Anytime, anywhere: in-depth answers to Concordia Library research questions

Andrea Cameron is Concordia Library’s teaching & learning librarian

What would you say if a student asked you, what is a DOI? Or, how do I search for an article when I have a citation already? How about, where can I get help with my research?

Concordia’s new Library Research Skills Tutorial covers searching, citing, notetaking and planning but not necessarily in that order — students can jump in at any point, according to their question.

Research is a messy process. While the library provides tips for managing efficiently, we also want to acknowledge that there is serendipity in inquiry and discovery, and that students can have all kinds of starts, stops and redo’s in the process.

You can link to the entire tutorial from your course Moodle, or link to a relevant section in your assignment outline. You may want to assign a segment as pre-work for a subject librarian’s visit to your class.

‘A very simple and thorough tool to get the information you need’

The tutorial can be completed from start to finish — but it would take a while! It was designed for students to be able to consult individual questions as needed. Students sometimes have their most productive sessions at hours when their professors, TAs and librarians are not available to answer questions. The tutorial lets them learn at their point of need.

That said, length was not a concern to those who participated in user-testing.

“The Library Research Skills Tutorial is a very simple and thorough tool to get the information you need when preparing for and writing a paper … We tend to learn only what’s necessary right now as we navigate our coursework,” said one undergraduate student from the Department of English.

“But the Library Research Skills Tutorial provides more in-depth knowledge which can be so beneficial to an academic journey. While it’s very easy to go through by accessing chunks of it at the time, I recommend going over the entire tutorial to get the best out of it.”

Try it out for yourself, and send  your comments or questions to: andrea (dot) Cameron (at) Concordia (dot) ca.

Check out the Library Research Skills Tutorial.

Need more help? Register for a Concordia Library workshop online. Sessions combine research skills with critical thinking, and time is reserved to answer specific research questions. Registration is open and the workshops run until February 20.