We welcome Mrs. Klick’s and Mrs. Battle’s English 10 Honors classes to CA Library this week as they investigate topics related to the 1920s in preparation for reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby.

We introduced K-W-L as a way to identify what you need to know about a topic: K = what you KNOW, W = what you WANT to know, and L = what you LEARNED.

We identified pretty quickly that the Academy Library has an excellent collection of print resources on this era in American history, searchable via the Academy Library Catalog. We also found out the library’s database page has some useful resources, including ABC-CLIO, the Gale Discovering Collection, and EBSCOhost for access to articles from over 500 magazines and academic journals.

When it comes to using the open web for finding free information, it’s vitally important to evaluate the relevance, accuracy and credibility of potential sources. The research manual includes a guide for evaluating resources on the web.

In addition to Google basic search, which we all know and love, we also explored some other search options on the CA Library webpage. Sweet Search is a nice option for finding websites that have been evaluated by research experts. The Custom Search Page at the CA Library blog helps focus on specific types of websites, hand-selected by me.

The research manual is readily available — don’t forget to use it if you have any questions about how to cite a particular piece of information — check the research manual style guide for answers to the most common citation questions.