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Preliminaries

Preliminaries

• Resource page(s)

• Library Web page

Information wants to be easy to access.

Our expectations as consumers of information are constantly evolving.

Time

SearchExistence of Information

What am I looking for?

What types of information best meet my needs?

What are my professor’s expectations?

Do the resources I have access to meet the criteria for scholarly

research?

My Goals: Skills / Navigation

Selection

(1) Consider what type of information resource best meets your needs.

(2) Determine what content best meets your needs.

(3) Teach you how to get your hands on the material.

Introduction to a topic.

Encyclopedias and Reference Works

Used for fact checking, quick, and authoritative definition or summarization of a topic.

Encyclopedias

• Encyclopedia Britannica– Online

– Print (1998)

• Gale Virtual Reference Library– International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

(2nd ed., 2008) - online

– Encyclopedia of Population• Online (2003) or Print (2003)

Research Game Strategy

FIND:

(1) Enough (not too many) sources.

(1) High quality (scholarly) sources.

Finding Articles

Finding Articles

• Social Science Index with Full Text

– Getting your hands on the article

• JSTOR

– Navigating the result set

Finding Books

Finding Books

Standard tool is the catalog.

• Voyager – books in the HWS library

• WorldCat – books in many other libraries

Supplementary tools:

• Interlibrary Loan (ILL)

• Google Books

Exercise:

Cousin Marshall by Harriet Martineau