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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
Existence of
Search
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 /
(1) Consider what type of
information resource best meets
Navigation
your needs.
(2) Determine what content best
meets your needs.
(3) Teach you how to get your hands
on the material.
Selection

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