Great success! I went to the library yesterday (but didn't have time to post about it until today), and I came back with some fantastic finds. I wrote down my list of words from my previous entry, and once I got to my county library, I typed each of those phrases into their catalogue search to see which results would come up. I had actually been pretty confident when I went in because I had taken so much time preparing for my search. Much to my surprise, I did not get very many results that matched (or if I did it would be a book that I couldn't use, like a fiction story of someone who lived on a farm). For example, I was really surprised that my title search for "farming" only pulled up 16 results; I had really thought my library would have much more than that. I did in fact try making "farming" just the keyword to search for, but that gave me too many results-nearly 120 results.
Thus, I found that I had to modify my tactic. I noticed that most of my results were in the 630's, so I decided to just go to that section and hope that it had more to offer than what my search results were pulling up. I was so glad to see that the 630 section was exactly what I had been looking for! It had all types of books that seemed like they were made for people like me, someone who would love to start farming but doesn't have a clue about how to get started. They had books on farming small amounts of land, farming certain crops, farming families from Indiana, and handbooks on living off your own land. I spent over an hour in that section thumbing through books to see what I thought could be helpful to me. I think found it interesting that my presearching of Follett's Pathways to Knowledge: Information Skills model didn't really seem to work for me. However, I think it's value may have been that it at least got me a good starting point to find out where I need to look in the library. As the book outlines, that stage is to "identify key words, relate to prior knowledge, explore general sources" (Callison 57). In that respect, it let me figure out more what I was going to want to look for once I got to the library, and its keywords led me to the right section.
Using my original search results, I also found that a promising section was J630 in the children's section of the library. After I got my adult books, I went to the children's section and was pretty relieved to see that this section not only had the kind of information I was looking for, but it was stated in a much more elementary way. As a novice, I really appreciate that! I think I'll start with these books to get a better idea of my subjects and then move on to the more advanced books. I also found myself thinking about the wrapping stage when I was looking in the children's section. I'm not really sure what I want to do for my final product, but finding all of these books, a lot of them with great pictures and graphics, made me think that I might create some kind of presentation I could show to elementary school kids, where I could also pull these books and let them look through then and check them out if they wanted to.
In my last blog I also mentioned that I was going to see about videos as resources (which someone commented on, so I wanted to be sure to address it). I did actually find a few videos in my search; however, they were for teaching kids about farming certain crops (like apples), rather than information on getting started farming, so I didn't check them out. However, if I were to actually do this as a unit in a classroom, I think that giving them a video to watch about farming--any farming video, it doesn't necessarily have to be about the crop I am going to focus on--would be a great way to make it more interactive and help them improve their visual literacy, "including the ability to thnk, learn and express oneself in terms of images" (Callison 423). I really like that I am finding a lot of different things in my searches because it's giving me a lot of options for my final project.
Much like the first part of the webbing step was like Follett's presearch, I found that the second part was the search step in Follet's Pathways to Knowledge: Information Skills model. It doesn't bother me that the webbing involved both aspects, because they are easy to complete and go perfectly hand in hand. However, I was glad that I was able to make the connection to the Follett model because it gave me confidence that I was indeed following a logical inquiry process.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like the fact you are starting with the children's books for basic information and ideas. Too often in our K-12 library high school students are reluctant to explore our elementary collection because "those books are for little kids." Getting the foundations, especially for an unfamiliar area through resources with simpler terms is a great way to start!
ReplyDeleteYour library experience with searching the catalog is a good one to remember. I had a similar approach to finding materials. I was not having much luck searching the OPAC, so I decided to browse the Dewey numbers that fit my topic.
This is a good approach for students as well. By browsing a section related to their focus topic, they may discover a different direction they want to go with their inquiry! This is another example of how several aspects of inquiry are done at once - in this case Wondering, Webbing, and Wiggling (http://virtualinquiry.com/inquiry/ws.htm).