When you finish this research exercise, you will be able to:
To complete this Research Exercise, you will take a quiz located under "Course Menu" and "Quizzes" in your FYS101 Brightspace course.
This video explains what PRIMARY, SECONDARY, and TERTIARY sources are, and provides examples of each type.
In First Year Seminar (FYS101) you will be researching PRIMARY SOURCES for your final project. These are original documents (photos, laws, artifacts, letters, etc.) created at the time of an event or during a specific time period. You will use SECONDARY and TERTIARY sources written since then, as well as additional PRIMARY SOURCES from that time period, to understand your PRIMARY SOURCE better and to connect it to the present day.
Check out this video from the University of Minnesota to learn what is meant by a "library database":
Here are two ways to get to the Shapiro Library website:
SPECIAL TIP! ***Once you are ON the library home page, you can access my.snhu and Brightspace from there too (at the bottom of the page)! So if you bookmark/favorite the Shapiro Library website in your browser, you will have one-stop shopping to all your SNHU needs!
Here are the steps to get to databases on the Shapiro Library website
Once you are on the A-Z Database List you have options for selecting relevant databases:
When beginning to research a topic, it is helpful to begin with TERTIARY sources to get an overview of the topic, key issues, important people and events surrounding it, etc. For FYS101, you will be researching a particular primary source (a law, a person, an artifact or a statistic/data point). Many of these sources may be looked up in a specialized encyclopedia or dictionary (tertiary source) so you can get an idea of what they are about. The library has databases of tertiary sources. We are going to focus on one called CREDO.
Watch this brief video to understand what is in CREDO and how to navigate it.
From the Shapiro Library home page:
Now let's see what CREDO has to offer on topics from this week's FYS101 classes:
Getty Images
Consider trying the CREDO database when you FIRST begin to research your primary source in your FYS101 team final project (or any paper/project you are assigned at SNHU). Most of them will have some related entry in CREDO to help you learn about your law, artifact, person or statistic, or the context for them.