Research Project
Table of Contents
This course has one major assignment, which is broken up into several components due over the course of the semester. This assignment requires you to:
explore the field of Information & Library Science, and
develop strategies to retrieve information, evaluate the information retrieved, and use that information to respond to a question.
This one assignment is a research paper, and the components into which this assignment is broken up are the smaller steps that you must go through to research and write a research paper (this or any other research paper).
You will develop a question of interest to you in the field of Information & Library Science. Then, you will explore (i.e., examine, evaluate, and use) various sources to retrieve information relevant to your question. Finally, you will critique your information sources in portfolio entries, list your sources in a bibliography, and assemble the information into a brief report responding to the question.
The final deliverables for this assignment are:
A journal of your research question's development: This should include your first and second question drafts, any subsequent question drafts, discussions of the development of your question, your responses to my feedback on your drafts, or basically anything you have to say about why your question evolved as it did.
A report exploring (and answering, if there is an answer) your research question.
A portfolio of the 3 source evaluations that you wrote during the semester.
An annotated bibliography of all of the sources that yield useful information, that you actually cite in your report.
Some of these deliverables are due throughout the semester (three source evaluations, two question drafts, and a partridge in a pear tree). See the descriptions for these assignments in the Assignments section on Blackboard. These intermediate deliverables will be graded when they are submitted. The final report will be graded separately from these intermediate deliverables.
The final report should include all intermediate deliverables. Let me repeat that: your final report should contain everything that you have handed in all semester, plus additional material. The final report should be submitted as one file.
Note: If you want to revise anything that you have handed in previously in the semester for the final report, please do so. But make a note in your final report of what was revised.
The final report is due the week following the final class session for this course. There is no final exam for this course.
See the description for this assignment in the Assignments section on Blackboard.
When you have chosen your topic, after you have submitted your first question draft & I have given you some feedback on it, you will discuss your topic in class in a brief presentation: what your topic is, the scope of your topic (as best as you understand it, given that you will have just started working on it), why you chose that topic, why it's interesting to you.
This presentation should be very brief. I mean it. I want to have all of these presentations happen in one class session. Classes that meet twice a week, like this one, have 75-minute class sessions. This course usually has an enrollment of around 20, which, if you do the math, means that everyone gets 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
This presentation is not at all formal. You do not have to use Powerpoint; I actually discourage you from using it unless there's something that you just can't talk about in any other way. You should just talk. It may help to write yourself some notes or bullet items to talk from.
See the description for this assignment in the Assignments section on Blackboard.
See the description for this assignment in the Assignments section on Blackboard.
You will hand in three of these source evaluations during the semester: one each on a website, a reference source, and a database.
The response to your research question should be developed as a brief formal report. The report should integrate the knowledge acquired from the sources consulted, citing each source as appropriate. The report should be understandable to others with an interest in Information Science. You are encouraged to post early versions of your report to the Blackboard discussion boards for comment, but you are responsible for any revisions and/or editing.
The report should be a 3-4 page paper (double-spaced). The report should explore (and answer, if there is an answer) your research question.
All sources that you use in answering your research question should be clearly cited in the report. This page contains a good overview of how to create citations in text. You must cite a source if you quote directly from it, but also if you simply use an idea from it.
There are many ways of making use of a source in a paper, but they all boil down to two basic ideas: direct quotes and summarizing. A quote is an actual passage from another person's writing, that you include in your own writing. When you quote a source, you must put the quotation inside "quotation marks," and cite the source by indicating the author, date, and page number (if applicable) that the quotation comes from. The author Isaac Asimov, for example, has this to say about using other people's writing in your own:
"... you must understand how learned books are written in case you ever want to write a learned book. First thing you do is get a thousand references, chosen at random... You then put them into the book, in the order you reach them... And stick two or three lines of your own between each of them to act as mortar... And you're all set" (Asimov, 1974).
No really, he's kidding. On the other hand, a summary of someone else's writing is just that, a summary. It's not a direct quote, but you're using an idea from the other person's writing. When you summarize someone else's writing, you still need to provide a citation to the work that the idea came from. For example, I believe that in order to be a well-informed person in the information age, you must possess information literacy skills, and so I have designed this course as Shapiro and Hughes (1996) suggest, as the foundation of an entire educational curriculum based on information.
Of course, once you cite a source, you must include that source in your bibliography. You'll notice that there is no bibliography at the end of this page, so how are you to know what the heck Shapiro and Hughes (1996) is all about and if I'm citing their ideas accurately or misrepresenting them? How would you find that piece of writing, unless I told you where to find it? (BTW, Shapiro and Hughes is the assigned reading for the first day of class: see the Schedule.)
The report should be submitted via the Blackboard drop box, and also posted to the forum named Final Reports on the bulletin board.
An annotated bibliography must be included with the report, which must include all of the sources that you use in writing your report. These sources may be books, journal or magazine or newspaper articles, webpages, videotapes, whatever... in other words, the sources from which you are getting the content that you are using to answer your research question. These sources should not be databases, websites, etc... in other words, not the places where you found these sources.
The bibliography must be annotated: in other words, for each item in the bibliography, you must write a corresponding description of the item. These descriptions should be a paragraph or so in length, and must include the same type of information that you include in your source evaluations, only shorter: how you found the source, how you searched within the source, what information you gleaned from the source that was useful to you, the criteria by which you evaluated the source. If you use any of the sources that you evaluated for your 3 source evaluations in your final report, you do not need to write a new annotation for those.
While the number of items included in the bibliography will vary from topic to topic (i.e., student to student), each bibliography must contain at least 6 high-quality resources. At least 2 sources should be print and at least 2 should be electronic. Each information resource should be cited in American Psychological Association (APA) format. The bibliography should be organized alphabetically, by author's last name.
APA is the citation format most commonly used in the social sciences. If you are not familiar with this format, you should look at the APA Publication Manual, 5th edition, which is in nearly every library on campus. The following links may be helpful with this format:
This page contains a good overview of APA citation style for print sources.
The APA maintains a website about how to cite electronic sources.
Many sources have both print and electronic versions − for example, many dictionaries, encyclopedias, magazines, and journals. These dual-media sources can count as either a print or an electronic source in your bibliography, but not both. Make note in your source evaluation of the media in which you are using the source, and the unique features of that source in that media, which set it apart from that source in the other media.
Criteria Used to Evaluate this Assignment
This assignment will be evaluated based on the quality of the portfolio entries (evaluations and search strategies), the annotated bibliography, the quality of the final report, and the completeness of the portfolio. The documentation of the question evolution will be used only to clarify the selection of sources and the final report.
Each portfolio entry should provide evidence that you have closely examined and evaluated the source, that you have developed an effective strategy (or strategies) for searching the source (using the explanatory and supporting material provided by the source), and that you have gleaned from the source the information that is pertinent to your question.
The final report should be a clear, focused, well-integrated discussion responding to the research question in its final form. Appropriate sources, including a mix of electronic and print sources, should be clearly cited in the final report.
Points:
2 drafts of the question: 5 points each = 10
3 source evaluations: 10 points each = 30
Report & bibliography: 25