Study Task 1 - Research Sources

 Although I didn't look into each piece of research in too much detail during this task, I feel like I have some good sources to refer back to at a later date when needed. Some of the research processes and tools were a lot easier than others, taking a fraction of the time and ending up with better results. The library for example is one of the best resources, providing plenty of good quality material in one place. The illustration and design sections in particular had a wealth of books all covering or touching on the purposes of illustration and how it can be defined. The internet was another good starting point, if used correctly and carefully. It is easy to get lost down a rabbit hole of links and articles that in the end aren't all that useful or relevant, however the volume of material provided online cannot be matched anywhere else. Although the reliability of the sources online can be questionable, it is a good place to go for a variety of different opinions and thoughts surrounding illustration, and not just those that are decidedly important by a publisher. Google Books had some okay sources on, although a lot of them you only get to see a preview of a select few pages of each publication. It's good in that it has a variety of bookstore library may not have, the amount on it is broad, however it is not the easiest to search on and is basically a worst version of having a physical book in front of you. By far the worse in my opinion from what I experienced in this task were JStor and Google Scholar. I don't know if I was just searching wrong or not including enough key words, but the search engine on both of them was quite poor meaning every search brought up useless and irrelevant results. I think they just take the words you search and find any article with that word featured, causing a lot of scientific and economic articles following an 'illustration' search. So much so that I couldn't find 3 quality sources from either in an appropriate amount of time. I can imagine it would be good for finding maybe older or more obscure sources, as the results seemed to be those which may not show up on a standard google search, but for general research sources it wasn't that impressive.