Research Quest

Session 2

Rank: Squire

Congratulations!

You and your fellow pages have proven your worth on the journey to the Eastern Plains and you have been raised to the level of squire.  The company holds a feast to celebrate your hard work, dedication, and promotion.

Image from Europeana, public domain

Training and tools

You are now allowed to train with the weapons you will need to defeat Ignoraemus, but it will take sometime before you are ready for battle.  You must first gain experience.  So, like the other squires, you train with your knight, Pat.  You are not quite sure if it should be Sir Pat or Dame Pat since you have never seen Pat out of armor and you are too polite to ask.  When you ask other knights about it, they simply chuckle, shake their heads, and walk away.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Once we have a sense of our topic, we need to start use the research tools available to us to find information sources.  For college and professional-level research, Google is usually an inefficient/inadequate tool because finding scholarly, peer-reviewed information (for a review of the peer-review process, see this silly video) can be very tricky since the browser--as well as Bing and Yahoo--can only search the surface web and most scholarly information is in the deep web (for a review of the surface versus the deep web, see this video).  Through the O'Grady Library, we have access to the library catalog and academic databases which are more reliable sources of peer-reviewed and credible non-peer-reviewed information.

For English 102, a particularly helpful tool is the ENG 102 research guide, which can point you to the catalog, databases, and credible websites that can help you find good information sources.