To continue the conversation and see how research librarians can work with you and your course, please feel free to contact us:
Rose Beranis, Wellness Librarian & Experiential Learning Coordinator
Susan Chatham, Research Librarian
Amy Harrell, Head of Collections, Research, & Instruction
Jeff Liszka, Humanities Librarian
or...
Learn more about instruction and activity options.
Request a research instruction workshop/activity.
Short Description:
This workshop introduced students to academic (scholarly/peer-reviewed) and popular sources and how each may be discovered and used within academic research. Students were assigned a research project to investigate scholarly and popular sources center on a topic of their choice. Most topics were focused around current events. Students also learned about the difference between academic "conversations" between scholars in scholarly writing, and writing for a general, popular audience in news sources and other popular online material. Lastly, students saw some searching demonstrations in academic databases and popular websites.
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This session was for an International Studies Senior Seminar but is adaptable and appropriate for all course levels and disciplines. For their final assignment, the students in the seminar were expected to write a 20-25 page research paper. The professor requested a session that included strategies for pre-research and finding scholarly articles. One integral strategy is to develop a set of keyword/search terms. Students often struggle with developing relevant keywords and search terms. In this workshop, we discussed building an effective body of search terms. With a worksheet provided, students began the construction of their set of keyword/search terms, and then had an opportunity to employ them by searching for scholarly and peer-reviewed articles in a library database best suited for their topics.
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This session was for the international studies senior seminar. For their final assignment, students were expected to write a 20-25 page research paper. The professor requested a session that included strategies for pre-research and finding scholarly articles. In this workshop, students learned about the beginning steps in the research process (pre-research). We examined initial investigations into topics discussing methods of gathering general context through sources like Wikipedia, Google and various websites that might be relevant to their topics. Then we translated those initial steps into searches to build develop keywords and search terms related to their topics.
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This was a workshop for summer research students in the Chemistry department. The workshop was designed as a hands-on introduction to Zotero, a freely available citation and source management software. Prior to the session we asked that students download and install the Zotero standalone and Chrome connector (in Chrome or Firefox only), to create a Zotero account, and to verify their email. In the workshop we looked at the functions of Zotero in terms of creating folders to organize material, capturing and adding material from databases to the folders, tagging and adding notes to their sources as well as sharing material in Zotero Groups with other Zotero users. Lastly we learned about creating citations and/or bibliographies sources in one's Zotero folder library.
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