignment

  Students today have access to so much information that they need to weigh the reliability of sources. Any resource – print, human, or electronic – used to support your research inquiry has to be evaluated for its credibility and reliability. In other words, you have to exercise some quality control over what you use. When you use the print and multimedia materials found in your college library, your evaluation task is not so complicated because librarians have already established the credibility and appropriateness of those materials for academic research. The marketplace forces publishers to be discriminating as well.

  Data collected in interviews of persons whose reliability is not always clearly established should be carefully screened, especially if you present this material as expert opinion or as based on knowledge of your topic. And you may have even more difficulty establishing trustworthiness for electronic sources, especially Web and Internet sources.

  Because the Internet and World Wide Web are easy to use and accessible, Web material is volatile – it changes, becomes outdated, or is deleted. Its lack of consistency and sometimes crude form make Web information suspect for people who use it for research. Because there is frequently no quality control over Web information, you must critically evaluate all the material you find there, text and graphics alike.

(http://www.umuc.edu/writingcenter/onlineguide/ chapter4-07.cfm-27.10.2013. Adaptado)

Everyone keeps data. Big organizations spend millions to look after their payroll, customer and transaction data. The penalties for getting it wrong are severe: businesses may collapse, shareholders and customers lose money, and for many organizations (airlines, health boards, energy companies), it is not exaggerating to say that even personal safety may be put at risk. And then there are the lawsuits. The problems in successfully designing, installing, and maintaining such large databases are the subject of numerous books on data management and software engineering. However, many small databases are used within large organizations and also for small businesses, clubs, and private concerns. When these go wrong, it doesn't make the front page of the papers; but the costs, often hidden, can be just as serious.

 Where do we find these smaller electronic databases? Sports clubs will have membership information and match results; small businesses might maintain their own customer data. Within large organizations, there will also be a number of small projects to maintain data information that isn't easily or conveniently managed by the large system-wide databases. Researchers may keep their own experiment and survey results; groups will want to manage their own rosters or keep track of equipment; departments may keep their own detailed accounts and submit just a summary to the organization's financial software.

Most of these small databases are set up by end users. These are people whose main job is something other than that of a Computer professional. They will typically be scientists, administrators, technicians, accountants, or teachers, and many will have only modest skills when it comes to spreadsheet or database software. 

The resulting databases often do not live up to expectations. Time and energy is expended to set up a few tables in a database product such as Microsoft Access, or in setting up a spreadsheet in a product such as Excel. Even more time is spent collecting and keying in data. But invariably (often within a short time frame) there is a problem producing what seems to be a quite simple report or query. Often this is because the way the tables have been set up makes the required result very awkward, if not impossible, to achieve. 

A database that does not fulfill expectations becomes a costly exercise in more ways than one. We clearly have the cost of the time and effort expended on setting up an unsatisfactory application. However, a much more serious problem is the unability to make the best use of valuable data. This is especially so for research data. Scientific and social researchers may spend considerable money and many years designing experiments, hiring assistants and collecting and analyzing data, but often very little thought goes into storing it in an appropriately designed database. Unfortunately, some quite simple mistakes in design can mean that much of the potential information is lost. The immediate objective may be satisfied, but unforeseen uses of the data may be seriously compromised. Next year's grant opportunities are lost.