The Scavenger Hunt activity is designed to familiarize students with many library resources that will be helpful to you when performing information research for your Speech 1315 class and others in college. This research guides takes you through the research process for it, step by step.
Once you have selected a topic and your professor has approved of your topic, you should then develop keywords. Watch the video above to learn what keywords are. You will use these keywords when searching the library catalog, the library databases, and the world wide web.
The first task on the Scavenger Hunt instructions is to find a book about your topic. I will now tell you how to look for both print books and ebooks. The ebook option will be essential for you if you are unable to physically visit the library.
If you are looking for print books inside the library building, the video embedded above shows you how to search the library catalog.
Once you have located a book in the catalog that you would like to find inside the library, write down the call number. This video shows you how to locate the books on the shelves on the second and third floors of the library building.
We have tried to make this video easy to understand. But navigating the book stacks in the library can still be confusing, so don't hesitate to ask a librarian for help.
Again, it's possible that you are trying to complete the Scavenger Hunt activity without physically entering the library. In that case, to complete the book requirement, you will need to search for ebooks. We have two excellent ebook databases. These let you read full-text books online. The interfaces can be confusing, so I have included a tutorial video for each one.
Have you used the library's databases before? If not, then I recommend watch the introductory video above. It tells you, among other things, how to access the databases off campus.
The video above shows you how to search the ebook database titled EBSCO eBook Collection.
The video above shows you how to search the database ProQuest EBook Central.
The second, third, and fourth tasks in the Scavenger Hunt activity involve finding a scholarly journal article, a magazine article, and a newspaper article. For these three tasks, we will use the database Academic Search Complete, which has scholarly journal articles, magazine articles, and newspaper articles on a wide variety of topics.
The video above shows you how to search Academic Search Complete.
The challenge of using Academic Search Complete for all three tasks is that, by using the default settings, Academic Search Complete will show scholarly journal articles, magazine articles, and newspaper articles on the same search results page. They're all mixed together, so you have to toggle particular options to make sure that you are looking at the particular types of articles that the Scavenger Hunt activity requires.
When you have completed a search and are looking at the search results, you will see several options on the left side of the page. Among them are to limit your search results to academic journals (another word for scholarly journals), magazine articles, and newspaper articles. This is how you can quickly sort between article types for the second, third, and fourth tasks in the Scavenger Hunt activity.
The fifth task in the Scavenger Hunt activity is to find a website about your topic. We have no specific instructions on how to search the open world wide web. But we do offer this video about evaluating information in order to help you discern higher quality sources of information from lower quality sources of information
This is our video that introduces APA documentation and this is our complete APA guide, which goes into more detail about citing sources and formatting correctly. It includes our sample paper. Although you are not writing a paper for this assignment, our sample paper does show you how to set up your formatting correctly. You can also download this blank Word document that has the formatting already set up for you.
For the Scavenger Hunt activity, our most important resource is this guide to citing sources for a reference list. You must provide a reference list citation for each source.
