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Consider Your Resource Options
Step 4
The resources you use will depend upon your assignment.
What types of materials are needed?
- Books
- Magazine articles
- Newspaper articles
- Scholarly journal articles
- Web site
- Other materials, such as statistics, government publications
What is the date of the needed materials?
- Current/Contemporary materials (written at or about the time an event occurred)
- Retrospective materials (written after an event occurs and "looks back")
What is your research time frame?
- GIL Express loan of books between University System of Georgia libraries and a few other Georgia libraries takes approximately three days.
What subjects/discipline cover your topic?
- Humanities includes all of the arts
- Sciences include the "hard" sciences, such as chemistry and medicine
- Social Sciences include the "soft" sciences, such as political science
- Does the topic cover one or more subjects?
Examples of subjects: history, English, psychology, etc.
Some topics may be interdisciplinary, meaning they may be addressed in several subjects or disciplines. Consider the topic of "Students with AIDS in the Classroom." The topic will obviously be covered in education. But you might also want to look at the emotional impact on the student who has AIDS. For this type of information, you can look at psychology materials. You may be interested in laws that deal with the treatment of students with AIDS. For that information, you can look at political science/legal materials.
The resource you choose depends upon what you're looking for. It will be harder to find an eyewitness account in a book, but easier in a newspaper. It may be hard to find a specific statistic on the Web, but easy to find it in a statistics reference book. To know what you're looking for you need to understand the flow of information, which is covered in depth in Unit 1 "Welcome to the Information Age".
WANT MORE on The Flow of Information?
> Unit 1 > Welcome to the Information Age
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