Tag Archives: library

File Me

Source: Giphy “As of right now we’re re-entering the library.”

Okay, so we (my class and I, though I assume you know that by now) have once again visited the great lands of the library to learn about annotated bibliographies. Please take note however, that we turned in our annotated bibliography assignment the day that we went to the library.

[Cue X-files theme.]

But anyways, I don’t know if I necessarily learned anything from this library session, mostly because the last time we were there our ‘bonus round’ game was basically what this session taught. Okay, that was a little wordy. What I mean is: we repeated the activity that I got to do last time we visited the library. Bonus though, Gail (the very helpful and very grandma-chic librarian) still had candy.

What we did however, was helpful in that it was review. The activities which Gail tasked to us were essentially the things that we had to do in our annotated bibliographies. We had to take into account what the content of our article was, who the author was, and how the context of both the article/author affected how we read/summarized our sources. So yeah, while nothing was new, it was still applicable for future projects.

Pop Goes the Article

Beginning my search for an article related to my argumentative topic: undergraduates and archives/archival research, though my professor had informed me that this topic was recently of great interest to many scholars, I more so expected there to be great difficulty. After applying the skills that I learned in our previous library session, using the keyword: archives and the phrase “undergraduate student”, I honestly expected no relevant sources to appear. Essentially, I expected this:

Source: Giphy

But actually there were so many articles, relevant, articles that popped up that I had a hard time narrowing my choices down. Eventually I settled on Silivia Vong’s “A Constructivist Approach for Introducing Undergraduate Students to Special Collections and Archival Research”, which had been published in the journal RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, & Cultural Heritage. The article itself focuses on methods for how to introduce/education undergrads to archival research, which is right up my alley.

So while I expected to use more of the lessons taught by the tutorial provided by my professor, found here, my article search went very smoothly!

[Insert Arthur episode on visiting the library]

 

Source: A. Raymond

Just a quick post about the prevalence of research across disciplines, and how schools focus on cultivating researching skills in students, but more importantly, about visiting the library for help on researching. Above is e-flier that students at my university – that includes me – recently received. The email itself describes how student at the university’s business school can contact one of our university’s librarians for help with business research.

Now, this past Tuesday, my class took a trip to the library for that exact reason. We met with this very cute grandma-esque librarian who had us play a series of research-based games. Through these games we learned how to use the databases available to us, how to efficiently search (using phrases and asterisks and the works), and how to write quick descriptions of articles that we might come across in our research process.

I don’t know if the business students are going to be playing any games, or if they are even going to be searching through databases. (Spoiler alert: I’m not a business student, I’m apparently not that interested in the stability of my financial future enough.) But, they are using the resources available to them – librarians – in order to cultivate their researching skills, just like we did this week.

Source: Giphy