FYI: Handling Potential Chat Questions from Atlanta-based HIST 2110 Students

This is from Jill Anderson (the History Subject librarian at the Downtown Campus):

An instructor in the Atlanta campus’ History department, Mark Johnson, is teaching four sections of an especially demanding version of HIST 2110 this semester. The students are required to a) turn in an annotated bibliography of 10 secondary sources on a topic selected from a broadly ranging list he’s given them, b) find a given number of primary sources on those topics from three different digital collections, and c) create original Omeka exhibits with those sources. Some of the topics Johnson has suggested are very specific (“United Daughters of the Confederacy”) and some are very general (“labor movement”). This is an unusual case, as these lower-level History courses tend not to involve significant research.

These students are about to start the primary-source searching. They are expected to use are the GSU Library’s Digital Collections, the Library of Congress’ Digital Collections (which are hovering between American Memory and LoC’s new Digital Collections interface), and the Digital Public Library of America.There is a specific LibGuide for this course which includes tutorials on how to do basic searching in these collections: http://research.library.gsu.edu/hist2110johnson.

Students may struggle with this part of the project, because some of the topics are not as well covered in some of these collections as in others, and some of the topics Mark has suggested are broader than others. At this point they should have topics roughly defined, because they’ve already collected secondary sources and created annotated bibliographies.

This LibGuide is meant to help the students, but it’s also meant to be a starting point for anyone who gets reference questions relating to this project. Because they have already collected secondary materials on these topics, they should have ample secondary materials to help them brainstorm term selection.