John S. Ott
Department of History
Fall 2014
HST 300 – Historical Imagination
ASSIGNMENT
GUIDELINES – LIBRARY RESEARCH
MISSION
Due in class, Tuesday,
October 28, in class
/ 150 points (15%)
Although we will receive a general introduction by Kris Kern
(kernk@pdx.edu) to the library's resources for doing historical
research, you
do not need to go to the PSU Library
to answer
the questions below. You can do it all on-line. However, to
access
the databases owned by PSU’s library from off campus and even to search
Worldcat, you will
need a PSU Odin Account (all
students have one; if you do not know what
an Odin Account is, contact the OIT Help Desk at 503.725.HELP or go to
their office in the basement of Smith Center).
Late
paper
guidelines and evaluation for the project
Grades will be assigned based on your thoroughness and
thoughtfulness
in
answering the questions below. Under most circumstances, thorough
answers and obvious indications of time spent answering the questions
will warrant an "A"-grade.
Late assignments will be accepted
until 18 November, but will be
marked down according to the following timetable (this includes
weekends!). Mitigating circumstances such as a demonstrable medical
condition or acute personal crisis may
be grounds for an extension, but
only if requests are made in advance of the assignment due date.
1 day late: 1/3 grade step (-5 points, e.g., from A- to B+)
2-4 days late: 1/2 grade step (-7.50 points, e.g., from B+ to B-)
5-9 days late: 1 full grade step (-15 points, e.g., from A to B)
10+ days late: 2 full grade steps (-30 points, e.g., from A to C).
A paper turned in ten
or more days after the due date can earn no higher than a B-.
Assignment guidelines
While this course does not require that students undertake a research
paper, it has as one of its secondary objectives that students be
introduced to the resources for historical research at their disposal
at
Portland State and elsewhere, through the Summit system and ILL.
To that end, your
"mission" is to answer
each of the following questions below with sufficiently comprehensive
answers
that it will be clear to me that you know what you are talking
about. Please read each question carefully!
1. What are some of the differences between the PSU-Summit
libraries and Worldcat? What
institutions
belong to Summit? What are its
advantages
and/or limitations for doing on-line based research at PSU? For
example, do you
find that conducting searches on the system is straightforward or
difficult? Attempt a keyword, author, or title search. What are the
results? Are they useful? [20 points]
2. What is Google Scholar? How does it work? What kinds of
information does it provide? Attempt at least one keyword,
author, or title
search of your choosing. What are the results? Are they useful? [20
points]
3. What kinds of sources do the J-STOR, Project Muse, and
Academic Search Premier (Ebsco Host) databases contain? Do the
databases have any limitations in terms of their content or user
interfaces? What are the capabilities of each? Are these
databases appropriate for bibliographic searches? Why/why
not?
[20 points]
4. Pick a historical
subject area of interest to you—it should be
fairly broad (for example, U.S. political history, 1900-1930, Oregon in
the Twentieth Century, History of Soviet Russia, etc.).
Using the Millar Library History Subject Guides
as a starting point, or one or more of the guides for related fields
(East Asian
Studies,
Judaic Studies, Medieval
Studies,
Middle East Studies, Native American Studies, Art History, etc.),
identify [40 points]:
three
primary source collections
relevant to your chosen field, which might yield primary sources useful
to researching the field you've chosen;
four secondary sources, two of which must be articles from
peer-reviewed journals (the other two may be monographs, or other
periodical sources); and
three tertiary sources. Tertiary sources can include
academic dictionaries,
encyclopedias, annotated bibliographies, biographical registers, etc.
NOTE: