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The College
of St. Scholastica Library Lab
Worksheet
Two: The Reference Collection |
The Reference Collection is the
intellectual toolbox of the scholar. If you have ever worked on a house
you know that having the right tool can make the difference between completing
a project in a timely manner with ease, or spending hours in frustration.
Or, if you have ever had the pleasure of being a gardener, you know that
shovels are for digging, but different shovels have different sized and
shaped blades, with longer or shorter handles, which are used for digging
different types of holes in different types of soil - yet they are all
shovels.
During your time at CSS you
will be working on intellectual "projects," and at times you are going
to need to do some intellectual digging. The Reference Collection is where
you should begin. It houses many intellectual tools - dictionaries, subject
encyclopedias, atlases, biographical sources, indexes, chronologies - all
of which have specialized purposes for specialized tasks. Learning to use
these (or even to think of using them before you head off to a computer)
can make the difference between completing your project in a timely manner
or hours of frustration.
| Three
Testimonials for Using the Reference Collection (based on true stories) |
A psychology student interested
in a graduate degree in psychology with an emphasis on the study of aging
spent three hours on the Internet looking for schools which offered a program
that matched his interest. After much frustration, he managed to find three.
Each year the CSS Library purchases a copy of Graduate Study in Psychology
[Ref. BF77 .G73 2002]. A one-minute walk to the shelf, and another minute
examining the index, yielded a list of 26 schools, along with current contact
information, tuition rates, etc.
A professor has assigned students
the task of finding a copy of a treaty between Native Americans and the
United States Government. The professor supplies a URL of a new website
that alleges to have the full-text of all treaties available. Try as the
student might, she cannot access the site (presumably, problems with the
server). The student comes to the library. In the Indian Reference Resource
collection there are five different works that contain the texts of all
the treaties between Native Americans and the U.S. Government (and also
from the time before there was a U.S. Government) arranged by time period,
geographical region, and tribe. It took the student only a few minutes
to locate a treaty of interest and to make a photocopy of it.
A professor has handed out an
extra credit question in his economics class. Where does the term "bear
market" come from? Again, after hours searching the Internet, the
student finally contacts a librarian as a "last resort." The librarian
immediately guides the student to the section of the Reference Collection
where the specialized dictionaries are shelved. Brewer's Dictionary
of Phrase and Fable (one of the standard, authoritative works on the
history of words & phrases) held the answer, after only a few minutes
of searching. |
Of course, not all stories work
out so nicely as the ones listed above. Sometimes it takes hours of digging
to find an answer. Sometimes the answer cannot be found at all. But questions
have been asked long before there were computers, and the Reference Collection
was created, and is still maintained, as a source for answering them.
| Getting
Started with the Reference Collection |
This worksheet will focus on one
type of work in the Reference Collection -- the subject encyclopedia. Subject
encyclopedias offer authoritative, background information with a list of
other books and articles than you can use to build your research with.
Use this worksheet to gather
background information for your paper and, through the bibliography attached
to the article you find, to start creating a list of sources you can use
for further research on your topic.
The Lab examples will show how
you can go about finding the information you need for your research paper.
The Lab will be using the following paper topic for examples –
Midwife-assisted births were
the norm for thousand of years until the beginning of the 20th century
when birthing moved from the home to the hospital, under the supervision
of a medical professional. In the last thirty years midwife-assisted births
have been making a comeback. Is birth a “natural” process, or one that
need medical intervention? Why are women choosing this alternative? Is
a midwife assisted birth safe?
Let's see if we can gather
different types of information to try and answer these questions.
Continue
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