Assignment | Iconography Final Project (McGinley): Finding Sources

Ancient destruction not covered in these so much, but more modern periods, sure. Restoration work also gets reported on.

Books, as a medium, contain a variety of presentations of information, from the casual, popular histories all the way to scholarly books. You can recognize the latter by checking the publisher (usually a university press, might be a professional society) and the author's credentials (probably a PhD); like a scholarly article, there will be copious citations provided.

Research means more than just Googling some likely terms and picking something easy off the first page of results. Consider:

You can streamline the quality of your Google searches by focusing on government (.gov) and education (.edu) domains in your results.

• .gov is the most strict to register -- non-government entities can't get it!
• .edu is mostly universities, but you'll sometimes come across some K-12 entities with this domain.
  • The big thing to watch out for is that you're not finding a student paper or project that's been posted on the university domain. Presumably their work is pretty good since it's being shown off publicly, but undergrads are not yet academic experts in their fields (sorry).
• .org is somewhat reliable, but it's barely a step above a .com in many cases -- it doesn't take much to form an "organization" to register this domain.

Google has some advanced search commands to make this quicker. Just add site:___ to your search. E.g. site:loc.gov or even just site:.edu. Try it below!

(I'll assume you can find your own way to YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

Access online library materials through the library databases!

Browse by subject area

• A-Z sortable database list

To access the databases  from off-campus, you will be prompted to enter your 14-digit library barcode.

Don't have one yet? Request a barcode number online.

The CRAAP Test

Evaluate your source's...

Also, The Three Rs

Is your source
Recent? Reliable? Relevant?

Is this source up-to-date? Is it about my topic, and does it go into enough depth? Does it come from an authoritative source? Is the information accurate (and are there citations given to back it up)? And why was this information written in the first place?