Hey Cougs, my name is Corey Johnson. I am the Roots of Contemporary Issues liaison librarian and I want to welcome you to this series of videos. This first one about library research assignment number one. As RCI librarian I am able to help you with any and all research aspects of this course, and in particular the semester-long research project and I want to show you right away a little bit about how to contact me.

I've shared my screen here and what you are seeing is the home page for the WSU Libraries. A pretty simple URL: libraries.wsu.edu which you can see here in the address bar. In terms of getting to specific RCI-related materials, in the near center of the screen if you click on subject guides right here you will be taken to the home page for library guides, which is a warehouse of information with learning materials about specific databases, research strategies for particular courses, including history 105 and 305, and a host of other information literacy topics. You can go to the search bar and type in Roots of Contemporary Issues, which would be right here where I'm mousing or simply RCI as well, or you can also just go to the address bar at the top of the page and type in RCI off the beginning part of the URL after the slash. So I'll go up and do that. Put the cursor in there, delete back to the slash, and add RCI.

So this is the Roots of Contemporary Issues LibGuide. First you see some introductory information about the project at the top of the page, then if you scroll down a little bit farther and look on the left, you will see contact information that I want to draw your attention to. There are a variety of different ways you can communicate with me: you can click this button and of course email me, there's a telephone number here if you would prefer to call me and I'll get back to you, or there is this schedule appointment link if you would like to set up a half-hour consultation session with me via zoom.

I would also like to talk a little bit about the history of RCI and this individual research project. Roots of Contemporary Issues started back in the fall of 2012 and this semester-long research project has been a part of the course since its beginning, so literally tens of thousands of students have now done this research project before you and I can report that they largely get through the process unscathed and actually to the contrary generally do quite well with it. We typically hear a lot of positive feedback in the end-of-course evaluations about the research project. One of the reasons why students like it so much is that they get to pick the topic they study for the project. As you're doing LRA number one, a key thing to know is finding a research topic is probably the most important part of this beginning LRA.

And by the way, I should step back I'm not sure if I even define what LRA is. LRA stands for Library Research Assignment. The other thing is students often think as they go through the LRAs, they might be choosing different topics for each of the different LRAs. Most courses you do four LRAs throughout the term and I want you to understand that's not the case. Indeed you are going to be choosing one topic and using it through the entire semester. Now that topic will be refined over time and that's actually an important step, but essentially you are using one topic area throughout the term.

You also want to do well on this research project. There are a number of reasons why. One of them is the research project in most RCI sections is typically anywhere between 25 to 40 percent of the final grade in the class. So there's that incentive, but another reason is students often use the final research paper as one of the items in their junior writing portfolio, so this is another way the materials from this course often get used.

Now a few other last points and then we'll get into the content of LRA number one: one of the things that's important is that these videos are for both History 105 and 305 students and if I scroll back to the top here you see that obviously, the guide is clearly labeled in that way. When it comes to the research project itself, the process that both 105 and 305 students go through is essentially the same. Oftentimes individual instructors will assign a little bit longer length to the final paper for 305 students versus 105, but again the process that you go through and the sources that you get are essentially the same. It's also noteworthy to say that there are LRA templates for LRAs 1, 2, 3, and 4. Instructors use these skeletal guides in their sections so that there is important consistency across the various sections of RCI. However, there is also room for them to make adjustments and alterations and this is an important point because these videos talk about the generic template, but ultimately, you're going to also be responsible to be very familiar with your instructor's actual assignment prompts because they give you more detail about precisely what you need to do for your section.

Let me give a quick example of that. You need to find for example what are called history monographs or history books as part of this project. Instructors might tell you that you need three of those books whereas other instructors might require two of them. Some instructors may mandate those books be published in the last 10 years in order to be acceptable, others may not.

Thank you for listening to this introductory video for LRA number one. In the next video, I'll discuss topic formation as part of LRA number one.

Welcome to the topic formation video for LRA number one. I want to begin by showing you a word document version of this particular LRA, which you can see on your screen now. this is not the way though that you might see it in your class. In fact it's far more likely that your LRAs will be part of your class course space, so they may actually be in that space as a word document you find in there and then you upload your own completed word document to that space to complete the LRA, or you might perhaps do that LRA in terms of typing the actual text boxes within the course space itself, but this will suffice for now because it will show us all the text we need to see. Also, note again that these are template LRAs so for your specific instructor in a specific section, it may be a slightly different set of questions or question wording and some instructors don't even choose to call them LRAs (library research assignments) so things might be slightly different and please note that.

I am going to scroll down here from the top. So obviously this title at the top followed by an introductory piece, and most of this introduction, talks about the process you go through to form a topic, or at least a beginning level topic for this project and I'm going to come back to this in a minute. This is of course the main focus of this particular video. There's some information here about submission and evaluation - how you'll go about actually turning in the assignment. There's some information and links to library help as well.

There are four questions that are part of LRA number one. So, the first one is finding a current news article, which I will talk about more extensively in the next video. The second question has to do with defining your topic and connecting it to course themes. The third question is doing some preliminary research and identifying keywords and I am going to stop here and talk a little bit about this question. This question asks you to use Wikipedia and for the purposes of finding background information on your topic, or finding you know encyclopedic sort of foundational summary information for your topic, and from hopefully one or two solid Wikipedia entries discovering a set of keywords that then you're going to use to discover other materials. I'm not going to talk a lot about Wikipedia of course, probably anyone listening to this video has used Wikipedia before. It's not a resource that you're going to cite in your paper, but again it is a very good place to get some background information and sets of key terms that you would need to continue your research. The fourth question is about writing preliminary research questions for this entire project, which I again will focus on in a subsequent video. So those are the four questions.

I'm going to go back and talk about topic formation. So, you'll see here that there are these four bullet points which describe the criteria you need to follow in order to have a solid research topic for RCI. The one thing that is not part of this list of four but is this part of the paragraph above is probably the most important thing and that's that the topic should be something of interest to you. Well, that kind of makes sense - this is an individual project, you get to choose your topic, so choose wisely and choose something that you think will be of interest to you throughout the entire semester. Now history of course is essentially everything that happened so hopefully there should be something for everyone in terms of finding a topic material that's of interest.

I want to just stop though and say a couple of possible ways that you might think about a topic, if it's difficult to come up with one, is to think about a little bit concerning why you're at WSU perhaps. This means what kind of major do you think you're going to be pursuing and if you think about that major, there are issues of significance within that particular discipline that have occurred throughout time and so that this could be a good way to look at something of interest to you and then also help you with your sort of career path development at WSU.

And actually, that leads nicely into the second thing: and that's just sort of the idea of thinking about career aspirations as well. Of course, there's your major at WSU but then there's also the idea of what you want to do for a career and that can be a launching point as well for your topic. Looking at the history of that profession, developments in that profession, or that kind of thing. Of course, you don't need to go that route at all, but those are a couple of different ways you might want to think about searching or think about developing a topic.

Now getting into these four things: it has to have relevance and connect to the present day world, so even though it's a history class what you want to research should have a connection to contemporary times. In other words, you might not want to do something about the Roman empire for example or something that is so far back in time that while there are things that connect to today's oftentimes they're sort of tangential kinds of things. So most of the students in RCI choose topics that are historical but that actually maybe have specific significance or occurred maybe within the last 100 years or something like that. So you want that connection to present day, has to somehow be relevant to present day.

At the same time though the second thing is that historical roots must be traced back to at least 1980 so you need to have deeper historical roots. And by the way, some instructors use 1980, as is written obviously in this template, some choose 1990, and some choose other dates as well, so be sure you're paying attention for your particular class section.

One of the things that students often do is pick topics that are too contemporary. For example, if you wanted to do something on self-driving cars or on bitcoin for example, these are things that just do not have relevance that goes back many decades, so they wouldn't really work for this class. However, even in the case of the development of different kinds of automobiles or in terms of bitcoin currency issues you could use those topics as those are interesting to look at historical versions of currency or the development of cars or something like that if that was of interest.

The third thing is it should be international in scope and not focused solely on the US. So, for example you would not want to or could not do for this class: dam building in the state of Washington for example. Now that's too focused on the US itself. You could though for example look at things the US is involved in. For example, many students do great research on the Cold War for example, primarily involving of course the United States and the Soviet Union, but what those students do is tend to focus on the Soviet perspective with whatever issue they're looking at.

Then the last thing is to clearly relate to one or more of the broader themes of the course. There's five themes that are part of RCI and there's actually a question in LRA 1 that asks you to make that connection. Now the thing that's important about this is to know that this particular criteria is not the most important of the four. In fact, it's certainly the least important of the four. These five themes are very broad and so really basically any topic that you pick should probably be able to relate to at least one of these themes so you really shouldn't have a problem doing that. If you actually come up with a topic and you think it doesn't connect to any of these five and you're passionate about that topic, go ahead and talk to your professor or your TA. There may be some way to make that connection. In other words, this is not supposed to be a barrier for you in terms of choosing your topic.

Okay so now I want to tell you about a topic that I've selected that I will use in subsequent videos that hopefully fits the mold for an RCI topic given the criteria I just described. So I’m an educator, I've been a teacher for many years and as you might guess, formal schooling has been something that I've grown up with and one of the things that I've learned about over time is quite a bit about the Japanese education system. In particular, information about its high quality. So I'm wondering how that developed over time, the historical and foundational features of the Japanese education system and perhaps even thinking maybe a little bit about how that might compare to values that underpin education in Western society. So that's my basic idea. So it certainly has relevance to the present-day world and it has historical roots that can be traced back. It's certainly international in scope, looking at Japanese education system. I can connect this to the five themes, and finally it's of interest to me.

So thank you for watching this LRA 1 topic formation video. Next I'll discuss finding contemporary newspaper articles as part of LRA 1.

Hello! In this video I'm going to focus on finding a contemporary newspaper article, which is part of nearly every student experience as part of LRA number one.

Right now the database we're recommending for finding a contemporary newspaper article is called ProQuest Global Newsstream and if you look here under question number one, and by the way that current news article will typically be question number one, if I scroll down you can see here that there are links to pertinent databases: Proquest Global Newsstream right here that I'm mousing over, and a second one called Nexus Uni. We recommend probably using the Proquest database first just because it has slightly better international coverage and because for your RCI project you need to have an international flavor to your work - that tends to be the one that works the best.

Before we actually go into Newsstream though, I want to explain quickly sort of the broader news context. You know obviously that on the internet and beyond you can get news from a huge variety of places with vastly different levels of accuracy, thoroughness, and credibility to those news stories. Most newspapers provide at this point some kind of web content as do almost all news outlets. One of the reasons why, and by the way you can use any news outlet or at least most instructors let you use any news outlet in terms of getting a story for LRA number one. One of the reasons though that we suggest you use one of the library databases is that it indexes, or pulls together and makes searchable, hundreds of newspapers with obviously hundreds of thousands of articles within them all in one place. And in order to get into that database (into that system) the news agencies have to have a significant amount of journalistic integrity, you know earning them labels as authoritative news sources, so that's why we suggest that you would use something like ProQuest Global Newsstream.

I'm gonna go ahead though and click on this newspapers LibGuide to just show you (which is right here - highlight it for a moment) this also is a place you can go to find a wider range of newspaper databases that we have - the complete set - we have more than two, as you as you might imagine. So that LibGuide looks like this. Hopefully it'll render here in a moment. And so here's a section called popular newspaper databases. It includes ProQuest Global Newsstream right here, and Nexus Uni, and then a variety of other ones as well. Some of these though have historical newspapers only and so we don't want to use those obviously for LRA number one, but you might actually find that there's a database given your particular topic that might be a little bit better than Newsstream among this list. So i wanted to just show you that there is a broader list here too that you potentially might want to use.

So back to our LRA text. I'm going to go ahead and use the hyperlink here to click into Global Newsstream.If you are off campus going into the database or any WSU subscription database, you may need to log in, like I am currently, and to do that you just use your WSU network ID and password -the same thing for example that you use to log into MyWSU, or into your online course spaces as well.

So here is what Global Newsstream looks like - its interface - and I'm going to go ahead and use a topic which hopefully fits the mold for an RCI semester project topic. I'm looking at the historical development of the Japanese education system, so I'm going to type in my query here and then I will explain why I'm typing what I'm typing. Make it a little bit bigger as well to see. So I'm using two separate lines here on the first one: I have japan and then on the second line I have educate or schooling, and you'll notice that  I have an 'AND' here between those two (I'm mousing over that) because I don't want just anything about Japan and I don't want just anything about schooling or education, I want things that are at the crossroads of those two ideas.

Also you'll note that I put a star or an asterisk at the end of the terms that allows you to get multiple suffixes or endings off that beginning word, or in the case of educat*, which isn't even a word, just a beginning set of letters. So with Japan* I can get different endings like Japan's possessive or I can get Japanese. Educat* I could get words like educate, education, educational. For school*, I can get school, schools, schooling. You get the idea. So this allows you to get multiple endings. It's a tactic that oftentimes helps you get more relevant results.

Now as I look over on the right-hand side of the interface, you'll notice that it defaults to what's called 'anywhere,' which basically means any field within the system, and by the way most subscription databases operate in the same way. I just want to show you though that there are a number of different other options where you can choose to search. You can choose to narrow it to particular fields. You can actually expand your search as well, so you'll see that there's one here that I'm on now called 'document text' - this will search every word of every article in the system, which can be helpful if you try a search and you're not getting much back, it's a good way to expand your search.

I'm going to go ahead and choose one of the common limiters that I use - sort of the opposite idea-  not expanding but limiting, called 'document title' and I'm going to actually look for 'document title' for both of these. What I'm doing by employing that strategy is saying you know i'm really hopeful that among the hundreds of newspapers that are indexed in this system, hopefully there's some good articles that just actually have the words 'Japan' and then 'education' or 'schooling' or some version of schooling in the title of that article. So that's what I'm hopeful of.

Now if it turns out I don't get anything back, or a small number of irrelevant things, well then I'll have to broaden my search, but typically that's where I like to start and hope that I can get some very relevant and helpful articles right off the bat.

I'm going to also come down here and limit because within the assignment, contemporary is defined as 'within the last year' so I'm going to limit to the last 12 months. Again, in your particular section of RCI, your instructor might view a contemporary article as something within the last five years, or even have a different definition of that so just pay attention for your particular class.

You'll also notice as I scroll down that there are a number of other different ways you could limit, by language, or different parts of the newspaper, things like that, all of which may be relevant to you or helpful especially given a particular topic. But I'm just going to keep it simple and go ahead and do a search with that basic setup. So what I'm going to receive here is a set of results - there's 249 of them and they are... I'm going to make this a little bit smaller again so you can see on the side that they are included across a number of different source types or news units of various kinds, so you know everything from newswire feeds to websites, to traditional newspapers, and other whole slew of different things.

Your instructor may want you to just limit to newspapers. In this case, I could click this button and it would show me just the 94 subset of this 249. Or if they don't mind if you use other kinds of sources, then you just look at this broader list. You'll see that each of them has an icon and a word descriptor of what sort of information format it's from, so I'm just going to leave it like this and again, blow this up a little bit so it's a little easier to see, and look through my list.

Now the question becomes what kind of article would make sense for an RCI project? If I'm looking at the history of the Japanese education system, well one thing that you don't want for sure is to try to find a newspaper article that describes in some quick summary all about the history of the Japanese education system - that is not what you're looking for. What you are looking for is some sort of evidence that your topic is still relevant today and the newspaper article should also potentially help you to refine your topic from what most of the time students start off with is a more general kind of topic.

So let's look at this first example. So this editorial is about something about textbooks... high school textbook screening. So that might get me thinking: within the more general topic of Japanese education and its history maybe what I want to focus on is the development of different kinds of curriculum within those systems, including textbooks. We know in the US for example that what goes in textbooks has become quite a controversial thing and you know historically and otherwise is that is that the case in Japan as well. How does their culture reflect what they teach and what they put in their textbooks or things like that. So that could be a topic area that you could look at and you could use this article to pursue that topic.

And then as I scroll down and look at other items in this list, for example this one (number seven) is an article that looks at some joint work between Japan and the Philippines and it strikes me that one of the things about Japanese history is that the peoples of Japan have always been very forward about looking internationally and borrowing ideas from other nations to advance their own society in a variety of ways, including their own industry and things like that. So maybe one of the things I might want to focus on is sort of how Japan uses international influence within its education system and how it does that well and I could use this article as a leaping point for that.

As one more example just off the cuff here to scroll down and take a look - here's an interesting looking article: Japanese school mocked after punishing student for plucking her eyebrows. Well maybe what I really am interested in as a future is a school counselor or school principal or something and I’m interested in discipline and student management as part of the educational system. So that might be an interesting thing to look at in terms of Japanese education: Are they very strict in their school system about what they expect of students and their behavior? How does that affect their educational output, et cetera, et cetera. So that could be another leaping point for you in the process. So those are the ideas to think about.

Now a couple of other quick things and then we'll close out this video. If you want an article in this system, basically everything in here is in full text. So if I go ahead and click on the full-text button or I click on the title as I just did, it will open up the full text of the article which is right here. I'm just scrolling through the article itself, so if I want to keep this article - which you're going to want to do for the purposes of your research in this class (again, it's a semester-long project), you're going to keep an electronic copy. You can download it to your computer, save as pdf, you can certainly email the full text of the article to yourself as well as print, and other kinds of things. I also want to note if I click this cite icon, that you can cite your article as well For RCI and for this project, you will be using Chicago style - the 17th edition. So you'll see here that this citation defaults to APA which we don't want, so I'm going to go ahead and open it up and come down here to the Chicago area and what we're looking at is Chicago 17th edition notes and bibliography - that's what we're using, not the author-date system, but the notes bibliography system. So if I click on that, that will change this to this particular citation, which I can then go ahead and copy and paste into my own work for the purposes of this class.

Now one last thing that you might want to check - so I'm going to go ahead and close out of this and I am going to bring up the LRA here again. You'll notice that within this question, there's a link to what's called Chicago style for citations and so I'm going to follow that link and it'll actually go into the RCI library guide (which looks like this) and it contains Chicago citation information as well, which you'll see that I'm basically mousing over right here and if I scroll down here a ways, I can find some basic information about newspaper, popular magazine articles, and how those citations should look in Chicago style. So you'll want to check with this as well because this set of Chicago information is actually from the folks at the University of Chicago that govern the Chicago style itself. So that's probably an important thing that you're going to want to take note of and always compare something you get from another database to this set of information to Chicago to make sure that you're on the right track.

And with that, I'm going to close this particular video. Thank you for watching and next we will talk about LRA number one: research questions. Thanks!

Welcome to part 4 of the LRA 1 videos. In this segment, we will focus on question 4 where you are tasked with creating two preliminary research questions. At this point in completing the LRA, you have a contemporary newspaper article hopefully you've read and analyzed. You also likely have gone to Wikipedia and read some entries about your topic. In some RCI sections, you may have also collected and read a small set of reference encyclopedia entries, so you have some beginning knowledge about what you're doing and you want to use this knowledge to help you write a couple of research questions. These are rough draft questions at this point, but they will guide you along your way.

You can see here that again we are in the word document template for LRA number one, question four: writing preliminary research questions, and in a moment I'm going to click into a couple parts of the LibGuide that talks about the process of writing a quality research question, but before I go there I want to just draw your attention to this italicized part of the question. This offering/set of helpful tips and the first thing that it says is your research questions need to be written like you're a historian and historians ask questions about the past. So that's one of the very first important things to ask your parameters for your research question is that the questions need to address concerns about the past. Typically, they address things about causes and effects of the past those - kinds of things and they also (I want to draw on the last line here) that historians ask questions that don't always have easy answers - so that's another important element you need to think about... that you're not asking questions that have answers that someone can look up and simply say those are the definitive facts about that question. Typically, they are things that are far more open-ended.

So having said that I'm going to go ahead and click again on this link to the library guide, which you've seen throughout many of these videos that I've produced and as that comes up I just want to remind you because this starts at the top that each of the LRAs (and you can see here from the left-hand navigation bar where I'm mousing over) that each of the four LRAs has a number of different tutorial materials that you can look at to help you with that particular LRA. So for LRA number one, there's a number of different videos here about how to use particular databases, for example. But if we scroll down here to the bottom, there are two sections here: one about writing research questions and then one that gives some example research questions as well. And I'm going to go ahead and just make this a little bit bigger - hopefully it makes it a little bit easier to see.

So basically what's listed here in terms of research question are six different points and I’m just going to summarize some of them quickly. In this video I want to focus a little bit on this word 'debatable' which was bolded here for a purpose. I said a moment ago that historians often look at the cause and effect of events and phenomenon from the past. Well one of the things that you can do to make your research question debatable is by looking at the causes or figuring out why you think (hypothesizing, if you will) about why you think something happened in the past and that usually will have a number of different potential causes. And so what you can do to make something debatable is make a hierarchy out of those causes. So for example, saying something is the most significant cause of a particular phenomenon or the most significant result for example, could make that thing debatable, so that's one important point that you want to think about.

I also want to talk about number five here: where it says 'make sure your question is researchable.' Well one of the things that typically happens is that people start with a very large question, or even a very general topic like 'I'm just interested in gender discrimination.' Well you can't write this essay or, you know, cover gender discrimination across the entire world for all times, but one of the things you should start to do with your preliminary research question is to couch your particular research in a geographic area of the world, or a particular time frame, and so that can also help you focus and it can help you ask a significant and a researchable question. So you know even if you're looking at sort of the cause of a particular historical phenomenon, which is common, you want to try to pick something where there's at least some discussion about the causes and again, which are most important.

You also want to be sure your research questions are not too broad. So as I was mentioning earlier, an example could be 'the history of the death penalty' is way too broad, but 'the history of how the death penalty came to be used or to be rejected, perhaps in a particular culture at a particular has far more potential merit.

And finally, you'll actually see an example of a research question at the bottom of this LibGuide and I will go ahead and scroll down to that) which you should take a look through because what it describes is sort of an early version, which is way too generic and unfocused, all the way to the steps you might take to make it a refined and better historical research question.

So that concludes the last of the four videos for LRA number one. Please feel free to get a hold of me if you have questions about any part of LRA number one. I'm going to scroll back up as you can see here to the part with my contact information, which is right here: my picture, email address, phone number, and then a link where you can schedule a half hour consultation session with me via zoom as well. So please feel free to use any or all of those potential options. Good luck with your research! Thank you!

This short tutorial will show you how to search ProQuest Newsstream for recent newspaper articles. We will start from the newspaper Library Guide.

We have a number of options here including regional news, and historical newspapers. We will be using the newspaper databases box in the middle of the home page. Newspaper databases allow you to search multiple newspapers at once, refine your search, and access new and rare historical issues that can be difficult to find on the open web.

Let’s open ProQuest Newsstream. This is the advanced search window, where we will enter some words related to our topic. [Enters gaza in first box and women’s rights in the second box of Advanced Search.]

We get a lot of hits. Let’s narrow this down to only newspapers. ProQuest Newsstream also contains short news feeds and academic literature, we want real newspaper stories. Here we can see which among the thousands of newspapers in ProQuest Newsstream had stories with these keywords, sorted by the number of hits. 

This is a very popular topic for regional newspapers. By default the results are sorted by relevance, but I only want the most recent news stories so I’ll sort them by most recent first.

This still isn’t perfect, all of these results are about France. They’re recent but not relevant. I’ll go back to sorting by relevance and then narrow the publication date to the last year.

This second result looks interesting. Notice the yellow highlighted text indicating where my keywords appear.

If I want to use this I can save it in a variety of formats, print it, or email it to myself. I can make an automatic citation here, but I’ll need to double check the formatting before I use it in my paper. This short tutorial has shown you how to search ProQuest Newsstream for recent newspaper articles. 

Good luck with your research, and contact the Libraries for help.

This short tutorial will show you how to use the Oxford Reference database, which contains more than 200 electronic reference books. Encyclopedias are most useful when you are beginning your research, as they give a well-researched summary of the topic. Wikipedia is a very popular online encyclopedia, but it is less trustworthy than Oxford.

Let’s say our topic is how OPEC has affected the political development of middle eastern countries. When looking for encyclopedias, we often need to think of our topic in broad terms, so we’ll search just for “OPEC.”

Our first result here is about OPEC, but it’s in an encyclopedia related to finance and banking, I was hoping for something more history focused. I will narrow my search to only history related entries.

This first hit seems much better. The entry is titled OPEC while the encyclopedia is titled A Dictionary of Contemporary World History.

If I want to cite this source, I will need to remember both the entry and encyclopedia title. As we can see from the symbol, this encyclopedia is unlocked which means we have access to it through the library website. The entry below it is locked, we cannot access it.

Here we can narrow our search to include only unlocked or free books, and not restricted. If we just searched for Oxford Reference without going through the WSU library first, we would only have access to free encyclopedias.

Let’s open this first entry. It’s only two paragraphs but there is plenty of information we can use to continue our search or to help us if we just need a few facts about OPEC, such as: it was founded in 1960.

The automatic citation tool will quickly summarize all the information I’ll need to cite this in my paper but I’ll need to double check the citation.

This short tutorial has shown you how to use the Oxford Reference database to find specialized encyclopedia entries. Good luck with your research, and contact the Libraries for help.

Hello! My name is Corey Johnson. I am the Roots of Contemporary Issues liaison librarian and I want to welcome you to the series of videos about LRA number two.

Let's start by going through some introductory information. First of all, you see this is the home page for the Libraries. You can get here by googling WSU Libraries, and you'll also see if you look up in the address bar that the URL is pretty easy to remember as well. Highlighting it here: libraries.wsu.edu.

From within this page, the way to find particular RCI information is to click on the subject guides icon here in the central part of the page. So if I click on that, you get to the library's subject and resource guides (we call them LibGuides).

There are over three or four hundred LibGuides in here written by librarians and their information about how to use the libraries, our services, and resources - broken down by discipline area, broken down by finding and using particular databases. They provide information about particular information literacy concepts like evaluating information and they also are oftentimes organized by course, so there is a specific library guide for History 105/305. You can get there by going to the search bar (where I'm mousing right now) and typing in 'Roots of Contemporary Issues' or even searching for RCI. You can also go back up here to the address bar, go to the end of that URL, delete back to the slash, and simply add the letters RCI on the end and that will get you to the RCI LibGuide as well, which looks like this.

We are looking at LRA number two and if you look in the left-hand nav bar, you will see that there is information in this guide for all four LRAs and then a variety of other information that is pertinent to this semester-long research assignment, including Chicago style information, etc. So I'm going to go ahead and click on LRA number two to bring us to the right section of the guide and then give you an ever so brief tour here of the information under LRA 2. So there are several different YouTube videos here, which are taking their sweet time to load, but basically they're about how to use particular databases to find materials in RCI. And then the information I'm scrolling to now below also talks a little bit about the resources we'll be looking at specifically in LRA 2, which includes history monographs and history journal articles. So we'll be getting back to this in a few minutes.

I also want to note here on the left-hand side, there's a picture of me and contact information for me so if you want to email me you can do that. You can see the button there, telephone number below, and then also the schedule appointment button which allows you to set up half hour consultations with me via Zoom, so please please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about RCI research or the research project more specifically. Again, my job is to help you in this process.

I also want to just give a little bit of other background information here quickly: so RCI started back in the fall of 2012 and I've been a part of the program since the beginning, so literally tens of thousands of students have done this research project and I've worked with a great deal of them so I have a lot of experience helping students with research in this class. I also, by way of introduction, want to point out a few other important things about this project. One: the research project in the LRAs are essentially the same for both History 105 and 305 students. The only exception to this is sometimes instructors require that 305 final papers be a bit longer.

It's also important to tell you that these videos are geared towards what are called the LRA templates, which is a skeletal set of requirements for all RCI sections. So I want you to note that individual instructors can make alterations and amendments to the templates, so in addition to listening to the information you hear in these videos, you'll want to pay careful attention to your instructor's actual assignment prompts so you know for sure you're getting all the correct information.

I also want to mention as you start LRA number two, a bit about what you did hopefully in LRA number one that you might build upon that important work. Arguably the most important element for LRA number one would be to come away with a solid topic idea - a topic being something that is of interest to you, a topic with deep historical roots, and a topic that covers not exclusively the United States, but is more international in scope. Hopefully your topic covers these bases and is now expressed in two research questions as well. Now in LRA number two, you are not starting with a new topic - you're actually carrying forward your topic from LRA number one and continuing to refine the research questions that you developed.

In LRA number two, we are looking for historical monographs (or books) and history journal articles. Our next videos will address finding these resource types. And, as always: Go Cougs!

Hello, my name is Corey Johnson. I am the Roots of Contemporary Issues liaison librarian and I want to welcome you to the LRA number two video concerning history monographs. What you're seeing on the screen is the LRA number two template and I'm going to give a brief introduction to that by scrolling down.

Obviously, there's the introduction to the LRA number two itself, a little bit about how you will submit your assignment, how it will be evaluated which obviously you want to read carefully, and then there are the three questions that comprise the body of this assignment. The first is finding scholarly history books or monographs, and by the way, that's all monograph is: mono is Latin for one writing, it just represents a fancy academic word for a book. That's what a monograph is so you're finding two of those as part of question number one.

Question number two, as I scroll down here, is to find two scholarly history journal articles, which I will talk about in the next video. And then the third and final question is based on the information that you get from the books and the articles; you're going to be revising your topic and your research questions, so those are the three areas or questions you're going to need.

Within this question, there's a variety of information I'm going to be covering not clearly just reading this to you, but I want to start by going to the LibGuide for LRA number two and there's a link to it right here so I'm gonna go ahead and click on that, it's just a basically a page with more tips and ideas, supplemental information beyond your assignment proper for how to do LRA number two, so here we are at that place and if we can get everything to render here the LRA basically the Libguide basically consists of some videos about how to use particular databases and then some information here at the bottom that we're going to use right away about the characteristics of history monographs, and history journal articles.

So in particular, I want to take a look at this piece right here that I've highlighted, characteristics of history monographs. When you are looking for monographs you are going to be looking in our main discovery system in the library - it's called SearchIt, where we'll go in just a minute. Search It contains about 20 million book volumes, and you just need to get two, so hopefully that should make you feel good because it's an awfully big pool and hopefully there should be some topic relevant books for you within the system. Now, when you go into the system again, which I'll show you in a minute. there are ways to limit to books so that you can be more successful in your search, however there's no really clever way or button or something like that you can push on to show you the history monographs.

So what we need to do first is learn a little bit about what they are and how to recognize them from the records for books, so you can make those choices in the system so that's sort of the good news, and the bad news. The good news is there is a system available that has plenty of books that you can use either by getting them off the shelf in the library or ordering them, but the bad news is that you're going to have to do a little detective work to figure out books that are appropriate for your research in this class.

So let's look at these seven characteristics. One is that historians tend to write solo so there's just one or potentially two authors. So if your book has one or two authors it's a good sign that it might be a history monograph. And, by the way, I'll stop here and say that you do not need to have all seven of these characteristics for your book to be appropriate for your research in this class, but on the other hand, the opposite is kind of true as well, if you have none of these seven, the book is absolutely probably not appropriate for your work in this class. So if you can get four or five or six of the seven, you're probably doing pretty well.

So again the first of those is one author. Historians tend to work in academic settings and so not surprisingly they publish with scholarly publishers (university publishers), so when you look at the record if you have, for example, University of North Carolina Press, pretty good idea that you're on the right track.

The third thing are Subject Headings. Books have Subject Headings, which are kind of like hashtags in social media. They're labels that librarians give books that describe succinctly what that book is about. So if the word "history," literally that word, or other words that describe historical terms or historical time periods, are part of the Subject Headings of your book, That’s pretty good sign that your book is fully about history, and something that you might want to use.

Next thing is call numbers. Most academic libraries use what's called a Library of Congress System, which is an A to Z system for call numbers, which begin with a letter. So the letters D, E and F are those that represent history of various regions of the world. So if your book has a call number that begins with the D, E, or F, good sign that you're on the right track. I'm also including here the letter H. H is for the social sciences and since social scientists and historians often write about the same kinds of things, oftentimes books that begin with the call number H can be helpful as well.

The fifth thing is a direct quote "includes bibliographical references." There are a lot of books in the system, as I said before 20 million of them, and many of them are children's books, popular novels, things you're probably not going to use to research.

"Includes bibliographical references" means exactly that, it means that your book has a bibliography at the end, that the researchers cited his or her sources, and you're looking at an academic book, you want to be sure your book has that.

The sixth and the seventh thing kind of go together. One is that your book should cover deeper history in terms of the content of that book. For some RCI sections there's literally a date that's given as part of the class, it has to be in the pre-1980 world, for others it's potentially in the pre-1990 world. You want to be sure that in terms of content, your book is covering deeper history. And at the same time though the seventh thing is, you want to be sure your book was published more recently, perhaps in the last 25 years or so. Again, I'm going to repeat that because it's a bit of a head scratcher, as I scratch my head, we want you to find books that are simultaneously published more recently, but at the same time in terms of their content, cover deeper history.

So those are the seven things that we're looking for. Now, I'm going to go back to our LRA template and go ahead and go in to Search It, there's a link for Search It in your LRA. The other way you can get to the Search It database is by going to the library's Home Page and there's a text search box right on the home page for the Libraries. And, in fact, I'm going to actually show you that I'm just going to go to the Home Page for the Libraries, click on that link, and here you can see Search It box. So I could go in here and type in things.

I'm going to suggest you go to Advanced Search. This link right here gives you more options for setting up your search. So the interface looks like this. I'm going to use a topic that hopefully fits the mold for an RCI topic. I'm going to be looking at the historical development of educational systems in the country of Kenya.

So on the first line, in the first box, I'm going to go ahead and put in the word "kenya," and I'm going to put an asterisk after it so I can get Kenya or Kenyan, or perhaps even Kenya's like the possessive Kenya's education system or something. On the second line I'm going to put in "educat* OR school*" and those words being synonyms, right? Educational systems, schooling systems that kind of the same thing. So you'll want to think about your topics and if you have multiple words that describe that topic, be sure you put them on a single line with ORs between them, so you can get whatever wording your particular author happened to choose for your concept. And, then of course they also have the asterisk or the star (Shift-8) at the end so you can get school, schools, schooling; educate, education, things like that. I'm going to also add another line, I mentioned there are 20 million books in the system, so you very well may get a lot of books that are about contemporary issues related to your topic. So sometimes searching for the word "history" itself can be helpful, and of course you can back off on that if that doesn't help. So I've got that in my search as well. So that concludes the part about putting in my keywords.

Again, you'll have a variety of different tactics you might use for your particular topic. Now, I could just search from here, but there are several other things I'm going to do to hopefully help make my search is a little bit more precise. You'll notice here that for all of these search lines it defaults to what's called "any field." I'm going to go ahead and change that to the Title Field for all three of these. So this is just going to look for the proper title of the book. This is a way to limit your results. Sometimes it limits too much, so you may need to back off on it. For one or more of these different keywords but it's a way to hopefully help you get the very relevant things in a very efficient manner. In other words, I am hopeful that there is a book with the title that is something like "The History of Education System in Kenya," or something like, "Kenya: A History of Its Education," or something like that, that has this combination of words.

Now over here on the right-hand side we have several other options we can use to limit to books, which we want to do. There are over 200 different material types in Search It, so you don't want to be bogged down with a bunch of materials you're just going to have to scroll through. But you can get them in one of two basic ways: print book or e-book. Both are fair game for your work in RCI. I'm going to start with print book because between print books and e-books, there are far more print books in the system than there are e-books, that may change in 5, 10, 20 years from now. In fact, it probably will, but currently print books are still the predominant in terms of the number.

You could also limit to English if you wanted here. You could also limit, I told you, history books should be secondary sources, should be recent, so you could actually go in here and say only show me things from a certain date especially if your instructor is requiring that. I'm just going to leave that off though for the time being, go ahead and click the search button, and see what we get.

So, our results look like this and I want to just talk about several of the things here. It only came back with four results so you know I may ultimately decide I need to expand my search. That's not very many, but hopefully some, at least one or two of these four, will work. The first one here, "Education in Kenya: An Historical Study" sounds pretty good. My keywords are right in the title. It's got one author. Unfortunately, though it was published in 1973, which is probably going to be too old, rather than being within about 25 years of the present, this is more like 50 years, so probably not something we're going to use for this class.

Let's look at the second print book, "A History of Modern Education in Kenya (1895-1991)." One author again, published in 1992, which is also quite a while ago, little over that 25 year basic marker, but something we're probably going to want to look at. It's probably written by a historian because historians oftentimes use date ranges in the titles of their material so definitely worth looking at. So I'm going to click on the title and go to the full record for this item.

So we have a bunch of different information here and I'm just going to work from the top to the bottom, with pertinent information you'll need to do LRA 2. One of the things that you'll need if you end up using this book and to complete LRA 2, is you need to list the call number for the book, which is its address on the shelf. You can see this is at Holland and Terrell Libraries and here's the call number, the thing that begins with "LA 1561." This is what you're going to use to find it on the shelf. And, in fact, we have a way to help you within the Holland and Terrell Libraries system to find exactly where you would go to find it. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on that and it goes to "Map It." So I can look here and see that my book, this call number can be found on Stack 508 on the Second Floor of Holland Library. So that part I've highlighted there for you. I can bump up the map here to see the specific floor and here is the part right here in blue, this is the actual stack number or shelving unit where I would look for that particular book. And there's other more general map links on this page as well to help you figure out where you're going to go. Or feel free to, obviously, ask any staff in the library about where to go, as well.

So, I'm going to go back to my record for the book but anyway that's how you find the book by using Map It. Now if I scroll down further another thing you'll need to provide for your book is something called the Permalink, which helps the grader, your TA or instructor. This is something they can use to click on to see exactly what book you're interested in so you can just copy that to your clipboard and use that. The other thing though you're going to want to do is come down and definitely look at this "Details" area before you decide if this book is for you. So I can see here the title, of course. The idea that I have one author. Here's the Subject Headings and remember I said you want to have either have the word "history" or other terms that describe historical time periods, so here's not only history, but it's 20th century history, which again may be appropriate for my topic depending on how I'm refining it. By the way, these are all in blue, they're hyperlinks, so if you want to go to all of the books in the system with that particular label, you click on the link and go out to it. So it's sort of a "more like this" button if you will. Here's the publisher, Evans Brothers of Kenya, that's not a university publisher but, again we're probably not going to get every single one of the seven criteria spot on. It does include bibliographical references so that's a good sign that it's a scholarly book. This is a book I would probably use for my topic.

Now in terms of another way to find more books like this, you need a minimum of two for LRA 2, at the bottom there's this "Browse Library Shelves" section. So here's our book, I'm mousing over right here in the middle. Books are put on the shelves by subject matter so books to the right over here, and books to the left over here, may very well be just as good or better than the original book that you were looking at, so keep that in mind as you're trying to find a nice, healthy set of materials for your topic. I'm going to go back to the results list of four.

Hello, my name is Corey Johnson. I am the library liaison to the Roots of Contemporary

Issues program. Welcome to this video about LRA 2, the third part in the series, this one is about finding history journal articles. So you'll see in front of you the template LRA for Library Assignment 2, and I'm going to just scroll down and be on the introductory materials to the assignment, past the history monographs or books segment that we looked at in the last video, and to Question Number Two here about finding scholarly history journal articles.

As you might guess, I'm not going to read this text to you, but you'll want to be sure you read it yourself and know all of the ins-and-outs. You need to find ultimately, and I'll highlight it here, two scholarly journal articles on your topic and they need to be published within the last 25 years. So that's ultimately what you're looking for, realizing that two is a minimum. If you find more than two, that would be great as well, ultimately these LRAs expose you to a number of different information formats, and to complete the assignments you have a finite number you need, but as you're finding things keep all of these sources in a place. Ultimately when you go to write your paper you might find that you use a number of different books or articles versus other kinds of things. So keep track of all of it.

Embedded in the template LRA are links to pertinent databases, and you can see threeof them here, JSTOR, Project Muse, and then Historical Abstracts. I would use those in that particular order. JSTOR is certainly the most comprehensive and probably where you want to start, and I will show you that in just a moment, but I also want to say here that there's also a link, as is the case with all of these LRAs, to the Library Guide for the particular LRA as well. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that, this see Part 2 Database Specific Video tutorials link, which goes into the library guide, which looks like this for LRA 2. There are these YouTube videos, but there are a number of different short videos here that supplement this video I've created that you might want to take a look at, including a specific one you can see here about JSTOR, and then some other basic tips and ideas for getting through the work of LRA 2.

I'm going to scroll all the way to the bottom and just talk for a minute about characteristics of history journal articles. So you'll see here at the very bottom I've highlighted it in blue. When you go into JSTOR you can limit to history journals which I will show you. So you really don't need to do a lot to know about how to recognize them per se, but you definitely want to be covering these three things. Your article should preferably be from a history journal, the content of it should cover deeper history. In some classes that's pre-1980 history and other classes maybe pre-1990 history, sort of depends on your particular section and your instructor, but at the same time, it needs to be published more recently. In fact I just said a few moments ago, in the last 25 years, so basically from 1997 to the present.

So I'm just going to repeat that one more time because it's sort of a hard concept oftentimes to get your head around, and that is that with these history journal articles we want the content of those articles to cover deeper history, while at the same time we want the articles themselves to be published more recently, and published more recently because hopefully the way ideally things work in academia is that when someone writes on a topic they consider what others have written before, and they sort of build on a house of knowledge. So the more recent things might ideally represent our most current thinking about the topic, and that's why that can be particularly helpful to find recently published articles.

If I go back, click back here into the LRA template, I'm going to go ahead and click on this link to JSTOR. If you're on campus you'll be automatically authenticated into the database, if you are off campus as I am right now, you will be asked to authenticate, so I'm going to go ahead and type in my Network ID and password. It's the same thing used to get into your course spaces or into MyWSU for example, those same credentials.

So here is what the search interface looks like. I'm going to go ahead and use a topic that I believe will fit the basic mold for a proper topic in RCI. I'm looking at the historical development of education systems in the country of Kenya. So I'll make this a little bit bigger, but you can see here I've used two text lines for my search and the first one I put in "kenya*" and the second one "educat* OR school*" So first to the Kenya piece, obviously that's the geographic place that I'm looking at. I've got an asterisk or shift eight, the star if you will, on the end of that word so I can get Kenya or Kenyan. Then "educat* OR school*," I have capital OR between those two because oftentimes the things you're studying there may be synonyms or words that mean basically the same thing, and you want to be able to capture all of those various words again, education and schooling meaning essentially the same kind of concept. And then I put the asterisk on so I can get school, schools, schooling; educate, education, educational, etc.

So I can also see here on the right hand side it defaults to what's called "All Fields," so I could narrow that down and I typically start this way so that I can efficiently hopefully get to the most relevant items, limiting to the title of the articles, under the presumption that the words in the title of any document are the most important words that succinctly describe what it's about. So I'm actually hoping that I'll get a bunch of articles that have education or schooling and Kenya in them. And, by the way, putting these on separate lines is important as well, or actually typing out "AND" between them because I don't want just anything about Kenya and I don't want just anything about education. I want things that are about both of those concepts at the same time.

As I go down this interface you'll see under "Select An Access Type," that it defaults to "Content I can Access." Go ahead and change that to "All Content" because you can see everything that JSTOR offers even though some of that content we might not subscribe to, but typically you can click on a button called "Find It @ WSU" and then you can get that content from a different provider we subscribe to anyway. So just a tip there to go ahead and go to "All Content." Your "Item Type" you definitely want to limit to "Articles" there are other kinds of materials in this system including books and book reviews letters to the editor all sorts of things that are not a scholarly journal article so you'll want to avoid those. Under language, you may want to limit to "English" knowing that in RCI you can use all language skills you have. So if you speak other world languages and can read in those languages, great, you can do that. There are a whole lot of world languages represented in the system, so again, if English is the one you're going to need to use, then it might make sense to limit to that.

I want to limit the last 25 years so I'm going to go ahead and put in 1997 to 2022. I don't even actually need to put in the 2022, it'll go to whatever the current year is. And then there are these things called "Journal Filters," and you can see there's a whole list of collections of journals by subject matter. There are four of them related to history and history is going to be your most important thing to limit to, history journals. So those four let's see if I can find them here, there's "Architecture History" right here, "Art History" here which are obviously pretty specific if your topics are also within art or architecture those would work. There is a general history grouping right here which you definitely all are going to want to click on. And then the fourth one under history is "History of Science and Technology," which again may not be helpful, so that's your top priority. Now, given my topic there are other groupings within this list that probably makes sense. I'm looking at education so and there is a group of education titles here, so I could click on that. I'm also looking at the country of Kenya so I could also limit to "African Studies," and that would be perfectly appropriate. So you'll see that for topics oftentimes there are multiple groupings you might want to select. However understand that the requirement still exists that whatever article you select, or set of articles, needs to cover that deeper history, which of course is more likely going to be the case in a history journal.

Okay so with that all set up, I'll click the search button, submit button in this case, and get my set of results. So there are 47 items in the list, and as I scroll down obviously I will make some sort of assessment about whether they would work for my topic. The first one says "The Effects of Primary School Quality on School Dropout among Kenyan Girls and Boys." Now this one gives me the flavor right away, it's from a journal called "Comparative Education Review," that this is about certainly about Kenyan education, but perhaps it might be about very contemporary. You know was published in May 2000, so it could be exclusively about the 1990s or something. So you'd have to check this out to make sure that it gives a good historical context; that would be my concern here.

The second one "Political Versus Civic Education in Colonial and Independent Kenya." Great, this one definitely is going to be historical so that's going to be, that box is definitely checked. Now whether or not civic and versus political education is going to be helpful for my topic is another question, but this one certainly would have promise and merit in many regards.

You know I can scroll down of course you get the point right you're looking at all of these to see here's one that actually has a date range in it 1844-1930 from Anglican and Episcopal history so the word history is right in the journal where this comes from so this would probably work. Other things are more generic like this one, "Gender and Education in Africa," well you know that may work it may be not focused enough on Kenya. This one, "Improving the Quality of Education: Kenya's Next Challenge," implies again that it may be looking more at the future which we don't want to be looking at for history research. So, anyway, these are the things that you need to think about.

Now, the last thing I want to show you in this video is just the simple bits about getting these articles. So obviously if you wanted this article you just click this "Download" button to your machine. It'll provide you with a PDF and you're good to go. I also want to show you that there is helpful citation information provided here as well. For RCI, we are using Chicago Style, so you can see here that if I click on this, here's the Chicago Style information that I could use. Click copy, and put that into my own documents. So that's fine, the only thing that you want to remember though is if I go back over here to the Library Guide, if you get citation information from a database whether it's JSTOR, or any others, you probably are going to want to confirm with the actual University of Chicago guide, which I have reproduced within your LibGuide. 

So here I am in the LibGuide and I'm looking at Chicago Style, so if I click on that it will show me examples from a variety of different areas including, if I scroll down here far enough, articles in an online journal which would be the case here so it lists a variety of pieces of information which are important.

So that concludes this video about finding history journal articles as part of LRA 2. So good luck on your research and as always, "Go Cougs!"

This short tutorial will show you how to find books on your topic through advanced search in Search it.

From the WSU Libraries home page, click on the advanced search link. We can use multiple search bars to construct a more precise search rather than just putting our keywords in a single search bar.

My topic is about the history of government propaganda and its role in dehumanizing groups of people. My keywords are propaganda, government, and dehumanization. If we just search for those words, it will use default settings and look for all three words appearing in any field of the Search It record. If I was just searching for keywords, I might also want to include the word history.

Instead, let's customize the search. I can select which field I want the word to appear in. I really want to focus on propaganda so I'll only accept sources that have that word in the title. I also want the word government to be mentioned, but it can be anywhere in the resource. I can add another line by clicking ‘Add a new line’.

I'm interested in dehumanization, but I might be limiting my search too much if I only accept that word. Some more common terms might be othering, racism, stereotypes, or subhuman. I can connect all these words with capital OR. This tells Search It that any combination of these words is acceptable when we also have propaganda in the title and government anywhere.

To the right of the search boxes, we can filter by material type, language, or date. For secondary sources, more recent sources are better. I'll limit my language to English and by date as needed. Once I hit search, I can narrow my results by type and select both eBooks and print books.

I spent a lot of time refining my search terms so we have a manageable set of results. There are more filters available on this sidebar but I don't really need them at the moment.

Here is a book that looks interesting. It is an electronic book. Under access options there's a link to the company that carries the e-book. If I’m off-campus, I’ll have to sign in to open it. From here I can read the full text online. Since I have a great book about imperial Japanese propaganda, I think I will pair that with government propaganda from the other central country of the Axis Powers in World War II, Germany.

I like this result so let's open it and have a closer look. I want to use a scholarly monograph so let's check the details. There is only a single author listed, not an editor so I can tell it’s a monograph. But what about scholarly? I'm not familiar with the publisher so that doesn't help but the book has bibliographical references, so I know the author cited their sources. It's also published in 2013 but lists a topic date range of 1918 to 1933 and is about Germany. Perfect for my paper. The call number tells me where I can find this book in the library and I can click on Map It to see exactly where it’s located.

Going back to my results, I see that this book is not available, but I have the option to get it for me from other libraries. To order this book, sign in using your Network ID and password, select your desired delivery location, and click Request. It will take about one week for the source to arrive at your desired library or home location. This service is free to you as a student.

My search for a third relevant book about propaganda in imperial Japan or Nazi Germany takes me several pages ahead in my results list, a special kind of history book, a primary source reader. This work includes a wide range of historical news articles and government documents which explain how German propaganda among a host of other factors, led to American ignorance and apathy toward the plight of European Jews. This book can be requested in the same way as our other book.

This short tutorial has shown you how to find books on your topic through advanced search in Search It. Good luck with your research and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

This short tutorial will show you how to perform an advanced search in JSTOR using filters and basic search strategies. 

We’ll start from the JSTOR advanced search page. I want to find articles on the history of slave trading that involves Brazil. I want any mention of slave, slaves, or slavery so I'll type in the root of these words with an asterisk at the end. This will give me any combination of letters that begins with that root. I'll do the same thing with trade, adding the asterisk right after the ‘d’.. I want to focus on Brazil, so I’ll add that term in the second search box. I will narrow both search boxes by searching the “Item Title” only.

If I feel like my search is too narrow I can expand it by using more asterisks and linking search terms with OR. If I’m getting too many results, I can use more AND and NOT modifiers. If I feel like my results don’t seem very relevant to my topic, I can switch from searching for my keywords in ‘All fields’ to searching for my keywords in the title. Get comfortable with changing your search terms and strategy throughout your research process to find the best sources for your assignments.

Underneath my keywords, I can change the access type. I can select between ‘Content I can access’ to find full-text sources, or I can choose ‘All content’ to see results that don’t have full text that I could request through Interlibrary Loan. Your choice between these options may depend on how much time you have before your assignment is due since it can take up to 48 hours to get an article through Interlibrary Loan. Choosing ‘All content’ is recommended if you have the time, so that’s what we’ll do for this example.

I can also refine by item type, language, or date. I'll limit to English.

Further down there are more ways to control your search options, like journal filters. Here I can limit to just history journals.

Let's search and see what we find. Let’s check out this first result. I can read this source from right here. This will help me decide if it might be worth reading further or using in my paper. If I want to save this article I can download it as a PDF. 

If the full text of a source isn’t available, the ‘Download’ button will not be available to select from the results page. Clicking on the title will take us to the item record where we can click on the ‘Find It @ WSU’ link. This will take us to a Search It record where we can either access it from another database or request the item through Interlibrary Loan. To see the request option in Search It, you’ll want to make sure you’re logged in.

This short tutorial has shown you how to perform an advanced search in JSTOR using basic search strategies. Good luck with your research! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

This short tutorial will show you how to use Project Muse to search for scholarly journal articles. 

Project Muse is a great database for exploring topics on history and the humanities. 

Like all scholarly databases you should access Project Muse through the WSU library to avoid being asked to pay for content.

Click on advanced search from the menu  in the upper right corner of the page. You will need to enter several search keywords or phrases to retrieve a focused set of citations. In the separate search bars, I will enter India, Protest, and “social change” in quotation marks because it is a phrase.

On the left there are a number of filters. We'll narrow our content type to journal articles. For books, it's better to use Search It. Then we'll narrow our research area to history.

This will help focus my search. As you look at these citations think about how they all fit my search even though the titles are very different on the surface. 

You can select either an HTML document or PDF version of the article and open it. Here is my article. It fits my search criteria perfectly though I hadn't thought of protesting in quite that way. 

This short tutorial has shown you how to use Project Muse to search for scholarly journal articles. 

Good luck with your research and contact the libraries for help.

Hello, my name is Corey Johnson. I am the library liaison to the Roots of Contemporary Issues program. Welcome to the LRA 3 introduction video. I want to start by saying a few words about myself and ways to contact me. My central role as liaison is to help students with the semester-long research project that is part of every RCI experience. So please feel free to get a hold of me for help. In order to facilitate that, if you look at the screen in front of you, which is, by the way, the home page for the WSU Libraries, you can get to this page either by doing a simple Google search for WSU Libraries, or the URL for the page is also very simple. So, if I go up here to the address bar and highlight that URL, it's simply - libraries.wsu.edu - fairly simple to remember.

Now if you want to find out more specific information about RCI from the home page, what you're going to want to do is click on "Subject Guides," which is this crimson icon right here. Go ahead and click on that, this takes you to the home page for the "WSU Subject and Resource Guides." There are some 300 to 400 of them in this system. They outline a variety of different sets of information about the services and resources in the Libraries grouped by discipline or subject area, sometimes by specific database, or by a particular information literacy concept, and oftentimes also for particular courses including RCI, HISTORY 105 and 305.

So, I could go in here, in the search bar, where I'm mousing over right now, and type in the full name Roots of Contemporary Issues or RCI, to find the RCI Guide by doing that, or if I go up to the address bar, I can simply, after the slash, delete those characters and add the letters r-c-i on the end and find the Roots of Contemporary Issues guide that way as well. So, we are obviously on the home page for the guide with some introductory materials and a basic welcome. On the left-hand side, you will see as I mouse over that there is more specific information for each LRA and then some more general information about the project itself.

We're looking at LRA 3 in this particular video, so I'm going to click on that and it will render a number of different items including some fairly slow to load YouTube videos among other things to help you with LRA 3. I also want to point out in terms of contacting me, that on the left-hand navigation bar of all of the RCI LibGuide pages, there's a button where you can email me questions you have. You could contact me via phone, you can also schedule appointments with me, these are half-hour consultation sessions through Zoom as well. So, consider all those different ways to ask your questions to me.

Also. in terms of introduction, I just want to say that I've been working with this program since it started in the fall of 2012. So there have literally been tens of thousands of students who have done this research project and I've worked with many of those students over that time, and helped create the assignments, and basically know the assignments inside and out. So, another important note about the research project is that both HISTORY 105 and 305 do the project and essentially the process that students go through is the same. Sometimes 305 instructors require a bit longer paper than for 105 students, but otherwise the research project should be fairly identical. I also want to note that the instructors of RCI use these LRA templates to create their assignments, but oftentimes they make alter minor alterations or amendments to them so your instructor's specific assignment prompts could be a little bit different than the prompts I will talk about in these videos. So, you absolutely want to be sure that you're checking out those instructor-specific details, so that you're not missing out on those.

One last introductory item is a quick review of what you've done in the first two LRAs. So, at this point you've gathered a number of what are called secondary sources, books and journal articles, and in this video for LRA 3, we're going to be looking at primary sources you also have had a chance to learn a little bit about Chicago Citation Style and we will continue to use that throughout this project. And you've been refining your topic through a number of pointed research questions, so you will continue that process as part of LRA 3.

So, that concludes this LRA 3 introduction and as always, "Go Cougs!"

Hello, my name is Corey Johnson. I am the library liaison to the Roots of Contemporary Issues program and I want to welcome you to this Library Research Assignment Number Three Part Two video featuring primary sources and definitions of them, and explanations of them.

So, what you are seeing in front of you is the template assignment for LRA 3, and to start things I'm going to briefly go over the contents of the assignment itself. So, you see obviously it starts with an introduction and a little bit about how to submit the assignment, and how it will be evaluated. And then we get into the actual questions, question number one being about finding primary sources, which is going to be the focus of this video, and the next video to come about using different databases to find primary sources.

The second question, as I scroll down here, is about creating an annotated bibliography and there's not going to be any videos specifically about annotated bibliographies. I'm going to leave that up to your individual instructors and TAs to provide you with details about how they want you to do that question. The third question is about self-reflection on the research process. The fourth question and final question is taking your two research questions you created in LRA 2 and narrowing it down to one single question and then also providing an answer to that question. An answer to your research question is essentially your hypothesis or the rough draft, if you will, of the thesis statement for your final paper. So those are the four questions.

So, let's talk about primary sources and the way to start that off is just to ask the question: What is the primary source? If you're going to find one of these, and by the way, in LRA 3 you're required to find at least one, you'll probably want to find multiple primary sources, but at least one, you're going to need to know what one is, and so typically during in-person classes when I ask this question: What is a primary source? students will answer by saying it's a first-hand account created by someone who witnessed an event, or had some direct experiences with a particular event or topic. And these are really good definitions, in fact, in many ways, the quintessential primary source, especially in the humanities, of which history is one, is that kind of definition of a first-hand account. Probably the best kind of source you can get is when someone has lived experiences with your topic.

Another thing you should know about primary sources is they don't necessarily have to be written text-based documents although those tend to be the most helpful. They could be a variety of other things: they could be paintings, they could be maps, they could be a whole assundry of audio-visual materials, they could be a wide variety of physical items as well.

At this point I'm going to switch over to this PowerPoint slide that I'm going to use as an outline for the rest of this video, including the first part you can see what is a primary source. Now sometimes when students again are asked this question: What is a primary source? instead of providing a definition they'll provide an example like a diary, for example, which is a good example because it gets at this idea of a personalized first-hand account. But it's also important to note that you do not necessarily need to have a first-hand account for something to be a primary source. For example, historical newspaper articles can be primary sources, and if a reporter who wrote a story about a battle during a historical war was not actually on the battlefield itself, experiencing the war, that would still be classified as a primary source. So, don't box yourself into a very narrow definition of primary source.

In sum then, the basic thing you need to understand is what makes something a primary source in the humanities is TIME. So, time is very critical and in RCI that historical time period is typically a pre-1980 or pre-1990 time period, again depending on the particular requirements of your section. Now for some topics that might be fairly obvious, what historical primary time period works for you. If you're researching World War I, then during World War One is the time for your primary source creation. For other topics, your primary source is maybe not so obvious, if, for example, you're researching the history of climate change, it sort of begs the question: When did climate change start? or When has it happened? This is a slow and evolving process, right, over many centuries. So, what you'll need to do as a researcher for this kind of topic is to pick a time period that may be important to you. Maybe when the first solid scientific discoveries about climate change were made, for example. And there are many topics, a lot of social related topics things related to issues with sexual orientation, or race issues, or whatever, that have occurred over many centuries and millennia as long as there have been people. And so, you'll need to define what that historical time period is.

I also want to talk about a couple of other keys to success concerning primary sources before we launch and find them in the databases. The first thing is to "know your vocabulary" and in order to talk about that I want to tell a brief story and ask a question about it. So, when I was working with an RCI student in a previous semester, this person's topic was human trafficking. He went into an appropriate historical newspaper database, limited to the years 1900 to 1950, typed in literally the words "human trafficking," spelled those words correctly, hit search, and got nothing back, got zero results.

And so the question is: What happened to this poor RCI student? Again, did everything right, appropriate database, appropriate words to describe his topic, but got nothing. Well the issue here is that the term human trafficking wasn't used in the deeper historical past, so a real key to success is knowing your vocabulary, some words that we use in today's world just simply were not used back 50, 100, or more years ago. So, then you may wonder, well okay, if my topic has this terminology that's too contemporary, what search term should I use?

Well, one of the things that's important to do is to tie your topic to specific historical examples: the names of people, or groups of people, the names of events, the names of laws or legislation, for example, could be very important to you. And the place you can find those is in the secondary sources the books and the articles that you've already gathered. And, by the way, as long as I'm talking about the books and articles you've already gathered, for example, as part of LRA 2, the bibliographies of those books and articles oftentimes also have primary sources in them as well.

So now that we know more about what primary sources are, the next video will dive into the task of finding primary sources. So, thank you for listening and as always, "Go Cougs!"

Hello my name is Corey Johnson. I am the library liaison to the Roots of Contemporary Issues program and I want to welcome you to this LRA 3 video (Part Three) about finding primary sources. I want to start by saying, in terms of finding primary sources, there is no central primary source database. So, in LRA 2 you looked for books and articles, and in terms of doing that within the discipline of history especially, there were particular databases we sent you to for both of those, that just made sense, in terms of where you might find those kinds of resources. Primary sources can be anywhere and everywhere, and part of the reason why there is no central primary source database per se, is because what is a primary source for one person's project may not even be a primary source for someone else's, it depends again on this idea of time. Time or some historical time period that a researcher chooses oftentimes is what dictates what makes a primary source for you, so again there is no central database. And there is not even, within databases that have a lot of promise, there's not necessarily any special button that you can click on or check box or something that just says primary sources.

So, essentially within the universe of primary sources there are more or less two different kinds, one group contains primaries which were more formally documented or published, sources like newspaper articles, books, or government documents. And the other kinds of primary sources are more informal, unpublished items, like diaries or whole assortments of personal papers, those kinds of things.

What you're seeing in front of you is question number one about finding primary sources from the LRA 3 template, and within that there are links to some newspaper databases, the historical London Times, and the Historical New York Times, one of which the London Times, I will be looking at in a minute, and then there's also a link here to the Library Guide for finding primary sources, as well, online. So, I'm going to go ahead and just click on that to show you the Library Guide because it has links to a number of different databases that we potentially might use to find primary sources.

So, if I start up here at the top again in LRA 3 within the RCI LibGuide, you'll see here that there are a number of different YouTube videos which may be helpful to you in terms of using particular databases to find primary sources. And then down here a little bit farther there are groupings of links to primary source databases that might be helpful to you. So, here's the Times of London, Historical New York Times, Reader's Guide Retrospective, which covers magazines in the United States during the 20th century. A number of different things from Britain including The Economist and the Financial Times Historical Archives, etc., etc. So, you want to look at this obviously for particular topics, there may be items in this list that are better than others. And then in terms of non-documentary kinds of primary sources, informal sorts of writing, there are a number of recommended databases here as well.

So, I am going to start by showing you an example of looking for documentary primary source. I'm going to go into the Times of London, which you could see if you notice there that it covers 1785 to 1985. I am off campus so need to log in to this system, if you're on campus you don't need to log in. And you just use your Network ID and password to log in, the same thing you would use to get into your online course spaces or, for example, MyWSU. So here we are at the Advanced Search screen.

And I'm going to use today, for this video, authentic student topics from prior semesters in RCI. This was a student looking at the historical development of women's rights in India, so I've got India on one line and then I'm going to put woman or women, that's what that question mark is for there. I'm going to make this slightly bigger as well. I can find women here and then India as well, both concepts are important so I've got them on separate lines, with an AND between them. Then I can change the fields I want to search over here on the right. It defaults to just sort of searching keyword, which is sort of an all field type of search. You can broaden your search by changing this to Entire Document, which is going to search every word of every article in the system. And this can be good strategy to use if, for example, you're looking for the name of a very particular person or a particular piece of legislation or something like that. That could be a good strategy.

You also can limit your search to a more detailed and narrowed kind of venture from the keyword by doing something like Document Title, which you'll see here. I am clicking on that because that's typically where I start. I hope to be efficient about my search and find documents that actually have my keywords in the title of that document, under the supposition that the most important words about any document are those in the title. So hopefully there'll be some newspaper article titles that have those words in it.

Now, two important things to note about newspapers in terms of finding primary sources, one is that they oftentimes do not have very descriptive titles for their articles like we do in more recent times, so sometimes searching by title is not necessarily very helpful. The other thing is when you go to do your Chicago citations for historical newspaper articles you'll notice that oftentimes, in fact most of the time, there's no specific author credit given to an article. And so you'll actually start your Chicago style citation with the title of the article because, of course, there is no specific author. So just keep those things in mind as well. Also, before I hit the search button, I just want to mention that finding newspaper articles as primary sources is typically a good way to start for your project. Newspapers cover every topic under the sun, and they've been around for a very long time, and they typically come out daily, for example, so there's a lot of newspaper articles, and you should hopefully be able to find some for your topic. Now, the downside to using newspaper articles for primary sources is that newspaper articles tend to be very short and they tend to be more objective and fact-based as opposed to providing a lot of analysis, so keep that in mind as you're doing your research.

If I click the search button, I will get a set of results, and by the way, everything in here is in full text, so you do not need to go to paper sources, everything is digitized. And you'll see here a number of sources that talk about the women of India, women doctors in India, etc., etc., medicine for women. And if you were interested in one of these you could click on the title of it, it will now show you the full text of that article and that could take a minute for it to come up since these are big digitized files. So here it is, and so you can read the article and figure out why this what how this may help with your project. It's also important to note here in the upper right that if you want you can immediately download the article to your computer, you can also send it to yourself as an email.

And then also obviously you can cite it as well and if I click on that link it defaults to showing it in MLA but I can go to Chicago 17th edition, which is what we're using for this class, and copy and paste this particular citation into my LRA. Now as we've said in these videos throughout, whether you're finding books, or articles, or primary sources, whatever it is you're finding, you're going to also want to go back to the Library Guide and look at the official University of Chicago set of examples for your research materials, to make sure that whatever citation a database provides you, that it is accurate, and you know to make whatever alterations are necessary.

So, that's one example of finding a documentary primary source from a historical newspaper database. So, I'm going to go ahead and close that, and go back to the LRA 3 template and then again click into this library guide, and the list of potential databases. And now show you an example of a non-documentary primary source search, so again go past these YouTube videos down here to this list. And so there's a number of different places that you might find these, but I'm going to take a look at Search It, so go ahead and click on that link and go into the search database.

And from here, I'm going to go to advanced search, and I'm going to enter some terms again from a student topic, a real RCI student topic from a previous term. This student was looking at the historical development of state-sponsored assassination. So, I'm putting "assassin" here with an asterisk, so I can get assassin, assassins, assassination, assassinated, etc., different variations on that term. I'm going to also go in here and in a second line type in words that describe informal primary source information types like "letter," "diary," "interview," or "speech." I could put in "narrative" here, I could put in "personal papers," there's a variety of different words I could use, again with ORs between them so that any combination of these words is fine. So, among the millions of items in Search It, hopefully what I'm going to tease out of the database are letters either about or by assassins, or interviews from assassins, or people involved with assassinations, those kinds of things.

And I can go ahead and limit perhaps to the title to be more specific and narrow in my searching. Again, I may need to back off on that if that doesn't work. So, I don't want to limit my material type. I could obviously limit to "English" if that makes most sense, and I could limit to dates as well. So, I've said all along that time is the most important thing that defines a primary source so I could pick a particular time period to make sure that I'm getting something that defines a primary source for my research.

I'm just going to do a more generic search just to show you an example here. And so I get a set of search results and hopefully what you'll see is the words assassin and letters appearing in the titles of these items. So, I got 446 results, here's letters and assassination and diary, etc., etc., and speech and assassination, as well, so hopefully these might be things that would be helpful for you.

Now the other thing I want to do while we're still in Search It is show you a little bit of information about another kind of way you can find primary sources within Search It.

Historians oftentimes publish what are called "primary source readers" or "source document collections" of various kinds, and in that case what you would do is there is actually a subject heading. So I can go into this "Any Field" area, and put subject, and type in the word "source," so again, for like source reader. And, in this case, and I would want to take out this line about diaries, letters, and whatever, because what I could find in a source reader potentially about assassins are a series of letters, and diaries and speeches, that have all been put into one book. And for that if you're looking for one of those you definitely would NOT want to limit to a deep historical time period because a collection of primary sources about a historical topic could be published at any time, in fact, could be published quite recently. So, if I did a search like this then I could see if there are source books that are available for my for my topic and again these books can sometimes be very helpful in your research.

I want to close by talking a little bit about a couple of other places that you might look for primary sources that maybe are not necessarily so obvious. So, I, yet one more one last time, I'm going to click into this primary sources LibGuide and scroll to the part about database lists, and talk to you about first google products, Google and Google Scholar. Now you might think, why would I want to go to Google to find a primary source? Well, oftentimes historians, people who work in museums, librarians, create digitized sets of primary sources and make them available to researchers online for free. So, if you go to Google and you not only type in words that describe your topic, those keywords, but also type in words like "primary documents," "primary sources," "primary collection" or something along those lines, it is entirely likely that you might find digitized materials for your topic. And every semester students find treasure troves of information online freely available that help them with their RCI projects.

Now also if you look at the screen here are a couple of other good places you can look, the first one is another Google product "Google Books." Google Books is the largest book digitization project in the world, and so there are millions and millions of books in this system. The books that are freely and fully available, in other words, the entire book has been digitized, are those that are out of copyright, which are books where the authors are dead and long gone. So, a lot of them are history books and so they're books from deeper history that you could use as primary sources. So, if you go to Google Books by clicking on this link, it's just books.google.com. By the way, in terms of a URL, you might find some really good primary sources, and the thing that's great about Google Books is that they index every word, of every page, of every book, so you can actually search inside books in order to find key information so it can be a very good place to go.

And then another huge digitization project is something called the HathiTrust. This is a large collection of historical items, digitized government documents, books, all different kinds of things, and it can be a very good place to find history primary sources.

So, this concludes the LRA 3 video about finding primary sources, good luck with your research and as always, "Go Cougs!"

This short video will show you how to effectively search the Historical New York Times for news articles. The Historical New York Times is one of many ProQuest Newspaper databases.

The Advanced Search page gives you more options to focus your search. I need information from before 1950 and my topic is the history of protecting endangered species.

I can use quotation marks around a common phrase when searching, so the search engine will look for the phrase, not the individual words.

I will limit by publication date and select “before this date” and enter 1950. I’ll also limit results to articles only. Sometimes ads, comics, and editorials are useful as primary sources, but I want a legitimate newspaper article.

This gave me only three articles, that’s not good, I was expecting hundreds. It’s possible that the phrase “endangered species” was not commonly used before 1950.

I’ll have to find some different terms in the search box.

Note that the search box saves my initial filters. Maybe the word “extinction” will work better. I’m interested in extinct plants, so I’ll add the word plants as well. The new results list is much larger and more comprehensive.

Still, there’s a problem. Many of these results are about power plants and industrial plants, not the kinds of plants I was thinking of. Sometimes it takes several tries to find the right search term. Instead of plants, let’s try “plant life.” This is a much smaller but better list of results.

The first article is about forest plant life, the second about preserving native wildflowers, the third about United Nations efforts to protect plant life. I can re-sort the list by oldest articles first and find that my search brought up relevant resources dated back to 1901.

Let’s return to the UN article, I think that will be most useful to me. I can read this article from here. I can also save it as a PDF, email it to myself,or print it. The automatic citation tool will quickly summarize all the information I need to cite this article in my paper, but I’ll need to check the format before I use it.

This short video has shown you how to effectively search the Historical New York Times for news articles. 

Good luck with your research, and contact the Libraries for help!

This short tutorial will show you how to search the historical London Times.

From the homepage, let’s click on ‘Advanced Search.’ 

There are many options on the London Times search screen to help you focus your search.

Most likely you will want to look under ‘publication section’ and limit your search to news items but for primary sources advertising, editorials, announcements, and even illustrations can be appropriate.

Under ‘publication date’ we can limit the date range to before 1980. Consult your own research assignments for your specific primary source date requirements. 

As you can see, this archive goes back to 1785. My topic is Ocean Pollution, so I’ll put those two keywords in the search box. 

There are very few matches! That tells me that I need to rethink my search terms Rethinking your terms and the way you word your topic is a critical part of effective research. In this case, it appears that ocean pollution is too modern, people must have used different terms back then or didn’t think of pollution in terms of the entire ocean.

I’ll change ocean to water. I’m getting more hits, but many of these are about local drinking water. A few are about rivers and seas. Sea may have been more commonly used than ocean in pre-1980s London. I’ll try that. I’m getting a number of articles about oil pollution at sea.

These thumbnails of each article highlight the relevant portion of text. Sadly the article titles are not always useful. I’ll have to explore the text to see what's actually relevant. I can click on the article title to read it online.

The text is very small. I'll magnify it here. This article is fascinating as it gives us insight into the questions people were asking about oil pollution. 

This is an excellent primary source as it shows the assumptions and anxieties about ocean pollution at the time.

I can print, download, email, or cite the article here. The automatic citation tool should give me all the information I need to cite this in my paper, but I’ll need to double check the formatting before I use it. 

This short video has shown you how to effectively search the London Times for news articles.

Good luck with your research, and contact the Libraries for help!

This short tutorial will show you how to use Search It to find primary sources. From the Library homepage click on the Search It advanced search link. 

My topic is on gun control in Europe and I want a primary source on the historical roots of gun control. I'll use the phrase gun control and because I may be dealing with outdated sources, I'll also use the phrase bearing arms. I'll accept either phrase in my sources - I don't need both together, so I'll connect them with an OR on this line. The quotation marks around my keywords ensure that my results will include that exact phrase.

I'll string together a list of search terms describing types of primary sources I'll accept such as letters, diaries, interviews, or speeches. Search It has no filter to find only primary sources but this method often gets useful results. The OR connecting them means that I'll accept any of these terms and the asterisk means that I'll accept any words with those roots. So speech, speeches, or speechmaking are all a part of this search term. 

I also want to make sure that my results aren’t focused on the United States so I’ll add another line and use NOT to exclude the phrase “United States” from my results.

Finally, I want to consider the historical timeframe that I want to focus on for my topic, so I'll limit my results to before 1980. Make sure you check your assignment in case you need specific date parameters. Because filtering for this date will provide historical documents in my results that could be used as primary sources, I can also try a search without searching for the types of primary sources. Get comfortable with changing your search terms and strategy throughout your research process to find the best sources for your assignments. 

These sources look promising. I want early cases of gun control, so let's check out this result. This source is accessed like any other digital resource by clicking on the title and then the link in access options. 

This short video has shown you how to effectively search for primary sources using Search It. Good luck with your research and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Hello, this is Corey Johnson - your RCI librarian, and I am going to be doing a short video today about using footnoting in Microsoft Word. I realize that many of you will use other word processing software, but obviously Microsoft Word is very common. The Word version that you're seeing here is Word 2016 and even though you may be using a slightly different version it's... over the most recent versions, it's very common to have the same kind of basic setup.

So if I go here and I'm typing along in my paper and I get to the end of a sentence where I'm either paraphrasing or quoting something like that I'm going to put in my first footnote. So the way that you do that in this system is first of all, you might think as you look here along the options, the heading options at the top, that you might think you would want to insert something so if you go to the insert tab and look across the options, one of the pitfall areas that students sometimes click on is cross-reference, which is something you don't want to use. And then an even more common error is to think about adding a footer which you see here and you don't want to do that. Footers are not the same thing as footnotes, even though obviously the wording is very similar. But avoid doing footers. So you don't want to be in this insert tab and as you go down the line of potential things, the one that hopefully will stick out to you is references, since obviously you're making reference to a particular citation. Now even within here sometimes there are issues that can trip you up. You'll notice right here in this area that's called citations and bibliography, named appropriately, that it defaults to APA which obviously you could change to Chicago. However, you'll see here it changes it actually to Chicago 16th, and we are now, as of the summer of 2017, in the 17th edition of Chicago so this would not be correct. In addition to that, if you wanted to use this, if you insert a citation here, what you're gonna get is what's called the author/date system within Chicago, which we're not using in RCI. We're instead using something called the notes/bibliography system within Chicago, so you want to avoid using this area as well. It'll just create pitfalls for you.

What you're going to want to do (after saying all those places where you wouldn't want to go), is to click here on 'Insert Footnote' which obviously also makes sense. So if I click on that, you'll see that what it did is it took us to the bottom of the page, where I can go ahead and add and I'll just type in some just keystrokes here to show this is where I'm going to put in my footnote for the first reference and then if I scroll back up you can see that it's at a superscripted number one right here. So then I can obviously you know continue with my paper at this point and blah blah blah and move on, and then the next time I insert, go to Insert Footnote, it's going to make a number two and so on and so forth. The system is obviously quite convenient as you might guess that because as you edit and add text and subtract text out of your paper, it automatically makes sure that the footnotes for any one page actually appear at the bottom of the appropriate pages. So that's an important thing for you to remember about how this works.

So good luck with your research and with your writing with doing footnoting and feel free to contact me, Corey Johnson - your RCI librarian at coreyj@wsu.edu if you need further help.

Hello, this is Corey Johnson - your RCI librarian - with a short lesson about DOIs (digital object identifiers). You can see the screen I am on here is the library guide (or LibGuide) for RCI. I'll highlight up here the URL for that: libguides.libraries.WSU.edu/RCI. Then if I go to the left-hand navigation bar and scroll down to Chicago style guide, I have bibliographic and footnote information for a variety of different kinds of information types: books, articles, newspapers, etc.

DOIs come into play in this area right here for articles that are in an electronic journal and so you're supposed to put a DOI, and here it is actually within the citation, at the end of your bibliographic citation - and your full footnote by the way as well - for online journal articles.

The question becomes 'where do I find a DOI for my article?' or 'does my article even have a DOI?' Oftentimes databases don't provide the DOI directly in the database where you might find it, so you may have to go and look. This suggests that you look at a place called DOI.org, which on the surface of it would make great sense. I actually recommend that you go to a site, and I'll show you here, called CrossRef. It's at CrossRef.org, which you can use to either get a DOI from the text of an article, the citation information of an article you have, or if you have the text which is the most common - like the title of the article - you can figure out if it has a DOI. One thing that it does is it defaults to this search site, and you don't want to search the site. You actually search metadata and then you can see here that you can search for authors, titles, you can actually search for a DOI number in here as well. Most often probably what you're going to have, and I'm going to put this in quotes by the way, is the title of an article that you're interested in. So I have one on my clipboard that I'm going to cut and paste in here, again putting quotes around it, and click enter to search. And what you'll see in the results is here's my article and I can check that it's the right author and it's the right volume and issue, the journal itself, etc. And then here's the DOI - the complete DOI - and you'll want to go ahead and put in the link that includes the actual location of the server - the DOI server - plus this other combination of letters and of numbers and letters that makes up a DOI. But you want to put this at the end of your citations.

So that's a little bit about DOIs, Thanks for listening and if you need more help, don't hesitate to contact me. At the LibGuide, you can see here - here's contact information for me. You can schedule an appointment with me online, send me an email, or otherwise call me on the phone as well. So good luck with your research and be sure to put those DOIs in where appropriate.