WR122 Instructional Session
What are we doing today?
- Sharing our working thesis statements to get a librarian-certified™ database recommendation.
- How to search efficiently in library resources (and how that's different from what we might be used to).
- And then we'll actually search (and learn how to find help when we get stuck)!
Let's share our working thesis statements.
8:30 am class click here and type your working thesis statement in the Google Doc.
10:15 am class click here and type your working thesis statement in the Google Doc.
Some generic, but still librarian-certified™ recommendations include:
10:15 am class click here and type your working thesis statement in the Google Doc.
Some generic, but still librarian-certified™ recommendations include:
- Rolling Stone
- Genius
- Library of Congress
- The search bar on the library homepage to find books, eBooks, streaming videos, encyclopedia entries, and articles (including scholarly articles!). The search bar looks like this:
Let's talk about how to search efficiently.
When you search in a database you want to search only the most important words--I call it Hulkspeak, but you can call it whatever you want! The good news is, you already know how to search in a database if you've used a database like Netflix or Hulu before!
If I type in "I want to watch cooking shows" into Hulu, I get a bunch of stuff--but none of it is relevant to what I want to watch!
If I type in "I want to watch cooking shows" into Hulu, I get a bunch of stuff--but none of it is relevant to what I want to watch!
But if I just type in the most important word, "cooking," I get stuff that's a lot more relevant to what I want to watch!
Once you have your keywords you can start searching.
Sometimes you get too many results, or results that aren't relevant to your search. If you did a search in Amazon, to the left below, to find a phone cover, you might start by typing in "phone cover" as your keywords. From you results, you might then filter your results to only show phone covers for a certain brand, or in a certain price range or color. This allows you to take your results from a lot to a more relevant little.
Same principle in library databases. This may look different depending on where you search, but you will always have filter options by date, source type, language, etc.
Sometimes you get too many results, or results that aren't relevant to your search. If you did a search in Amazon, to the left below, to find a phone cover, you might start by typing in "phone cover" as your keywords. From you results, you might then filter your results to only show phone covers for a certain brand, or in a certain price range or color. This allows you to take your results from a lot to a more relevant little.
Same principle in library databases. This may look different depending on where you search, but you will always have filter options by date, source type, language, etc.
Regardless if we have full text, you'll find a lot of helpful tools available in the library databases. Look for these tools, they are your friends!
Let's start searching (and learn where we might get help)!
Now that you can start searching, you know everything there is to know about researching, right?! Actually, it's totally normal to find yourself getting stumped. There's a lot to this whole research thing! To help you, the library offers a wide range of services. We'll help even if you're not using library resources, you just have to ask!