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Session 0: Introduction to the Course This course, LIS5703, Electronic Access to Social Science Research Resources, is intended to give graduate students in the social sciences or their related professional areas practice using a variety of the best and better Web searching tools and "invisible" internet-accessible bibliographic and literature tools (academic library tools) that define and point to the "ways of knowing" in the Social and Behavioral Science disciplines and their related professional practice areas. While the topical sessions and exercises we give you in this course are intended to show you--and then give you practice in--the use of this complex "knowledge apparatus," the evidence that I will get from you that shows your comprehension of this knowledge system is your final project. Like a course term paper, your final project (a bibliographic "pathfinder") is the single most important way I have of assessing your understanding of the content and techniques I exposed you to. With each weekly topical session in this course, we will offer up an "exercise" for you to complete. These exercises are counted only nominally (they, altogether, are worth just 15 percent of your course grade); it is the final project, completed by each student, that is of paramount importance (85% of your course grade). We only offer the exercises to you as
Final Project Your personal research project is an opportunity for you to investigate, in a good deal of detail, what scholarly (and otherwise reliable and valid, academic) resources exist for some topic that is part of your professional or disciplinary degree area. Your project is also, by far, the main means of assessing how you did in understanding in the content of the course. The bibliographic project is a chance for you to see what exists in the traditional, print-based resource bases of books, documents, and journals articles, as well as to identify those organizations, agencies, and publishers that have to do or say about your topic in the newer online, networked environment of today and tomorrow. The document that most will build for this
project--what is called a "pathfinder"--will demonstrate your mastery over
the system of literature and bibliography we have exposed you to in the
topical sessions of the course. This project will be your evidence
of mastery over the searching tools and techniques you learned about in
LIS5703, Electronic Access to Social Science Research
Resources. Course Communications There are several ways in which the course instructor communicates with the students of this course:
1. Instruction's Email Addresses There are actually two instructors for LIS 5703 who alternate taking the lead in offering the course over the three semesters--Fall, Spring, Summer: We rotate the responsibility of being the course's "instructor of record" on a semester-by-semester basis. So, you will have to determine from the course web page who is the instructor of record for the semester you are taking the course:
You are welcome to use the email address of this semester's instructor to contact him or her on course-related matters. 2. Each Student's Email Address Many of you have several email addresses. The instructor don't particularly care which email address you wish to use to send email to the instructor, except to note these issues:
My Distribution List of Email Addresses This is a "paced" class--an instructor paced class--meaning that the instructor does things on a set weekly schedule that everyone has to adhere to. So, all students are to be moving through the same course materials and the same time, and responding to questions that the instructor asks about those materials during the same time period. Therefore, we send out to the class, via your OU email address, a weekly "bulk" email that details what is coming up in the way of readings and exercises and project deadlines for the next week. We do that every weekend (typically, Sunday morning). We then give each of you one week (actually, 7 days plus 1) to do the required readings and complete the exercise or bibliographic project deadline that is due for that week. All we need to do that is your OU email address, which we already have. If you haven't been picking up email that has been sent to that email address, you must learn to do that very quickly: the instructor can drop you from the course, administratively, if you aren't getting those messages.
3. The Desire-to-Learn course area: using its threaded discussion area The instructors are using the University's official web-based course management service, Desire-to-Learn, to manage the content and the formal discussion that takes place in the course. When the instructor intends for your individually-assigned tasks to be public, the instructor will call for your responses to questions to be served up on the Desire-to-Learn area for this course. That system is at this address: OU Libraries LORA services Later in the course, you will be searching databases that are made available to you through the OU Libraries system as an official, "authenticated" OU user. In order to do that, you will need to know your OU user id and its associated password. Many overseas students who took this course in the past were initially unaware of the fact that they even had an OU user id and associated password. To test to see if you know what your official OU user id and password are, try to get into any of the OU Libraries databases listed on this page: If you can't get access to any of them, read the materials on the OU Account Management System page, because your inability to get access to them is most probably because you don't know you official user id and password: (You will need this same user id and password in order to access Design-to-Learn too.)
The new course textbooks are the most recent paperback editions of these two paperbacks:
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