Course: History 401, Junior Independent Study
Faculty: Greg Shaya and Jeff Roche, Department of History
Librarian: Damon Hickey, Director of Libraries and Nikhat Ghouse,
Academic Resident Reference Librarian
Introduction and Overview
The goal of this information literacy initiative is to make our history majors better researchers, better prepared to tackle the immense resources available to the contemporary scholar.
We center our attention on History 401, Junior Independent Study. In the flexible curriculum of the history department, this is the first course required of all history majors.
History 401 might be subtitled, "How to Do History." Students in History 401 produce a work of substantial research as they learn the kinds of skills necessary for their Senior I.S. Through individual meetings and occasional group workshops, students are led through the process of developing a historical topic, finding relevant sources, evaluating the historical literature, developing an argument, outlining, and writing a research paper.
The study of history is, at essence, an exercise in information literacy. But there is a curious dilemma facing the young historian today. The sources of history-both primary and secondary-have never been so accessible. Full-text databases of scholarly research and historical documents, digitized image banks, online bibliographical indexes and finding aids now complement the profound print resources of the library. But this wealth of resources has generally left students bedazzled. The result, for most history majors, is that they are satisfied to seek out sources with the very simplest and clumsiest of search methods.
There is an enormous opportunity here: to help history students to recognize the wealth of resources at their control; to help them to use resources productively and selectively; and to help them to make use of the library's print collections.
We propose, therefore, two innovations that would integrate information literacy into the History 401 curriculum:
As History 401 is the first course required of all history majors, it is the ideal place for such an initiative. The resources we have proposed would help students, quite directly, to complete the course. But more importantly, these resources would ensure that students have a solid grasp of the research skills necessary to their Senior Independent Study.
This proposal is one facet of a coordinated effort within the Department of History to reorganize the curriculum of History 401. We have already begun consultations with the Department; our goal is to produce resources that will be used in the teaching of all History 401's. We propose this project with the full support of the Department of History (see attached letter of support from Madonna Hettinger).
The benefits of this project should be clear. It will:
Part 1: Online Resources
Part 1 of this project entails the design of web pages that would guide students through the process of historical research. These pages have two facets:
These tutorials would illustrate how to:
For example, we might build a tutorial around the question of how the government tried to help farmers during the Dust Bowl. An interactive assignment would have students build a bibliography on the Dust Bowl drawing upon a host of on-line resources: Prompts would guide the student toward scholarly articles, appropriate books, sources available in archives, and historiographic essays Then students would expand their bibliography to include relevant information on the New Deal, environmental changes, and historiographic interpretations.
Another tutorial might demonstrate how to take notes from a secondary source. The page would include a paragraph on the passage of the second Agricultural Administration Act from a narrative history of the New Deal. A set of linked pages would show how a student would take different notes from the same paragraph according to their particular interest. Thus, the student could read the paragraph and choose from a menu one particular aspect of the New Deal: changing historical interpretations, agricultural policies, the inner struggles of Roosevelt's Brain Trust, or legislative battles over a particular piece of legislation. According to which item the student chose from the menu, the notes taken from that paragraph-examples of which would appear below the paragraph-would, by necessity change.
Part 2: Library Workshops and Assignments
We have planned these web resources as tutorials that would guide students in the use of historical resources and the process of historical research. But library workshops and guided assignments provide the best opportunity to make these research skills operative.
Our aim is to put together assignments that could, on the one hand, advance their Junior I.S. research project, and on the other hand, develop their ability to use library resources. These would directly reflect the research skills described above. Over the course of the Junior I.S., students would be required to:
These assignments would be tied to a series of library workshops where the teacher and a librarian would demonstrate the tools and strategies for effective research using the web-based tutorial in a lab session. One session would focus on the basic use of CONSORT, OhioLINK, WorldCAT and WebZap for interlibrary loan. Another session would center on the use of specialized historical databases and biographical sources. A third session would introduce students to Special Collections, as well as finding aids for Ohio archives.
Timeline
This project will proceed in three phases, with a timeline as follows:
Phase 1. Spring - Summer 2002. Beginning May 6, 2002
Phase 2. Fall 2002
Phase 3. Winter 2003. Ending February 7, 2003