I few months ago, at the request of Social Studies teachers at the Academy, I put together a collection of primary sources from the First World War. Most of the collection is made up of excerpts from letters and diaries written during the war by those who witnessed the battles and civilian reactions to the conflict, often from the front lines.

World War I: A Collection of Sources From The First World War

The presentation is in the form of a blog — the first post is dated August 1, 1914 as France mobilizes for the advancing German threat. The final post, September 1, 1918, is written by a journalist who died the next day from wounds received in battle.

For more information on World War I, visit 1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century at PBS.

We welcome Mrs. Glover’s and Mrs. Tepedino’s health classes to the library this week to find information to support a group presentation on a specific disease.

Remember your essential question: what do we need to do to convince the Board of Directors at Strong Hospital to award us a $1,000,000 grant to fund research for our disease?

After defining the task, we decided that someone in the medical community would be the ideal source for this health-related project, so we set out to find information that we knew was written or reviewed by medical professionals, or at least was sponsored by medical organizations.

Since we are looking for 3 reliable sources for our brief presentations, we decided Wikipedia wasn’t the best source because of the uncertainty of the original authors, as well as the extensive medical terms that are used in the rather long articles.

We decided that since many of the overview articles at WebMD were written and reviewed by medical professionals, and couldn’t be changed by just anyone, that site might lead us to reliable sources.

We also considered the search process itself, and briefly discussed how Google and other search engines rank their search results; not by how reliable or “good” the information is, but by how many other web sites link to it — essentially, a popularity contest.

SweetSearch was introduced as a search engine that does give an indication of how reliable the search results may be, since “every web site in SweetSearch has been evaluated by [their] research experts” — sweet!

EasyBib and BibMe (both free!) are resources to keep in mind when it’s time for producing bibliographic citations. The bibliographic robots don’t always get it right, however, so we should check the suggested citation against the Research Manual Style Guide to make sure it’s accurate, and make changes as necessary.

We welcomed Mrs. Albright’s Speech and Debate class to the Academy Library today.

We started with a look at search engines, with Google being the most popular. We determined that Google ranks search results based on how many other sites link to individual websites, not necessarily by how useful or reliable the sites are.

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.

EasyBib and BibMe (both free!) are resources to keep in mind when it’s time for producing bibliographic citations. The bibliographic robots don’t always get it right, however, so we should check the suggested citation against the Research Manual Style Guide to make sure it’s accurate, and make changes as necessary.

During our next session, we’ll assess some websites based on relevancy, accuracy and authority using the Website Evaluation form.