j’s scratchpad

It’s that time of year when I speak to a journalism class about doing research. In two hours, I should cover a lot of the basics and important stuff, like specific sources, public records, what resources are available through their local libraries (Gary Price shared a great anecdote about this during his talk), using libraries and archives (Thanks for the really cool archives link, Garrett!), some hints on running good searches, and how to evaluate resources. I will probably talk about blogs, feeds, and Wikipedia–not just because I’m into them, but because they can be risky sources.

When the instructor and I were parsing out what I should cover, we discussed how some of the students might not be too ready to ask for help with their class assignments because of just the general hesitancy some people have about asking for help and some students might think asking for help with the assignments is cheating. I’m going to remind them–at least I hope it’s a reminder–that librarians are here to help people.

Any one want to remind me what else I should cover?

I don’t think I’ve posted my outline here in the past, but I might do it this year.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 10:24 am and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.