What resources are available to me?

General sources will give you a brief overview of your topic and can be a good place to start.  Reference books, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, etc, will all give you a good starting place.  They will allow you to define your topic and give you suggestions about where to go for further information. 

For example, if my topic is Ritalin, I might consult a medical dictionary or encyclopedia first to find out what it is, what conditions it’s commonly prescribed for and how it works on the body.  I won’t get a lot of in-depth information to any of my questions– reference books are designed to give a brief summary.  Often, however, a brief summary is exactly the place to start, because it helps you draw some boundaries around your subject.  The information in the reference books ideally help you find other, more detailed and specialized sources that will aid you in formulating a thesis.  Don’t think it’s as simple as looking up your topic and reading a paragraph in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  You can find reference books on surprisingly narrow ideas:  there is a dictionary of feminist theory, for example, and an index of medical research organized by topic.  Any topic you can think of has a reference source that could help in one way or another.  It’s an ideal place to start gathering information and material for ideas.

Specialized sources give you more detailed accounts of your topic, often written by an author who has a particular slant, angle or agenda.  They take varied forms:  books, magazine, journal or newspaper articles, websites, TV or radio programs, documentaries, newscasts or interviews, personal interviews, surveys and experiments, and more.  If they give you accurate information that you didn’t already have about your subject, they can be considered viable sources. 

In my search for information about Ritalin, I might look up statistics on prescription rates or interview someone, such as a child who has taken Ritalin, or the parent of that child, or the doctor that prescribed it.  I might look in one of our periodical databases for JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and find what articles they’ve run in the last decade about Ritalin.  I could check out a couple of books written on the subject, or look it up on any number of websites, to get an idea of the pros and cons of the drug, or of possible alternatives or preventative measures.  What specialized sources you choose will be largely determined by the amount of information that’s out there and the natural direction of your own interest

Which sources will best answer my questions and suggest more possibilities?  

Your original questions are merely a preliminary step, so you don’t need to be a slave to them.  You can modify your list of questions, deleting and adding as you see fit.  Answering your original questions is an excellent place to start, but you can't stop there.  Your sources should not simply answer the questions, but encourage you to start asking more questions, and formulating ideas or opinions about your topic.  The final draft of your paper will not simply be a list of answers to your question, but rather a series of connected ideas that develop a single, in-depth idea about your topic.  Each new piece of information you uncover should spark your interest further, and challenge you with new ideas.  Your sources should leave you feeling like more of an authority on your subject.  If they aren’t doing these things, they aren’t working very hard for you, and you should abandon them in favor of more fruitful ones.

Since you can’t look at every source available, you have to have a strategy for picking sources that will yield the most information in the most efficient way possible.  The best place to start looking is in your computer, of course!  Go to the library homepage and check out all the stuff you have available to you!  Go to:  http://www.gavilan.edu/library   for a list of all these resources.  Spend some time looking around, because these resources will be useful not just for this class, but for other classes and for life, too!  We have books at Gav and from other libraries.  We have subscriptions to several online magazines, especially medical and educational ones.  We have a wide range of magazine, newspaper and journal articles in our periodical databases (try EBSCO and CQ Researcher).  We have other databases, too, such as Access Science, with info about Science, Country Watch, with info about different countries, RAND California, with California statistics, Literature Resource Center, with info on authors and literary criticism, and Westlaw, with information and articles about the law and legal matters.  We also have access to several search engines, such as Google, Hotbot and more.  We have directories geared toward specific subjects, and more sources listed by topic.  I strongly urge you to avail yourselves of all the fabulous online resources.   If you have any trouble accessing any of the library resources from your home computer, contact Sabrina Lawrence at 408-846-4885 or slawrence@gavilan.edu.