Library Research: the basics  

When doing research in the library, remember the thirty minute rule: if, after thirty minutes, you are still struggling to find something on your topic, it's time to get some help.  That can mean checking with your friends or classmates who have done this before or even asking your instructor.  Worse comes to worse, you can even ask a librarian & you don't even have to be in the library to do it.  Just check this page out.  Honest, it's cool. It's our job.

Research is a process.  Like life in general, a lot of it's ordinary, even boring.  Sometimes it's hard work.  And other times you get lucky.  And like many other skills, the more you do it, the better you'll get.  Promise.  So, when doing a research paper, you may want to follow these steps. Click on the tabs above for more information.

"Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all of this is simply one grand misunderstanding?  Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that?  In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside.  In fact it's exactly the opposite.  Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos..."

--William Gaddis

You don't have to be a mad scientist to do good research, but you will have to use tools beyond Google or some other search engine.  That means databases & catalogs.  And maybe a honking big wrench.