Academic Skills Session: Research Survival Guide

Our second session in the Academic Skills Programme was called 'Research Survival Guide: Mastering Your Dissertation or Project' (side-note, I think in hindsight that 'Surviving Your Dissertation' would have been a snappier title, but oh well...!)

Research Survival Guide: Mastering Your Dissertation or Project from Annie Gleeson

As with the last session, I've adapted the content into three posts on the library blog:

• Research Survival Guide Part 1: The Literature Search
• Research Survival Guide Part 2: Evaluating Resources
• Research Survival Guide Part 3: References and Bibliographies

I made a screencast of Zotero in action to show how the cite-while-you-write and bibliography export features work, now uploaded to YouTube with voiceover.

We also had a couple of handouts for this session - a Literature Search Plan worksheet to get the students thinking about the search terms they were going to use, and a Reference Template to take away and use to record their references if they favoured the pen-and-paper approach. The reference template was adapted from Meriel Royal's version, thank you Meriel for the idea!

Academic Skills Session: Navigating the Information Jungle

Liz Osman and I did two sessions earlier this month as part of the college's Academic Skills Programme. Our first session 'Navigating the Information Jungle' was aimed at first years, and was a kind of 'you've found your feet, where do you go from here?' session.

Navigating the Information Jungle from Annie Gleeson

I've adapted the content of the session into three posts on our library blog:

• Navigating the Information Jungle Part 1: Knowing What’s Out There
• Navigating the Information Jungle Part 2: Making Sense of Reading Lists
• Navigating the Information Jungle Part 3: Referencing and Plagiarism