When TVT graduating seniors go off to college: We hope that they will ask meaningful questions We hope that the next step of their research journey will allow them to inquire about things that help them stretch intellectually and find meaning in their world We hope that they will continue to learn and that the products of their journey will allow them to demonstrate creative thought We hope that their work will make a difference

Basic research strategies for seniors, 6-11 th graders, teachers, and everyone else:

Read : You need context, a basic level of understanding (l imited vocabulary will limit your results) When you search, enter the most important words first (be on the lookout for synonyms and related terms) Consider what words the author of these documents might include (Mine your best results and the best documents for new words or phrases) Try nouns first (unless you are looking for graphics –adjectives) Use the subject headings—the controlled vocabulary–that appear in library database, to take advantage of the work the database does to group like stuff together, to organize knowledge

What are credible sources?

How to go beyond 5 Federation Way without leaving the building to local public resources: OC Public Library Newport beach Public Library UCI Libraries (check out JSTOR)

How to Access NEWSBANK via the Orange County Public Library OCPL.org Research Databases Newsbank Login :

BOOLEAN LOGIC Try using quotation marks AND and NOT – Remember the old Venn Diagrams?

Are students searching in the right places? Think bigger than Google Think bigger than Wikipedia Think bigger than YouTube Think bigger than the Proquest Database and World Book Online

What exactly are we reading? Is it a magazine or journal article, a reference entry, real- time news article, a blog post, the stream of a Twitter hashtag, a wiki page? Is it academic/peer-reviewed or popular? Lines are getting blurrier but college professors may prefer scholarly content.

New Places to Get the News: New tools aggregate the various sources of real- time news and social search. They include the far-reaching Mashpedia (

To help you get your arms around that new topic try: YouTube ( or SlideShare ( or AuthorStream (

We teach students to respect the intellectual property of others, to lead readers to our sources We want to use web-based citation generators, not only for their formatting, but also for their ability to facilitate document storage and notetaking - Easybib, (there are a lot of similar tools: NoodleTools, Mendeley, Zotero, and Evernote)

LOOKING FOR CREATIVE WORKS? Looking for music, video, writing, code, or other creative works? Creative Commons has got you covered. Search for creative work through sources like Google and Flickr right here. Find CC-licensed works Find CC-licensed works Creativecommons.org Scroll down to EXPLORE

How to use others’ materials fairly and honestly: Search.creativecommons.org for Graphics

You may choose, also to use curation efforts maintained by subject experts, librarians, and enthusiasts by using: LibGuides

Students find better answers using: Advanced search strategies Keyword selection Critical evaluation of websites Selection of appropriate databases Students finding answers using: Teacher/librarian/expert produced lists of preselected websites Locating the Best of the Best

Exploit social media: Search smart—push. Don’t work so hard. We don’t always need to pull or search for information. You can learn to have the specific information you need pushed to you. When you are searching a database, you will be able to have your searches continually updated by setting them up as alerts or RSS feeds. After you do your very best search, you won’t have to keep checking the database for new content. Instead, the database will come to you when new stuff appears. Google Alerts ( searches blogs, news, the Web, video and more, pushing new content directly to your .

In short: We hope that when out students go off to college they will have solid information literacy skills!