Multicultural Americans assignments

We've relied heavily on the Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America in the past, but it's pretty old by now (print copy 1995, ebook copy 2000).

Here are some newer alternatives:

Multicultural America: An Encyclopedia of the Newest Americans (Greenwood, 2011) Print and Online R305.800973M91b
4 volumes. Signed profile articles on 50 American immigrant groups, 10-20K words each (some entries are quite lengthy). Statistics provided, but the text emphasizes history, identity, and culture. Includes bibliographies.

Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (SAGE, 2013)   R305.800973M91
4 volumes, 900 signed entries on specific ethnic groups and topics related to multiculturalism, appendix of 2010 Census Data, bibliographies, and more. Articles are relatively short.

These and other titles are listed on the SW3200: Cultural Diversity course guide.

-Kristen W

Shepard's Citations

There is a Business Law assignment requiring students to use Shepard's Citations. It is now standard to do citation searches online rather than using print citators or the old CD-Rom versions. Shepard's Citations is located in LexisNexis Academic under the US Legal tab on the left-hand frame. Westlaw has a competing product called KeyCite. It is available in Westlaw Campus Research. You will need to click on the Law tab located on the header. From there enter either the citation or the case name in the Find box on the left-hand side. The KeyCite report is a part of the record returned about the case. I have added an entry for Online Citators to the online legal resources guide that explains how to access these important resources. It appears in the same section as the links to LexisNexis Academic and Westlaw Campus Research.

Sharon

They Say I Say, With Readings

Some English classes are using They Say I Say, With Readings, 2nd edition from 2012. We have one copy on reserve, and it's a popular item. We have two reserve copies of the 1st edition from 2008.

Don't hate me, but I've told several circulation students and staff that if a student needs an essay from the 2nd edition that isn't in the 1st edition, and the 2nd edition isn't available, the reference librarians will help the student try to locate the essay online or in another book in the library. I successfully did this twice in the last 30 minutes.

First you have to know the complete essay title and author, so I'm posting the TOC below. I included links to the three essays I've located. If I get around to it, I'll update this as I locate other essays. Now that I went to all this trouble, no one will ever ask this question again, but that's the way it goes!

Kristen

They Say I Say, With Readings 2nd edition (2012)

PART 5 - READINGS

14. IS HIGHER EDUCATION WORTH THE PRICE?
· ANDREW HACKER AND CLAUDIA DREIFUS, Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission?
· SANFORD J. UNGAR, The New Liberal Arts
· DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, Kenyon Commencement Speech
· LIZ ADDISON, Two Years Are Better Than Four
· KEVIN CAREY, Why Do You Think They're Called For-Profit Colleges?
· CHARLES MURRAY, Are Too Many People Going to College?
· MIKE ROSE, Blue-Collar Brilliance
· ROBIN WILSON, A Lifetime of Student Debt? Not Likely

15. IS POP CULTURE ACTUALLY GOOD FOR YOU?
· STEVEN JOHNSON, Watching TV Makes You Smarter
· DANA STEVENS, Thinking Outside the Idiot Box
· ANTONIA PEACOCKE, Family Guy and Freud
· MALCOLM GLADWELL, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted
· DENNIS BARON, Reforming Egypt in 140 Characters?
· DAVID CRYSTAL, 2B or Not 2B?
· ROZ CHAST, The I.M.s of Romeo and Juliet
· TOM BISSELL, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
· JASON ZINSER, The Good, the Bad, and The Daily Show
· GERALD GRAFF, Hidden Intellectualism

16. IS FAST FOOD THE NEW TOBACCO?
· DAVID ZINCZENKO, Don't Blame the Eater
· RADLEY BALKO, What You Eat Is Your Business
· JUDITH WARNER, Junking Junk Food
· WIL HAYGOOD, Kentucky Town of Manchester Illustrates National Obesity Crisis
· MICHELLE OBAMA, Remarks to the NAACP National Convention
· MICHAEL POLLAN, Escape from the Western Diet in Pollan’s In Defense of Food
· MARY MAXFIELD, Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating
· SUSIE ORBACH, Fat Is a Feminist Issue probably in Orbach’s Fat Is a Feminist Issue, but I don’t know what pages of the book correspond.
· CARRIE PACKWOOD FREEMAN AND DEBRA MERSKIN, Having It His Way: The Construction of Masculinity in Fast-Food TV Advertising

17. WHY DOES IT MATTER WHO WINS THE BIG GAME?
· MAYA ANGELOU, Champion of the World
· WILFRID SHEED, Why Sports Matter
· MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, Women Who Hit Very Hard and How They've Changed Tennis
· JENNIE YABROFF, In Defense of Cheering
· FELISA ROGERS, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Football
· SARA MARATTA, Move Over Boys, Make Room in the Crease
· WILLIAM MOLLER, We, the Public, Place the Best Athletes on Pedestals
· JOE POSNANSKI, Cheating and CHEATING

18. WHAT'S UP WITH THE AMERICAN DREAM?
· BOB HERBERT, Hiding from Reality
· CAL THOMAS, Is the American Dream Over?
· BRANDON KING, American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold?
· ROBERT H. FRANK, Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/business/17view.html
· PAUL KRUGMAN, Confronting Inequality
· KAREN OLSSON, Up Against Wal-Mart
· SEBASTIAN MALLABY, Progressive Wal-Mart. Really.
· CONSTANCE M. RUZICH AND A. J. GRANT, Predatory Lending and the Devouring of the American Dream
· BARACK OBAMA, A More Perfect Union

Harvard Business Review article

Heads up that a hard copy of the HBR March 2007 article, Managing Difference: The Central Challenge of Global Strategy, is at the reference desk in the assignments folder and a pdf version of the article is saved on Ref1 in Karen's folder.

This is an article used in a current class, but our copy of that volume is either missing or damaged (can't remember which).

Kristen

English 1020 Scavenger Hunt

Mr. Collin Olson's English 1020 students might ask you for help with a tricky scavenger hunt assignment. It's not a new assignment, so some of you may have encountered it before, though I never had. A copy with answers is in the "assignments" folder in the tray at the reference desk.

How will you know you're looking at Mr. Olson's scavenger hunt and not something for another class? It's 36 questions and involves tasks like finding how many copies of a certain book exist in a foreign country (worldcat), or finding how a certain scholar describes a particular term (check infosearch for a book by that person, probably a reference book).

K. West

Assignments at the Reference Desk

Just a reminder that there is a manila folder at the reference desk, in the 3-level filing tray by Ref1, titled "assignments." It contains copies of and answers for current and previous library-related assignments, "scavenger hunts," etc.

At the top of the folder now is an answer key to Amanda Moore's Legal Writing and Research assignment. Please don't give answers to students, but use the answer key as a guide to directing students to the next step.

ENGL 3030 Scavenger Hunt

FYI: Students in Dr. Bradley's ENGL 3030 class have apparently been asked to find the following article as part of a scavenger hunt:

Dawson, Hugh. "Recovering Rip Van Winkle: A Corrective Reading." ESQ. 40.3 (1994): 251-73.

We have this in print, but not online... or so it seems. The same piece is also available via Literature Resource Center as a reprint in 19th Century Literature Criticism, but it doesn't show up as an online option in Journal Locator because it's technically in a book.

University 1010K

Just a reminder about University 1010K (University Seminar). Regardless of the instructor, the class Web site, syllabus and assignments are at http://www.mtsu.edu/~studskl (easily located by Googling MTSU study skills).

Students can't always clearly articulate their question, but you can interpret most questions by looking at the Web site, the syllabus, and/or assignment. The current assignment is a scavenger hunt about the Web site itself: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~studskl/scavweb.html

Yes, an idea more productive than writing this blog post would be for someone like the instruction librarian to coordinate with the course coordinator so the assignments are clear and effective, but our instruction librarian hasn't done so.

Kristen

Bio 3230 Assignment

Biology 3230 students may ask for reference help this week with an assignment that asks for examples of primary, secondary and tertiary literature. In addition, the assignment requires the use of Current Contents, a publication that is shelved in the current periodicals area. (This assignment isn't new; it's the same one from previous semesters).

Linked to this post are my handwritten notes that may help you direct students to the correct types of examples. Please don't give students examples outright, but try to help them determine what types of resources fall into the three categories and help them determine where to find examples of those resources. Tertiary literature is the most difficult of the three concepts for students to grasp. Examples are abstracts, indexes, article databases, bibliographies, or any type of list). The definitions of secondary and tertiary literature vary depending upon authority, but my handwritten notes reflect what the students are told in this class.

Also, the students had a library session about this assignment on Sept. 8, and their textbook talks about it in depth.

-Kristen W.

Legal Research & Writing Assignment

I have put a copy of Amanda Moore's answer key to her Legal Research and Writing library assignment at the reference desk. This assignment will be given on Tuesday, Sept. 7, and is due Tuesday, Sept. 14.

• The answer key is not to be distributed to students.
• Only use it to help the students advance to the next step in their solution.
• All questions should be answered with print sources that have been covered in their class.
• This assignment does use the Tennessee Code Annotated, which has been moved to the weeding section, so students may need some help physically locating it.

Jason

Biology Lab Library Assignment

Last year I updated the recurring Biology Lab Library Assignment, but the old version lives on and continues to show up at the reference desk. You will recognize this assignment as the one that calls for students to find 5 PDF articles (no problem!) and 5 copied from print journals (incredibly cumbersome!). The sample topic is mycorrhizae, but students have the option to pick from a list.

Here are some tips for finding biology articles in our PRINT periodicals collection.

1. Search for the student's topic in the Biological & Agricultural Index Plus database w/ “Peer-Reviewed” limit. (**Date option will help. See below.)

2. Click the "Library Owns?" link to see if the library owns this title in print. This will sometimes give you two catalog entries. Select the one that says, "1st Floor – Periodicals” to see the exact holdings/dates that are available in the library.

** Note: We cancelled a lot of print biology subscriptions after Dec. 2007. If you are having problems finding print articles from 2008 to the present, revise your search and limit the date to “To: 2007.”

**Update: I heard from the faculty member who coordinates the Biology lab GTAs. He inadvertently sent out the old version to the GTAs, but then followed up with the newer version saying to use that instead. I have printed the full assignment and left it at the reference desk.**

Jason

Biology 1111 Finding Research Articles

If you've walked through Periodicals or Reference, you probably know that Biology 1111 students are here looking for 5 online articles and 5 print articles.

Just a reminder that Jason (and others) figured out that if you use Biological and Agricultural Index Plus or another Wilson database, you can use the "Library Owns?" link to quickly see if the print journal is available.

One student and I had a devil of a time tonight finding five articles that were actually on the shelf (or in the copy room or on the Periodicals counter...). We ended up taking one relevant article and scanning its reference list for other journals we knew were available in print (Proceedings of the National Academy is a good one). I think it was as fast as the hit or miss database search.

Other suggestions to help lesson the confusion? Please chime in.

-Kristen W.

Hall of Shame

Students may contact the desk looking for a two-part article, "The Physical Education Hall of Shame," from the journal JOPERD. Journal Locator will find JOPERD if the student has that as the name--its full name is The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance. Part I of the article is in print in Periodicals (Aug 92). Part II is online (Feb 94).

Now that I've posted this, no one will have any trouble finding this, but I didn't want Amy's groundwork to go to naught.

-KW

Weather Record Assignment

Students in COMM 2200 have an assignment that asks them to find the record temperature high and low for their hometown. First go to the National Weather Service website at http://www.nws.noaa.gov . Next locate and click on Tennessee on the map. Scroll down the navigation bar on the left side and locate and click on Climate Local. Next look at the horizontal tabs and click on Local Data Records. Once this option has loaded look for and click on All-time Records for Various Middle Tennessee Locations. Looks like 109 and -19 are the extremes for Murfreesboro.

Sharon

Photo Law Ethics Assignment

The ethics and the law assignment for Photo Law is back. It's the same basic assignment from past semesters, with perhaps a few tweaks. The assignment really isn't as hard as it appears.

Only two questions are troublesome: 1) Shephardizing RAV v. City of St. Paul and 2) the Law Week article about advertising in a student newspaper.

For 1) search the Web for the case citation before you look for the later cites in LexisNexis or WestLaw.

For 2) I don't think there is a cumulative index to Law Week, so it helps to find the case in LexisNexis (use key word searching) and then you have a year to target in Law Week.

Of course, a good reference librarian isn't going to just give away the answers, so use these hints as a way to help the students find the answers on their own.

-Kristen