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Walking Through Your 'Field'

Do you want your students to gain familiarity with the journal literature in your discipline? Consider a "browsing" assignment that gets students into the stacks and away from the electronic databases. The Meriam Library has a fantastic array of general and subject specific databases, but asking your students to use databases to find "any article in the field" can sometimes be more complicated than you would imagine. This is because online databases are not created for individual libraries, and they usually contain citations to periodical literature our library doesn't own. In addition, searching a database using keywords may yield many useful articles, but from many disciplinary journals, not just those in your field.

If you would like your students to experience your discipline through journals, try what anthropology Professor Charlie Urbanowicz does in one of his courses. Urbanowicz has his students write a 1,500-word article critique. His students can choose any article, as long as it's related to anthropology and in a journal from the field. Urbanowicz worked with the librarians to create a list of approximately 160 journals, all located in the stacks of Meriam Library. The journals range in date from the 1800s to the present. Some are current subscriptions, but many are titles that have been canceled or have ceased publication.

A major benefit of this assignment is that many of these journal articles cannot be found through an electronic database search. This assignment is a great way to get students in the stacks so they can experience the discipline through an academic journal. Urbanowicz sums up his philosophy for this assignment using the following words from The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher, available in the Meriam Library:

"When you ferret out something for yourself, piecing the clues together unaided, it remains for the rest of your life in some way truer than facts you are merely taught, and freer from onslaughts of doubt."

Kris Johnson, Information Literacy/instruction librarian