For class today, we met in the library as the librarian guided us through activities using tinyurl.com websites. The name tinyurl is pretty deceiving if you ask me. Yes the url itself is tiny, but I would kinda just assume the website (articles) it takes me too would be tiny too… and that is not the case.
Anyways, this library session was very helpful for my research project in two very different perspectives.
Perpective #1
From the activities we engaged in learned the difference between a periodical title and an article title, and how to locate them both. When I was exposed to the articles, I practiced “sizing up” on a particular article and periodical in order to determine the articles of most value and importance to my research fairly quickly. Then, I learned how to write/construct a succinct, yet insightful one sentence description the article. This one sentence contained the following three elements:
- Brief description of the article itself
- Brief description of the credentials/background of the authors
- Brief description of the type of periodical
After learning the elements the sentence should contain, I practiced physically writing my own one sentence descriptions, which we then reviewed as a class afterwards to ensure we were doing them correctly.
Perspective #2
By having what I just described in perspective #1 happen, it directly correlated with a lot of the sources I have found. Many of my sources discuss the fact that many students do not have research skills, and if they do, that they don’t know how to properly utilize them. The methods the authors often refer back to is that it is imperative for archivists, librarians, and teachers to properly instruct students how to research so they will be successful in the future. Therefore, by the librarian teaching my classmates and I how to locate sources and formulate them when writing, she is following exactly what the authors of my sources are preaching!
