An Alternative for Source Books: The Extended Bibliography

AN ALTERNATIVE FOR SOURCE BOOKS: THE EXTENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY James C. Work James C. Work (BA., MA., Colorado State University) has taught at the College of Southern Utah and at Colorado State University. Exponents of the "controlled research paper" for freshman college English maintain that the use of selected research materials has obvious and irrefutable advantages to the instructor, the student, and the library staff. And they are probably right. It offers the instructors an opportunity to expound at length on the differences between fact and opinion, wheat and chaff, and research and plagiarism. It keeps the student diligently sifting his source book in his room, thus eliminating crowds at the card catalog. And the "control method" allows librarians to get on with their cataloguing and shelving. From the source book students can leam paraphrasing, documentation , scanning, quoting, selecting, and synthesis of research materials. But what they do not learn from a source book is how to get at additional information. The feeling that something was wrong with our source book method began when a former student asked me where he could find "some magazines " in our library. Another student, who had to write a paper for an advanced journalism class, complained that he had labored long hours with the card catalog and Reader's Guide and had only three sources to show for it. After talking with other instructors and students and after taking a critical look at the files of old research papers, I reluctantly concluded that we had been teaching them how to select material without telling them where to find material to select. After some experimentation (and several failures), I arrived at a substitute exercise which allows the instructor class time for discussions of source selection and usage, which makes the student a library user rather than a library nuisance, and which helps the student in future research assignments. The assignment which replaces the source book or "controlled paper" is one which requires the student to find seventy-five to one hundred possible sources of information on an assigned topic. The students' first reactions to this vary from shock to disbelief; however, as they begin the methodical search pattern explained below, they find it no more time consuming and much more beneficial than writing a short paper based on a single source book. The discovery of one hundred entries and their organization into final form can be done in one week, although I find it more satisfactory to assign topics on a Friday and collect the bibliographies two Mondays later, thereby giving the students the benefit of two weekends rather than one. During the intervening class periods I discuss the form used in recording the different types of bibliographic entries and point out some of the differences between forms used by literary scholars, scientists, periodical indexes, etc. And the fact that the students are in the process of recording their findings 84RMMLA BulletinJune 1969 and will be graded partly on the correctness of Üieir form makes them an attentive and questioning audience. Before going into the actual process used in finding die one hundred entries, we should say someuiing about die topics. I prefer recent topicsdevelopments which are news today—because my insistence on contemporary topics prevents die use of last year's papers and also gives die student the feeling that he is doing new and interesting research. The topics to assign to die students are not difficult to find; in fact, one topic could suffice for the entire class, although I personally prefer to give each student a different topic. From die articles in recent newspapers and magazines, I select one topic for each student and about ten extras. From today's newspaper, for instance, I might select "Recent Changes in die Draft Law," or "Ethics of Heart Transplants," or "The Air War in Vietnam," or even "Scrap Iron as an Art Medium." I then hand each student a mimeographed list of all the subjects and ask each (in random order) to select a topic, which I then check off the list. It would be feasible for each student to arrive at his own topic, or for the class to make up a "pool" of...