WRIT 100-13: LIBRARY RESEARCH

Mackenzie Brooks

Assistant Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian

English Department Liaison

brooksm@wlu.edu // Leyburn M37

October 21, 2015

Get out your library/research anxiety now.

http://goo.gl/forms/YZwSpXbZhs

By the end of this session, you will...

1. Understand how a library works.

2. Be able to "search everything."

3. No longer fear information overload.

By the end of this session, you will...

How the Library Works

How the Library Works

Collections + People

https://www.flickr.com/photos/8601342@N03/4549779936/

Libraries Before the Internet

Libraries After the Internet

Search Everything is:

• a discovery tool/system/service
• something we pay for
• potentially biased
• one of the best of its kind
• still not perfect
• constantly changing

Everything =

• 384,267 e-books
• 94,735 e-journals
• 513,255,675 records
• 975,050 catalog items (mostly print)
• 1.5 billion citations
• 90 content types

Remember

You have to tell Search Everything that you know what you're looking for.

A word on Google Scholar...

Information overload

https://xkcd.com/1227/

Information overload is not new.

Filters change over time.

Filters come in many forms.

Zotero is your friend.

library.wlu.edu/zotero