Library Day Part 1

Today I held my 121 classes in the Willamette Room of the Valley Library. Today's class was designed to familiarize students with the Library of Congress system, help them figure out where a good book for their paper might be, and determine (at least superficially) if a specific book will be useful for them.

I started the lecture with a brief intro to shelf reading. I drew some "books" on the board and had the students figure out how to order them properly on the shelf. This went reasonably well. I'm sure that not everyone was completely following, but enough of the students seemed to get it, and I am certain that none of them had been exposed to this information before. In fact none of them had ever taken a book out of the Valley Library before.

I followed this lesson with a brief overview of where books are located in Valley. They each brought three call numbers they'd looked up the night before, and wrote down the floor where each book would be located next to their call numbers. I then showed them some floor maps and gave them navigation advice. After this, they were turned loose to hunt up some books for 20-25 minutes.

When they returned with their quarry we went over how to use the table of contents and index to get an idea of how useful a book might be. I assured them that a book can be counted as a source even if only a few pages relate to their paper. This seemed to make them feel some relief. Most of them checked out a book or two.

We will be using those books that they checked out in class on Wednesday. During that class we'll get into MLA for books, and I'll set aside some time to address some more specific questions about Summit and ILL which we touched upon only briefly today.

Lesson of the day...Make it UBER EXPLICIT that the ILP/Paper topic cannot be changed after ILP 2. Some student today was trying to make a case for changing his topic because "there isn't enough information". Frankly I know this is a lie. He doesn't know it's a lie, but it is. Almost any topic imaginable has been considered by enough people to make a suitable 121 Paper 2 topic.