WRITING 115, Paul Montone. SE Center, Winter 2009

paul.montone@pcc.edu
Librarian: Tony Greiner.
Cascade Library Phone Number: 503-978-5269. refer@pcc.edu

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Assignment on American Icons.

Objectives:

1. Make students aware of magazine article collections available in libraries.
2. Expose them to boolean search terms
3. Help them with citation headaches. ("Take two MLAs and call me in the morning.")

 

INSPIRATION.

Need help identifying an icon? Use Google and type "American Icons". There are several good sites that list them and have examples.

DOING YOUR RESEARCH.

You will need to have 3 or 4 sources on how your icon has been used over time. To start, I recommend a magazine article collection called Masterfile. You can find it by clicking on "Databases by Title" in the gray bar on the right side of this page, and then scroll down and select "Masterfile Premier."

1. In the first search box, put in the name of your icon. If it is two words (Uncle Sam) put it in quotation marks "Uncle Sam."

2. In the next search box, put in the phrase: icon or symbol. The "OR" is important.

3. Click the 'Full-text' limit

4. Search

SELECTING ARTICLES.

Go through your list of articles, and read the "Abstract" (Summary) of each one. Does this look like a good source of information? If so, click on the words "PDF Full Text" or "HTML Full Text" to see the entire article. PDF will always have photos, graphs and such, HTML does sometimes.

PRINTING, EMAILING, AND CITING THE ARTICLES.

Once you have brought up the article, use the icon of an envelope to email the article to yourself. The screen that you use to type in your email address also has, on the right, a radio button under "Citation Format" Use the pull-down menu to select MLA style.

The email will have the article, and the citation. You will need to add a little bit to the citation, the name of the library, date you read the article, etc., but most of the typing is done for you.

SEARCHING THE WEB:

For web searches, try clusty.com, which has a good search engine, and which explains the website in full sentences. The 'Images' tab on Clusty or Google may prove useful.

CITING WEBPAGES:

On the gray bar on the right-hand side of this page is "Cite Sources" Inside there are several guides that can help you put websites in correct citation style. My favorites are the ones created by PCC Librarians!

 

Related:
Class Pages, Subject Guides A to Z