Library facilities at my campus also are limited, but I feel that it's
important to encourage students to become proactive with interlibrary loan
services. Most students, after all, will have to work with this library for
four years. And, I feel that library staff are very helpful in assisting
students.
That said, in my classes that require a paper, I ask students to provide me
at various points of the semester (early on, I might add) with an annotated
bibliography or some other critical summary of their sources. In addition, I
ask that they staple a copy of the first page of the article, or the
copyright information from the book they'll be citing. Ostensibly, this is
to help me check their APA style. Realistically, it also ensures that they
actually have their references on hand and that they haven't cribbed from
the abstract.
I do emphasize that students should use primary sources, however, I will
accept chapters from an edited book. I will not allow students to cite a
text for papers in intermediate or upper division courses. I also will
direct them to the online sources in our library as well as the bound
journals where many classic studies are readily located.
Hope this helps.
Cheryl R.
---
Cheryl A. Rickabaugh, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Dept. Chair
Dept. of Psychology
University of Redlands
http://newton.uor.edu/FacultyFolder/Rickabaugh/Rickabaugh.html
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
Behalf Of Martin J. Bourgeois
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 1999 9:41 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: question about references
Those of you who assign research papers: What do you do if you are at an
institution that has a poor library, which causes students to have
difficulty finding sources? Interlibrary loan services typically take too
long if a paper is to be completed during the same semester it is assigned.
Some possible solutions are: a) allow the use of secondary sources or b)
allow students to cite papers after calling up the abstracts on Psychinfo
(without seeing the paper itself). I don't want to teach students that this
is an appropriate way to do research. How have others dealt with this
problem?
Marty Bourgeois
University of Wyoming
