Assignment 2: Exploring the Library Information Landscape

Due date: Friday, September 10, at 11:59 PM

In Assignment 1 you described your personal information landscape: the people and places you go to for information you trust. The class did a great job with this, both in identifying your own trustworthy sources and areas where you don’t feel like you’ve got reliable sources. If your information landscape can be represented as a map, those unknown areas are like the areas that you haven’t yet explored and are thus blank.

This assignment follows on Assignment 1 by asking you to explore the unknown areas of your information landscape.

Right now you’re taking other courses in which you’re learning new information every week, sometimes at a more rapid pace than you can handle. The people you trust in your information landscape aren’t necessarily experts on the subjects you’re learning about. Your professor is an expert but can’t always answer your most detailed questions, and sometimes for a paper or project they will ask you to do research on your own.

That’s where Feinberg Library comes in. The college library should be where you go for reliable information about the new subjects you’re learning about in your courses.

In this assignment you will name a topic that is being covered in one of your courses and explore the library website to begin finding resources on that topic.

To get credit you must do the following:

1. Use your Plattsburgh account to create a new Google Doc.

2. Title your Google Doc in the following way: [Your Last Name] - Assignment 2 - LIB190 WA1. Since my last name is Beatty, my Google Doc would be titled Beatty - Assignment 2 - LIB190 WA1.

3. Name the topic you’re researching, what course it comes from, and why it interests you. For help see:

   • Selecting a Research Topic: Overview — a short guide from MIT Libraries

4. Explore some of the resources available to you via Feinberg Library by searching about your topic in appropriate resources.

   • SUNY Plattsburgh Feinberg Library home page — Begin your research here.
   • Tutorial: Feinberg Library Home Page — To understand the resources you can find via the Feinberg Library home page, read through this short page.
   • SUNY Adirondack library home page and SUNY Adirondack library guide for Plattsburgh students — If you’re working from the branch campus, try these resources too.

5. Write about your process as you go. What resource did you search? What search terms did you use? How useful were your search results?

   • You must search the Find It at Feinberg search box, the Google Scholar search box, and at least one database from the Research Tools page.
   • Use screenshots as you think appropriate to illustrate your process.
   • Whether you use text alone or a combination of text and screenshots, I need to be able to follow your process.
   • Seven Critical Steps to Getting Better Search Results — This page will introduce you to some tips and tricks that work in the Find It at Feinberg search box, in Google and Google Scholar, and our databases.

6. End with a brief reflection on your process. What might you do next if you wanted to continue researching this topic?