Description: In Reed's History Department students learn to conduct independent research in the required Junior Seminar, which is offered twice each year. Every junior major must take the Seminar in order to develop historical research methods and writing skills in preparation for their year-long senior thesis. In the seminar, students plan and execute a thirty-page research paper in one term, in addition to regular course reading. Students submit their work for evaluation at different stages, which usually includes writing a research proposal, an annotated bibliography, a first and a final draft of the paper, and giving an oral presentation of their research to their classmates. Professors also arrange several seminars with Reed librarians to review library research techniques using not only printed reference guides but on-line databases. The pedagogical goal is to have students do what working historians do: engage in the research process in order to produce an interpretation of an event or issue.

The History Junior Seminar as constituted has proven valuable but extremely time-consuming for the professors who teach it. The course could benefit in several ways from the application of new technology. Specifically, we seek new ways to teach students to locate the growing number and variety of sources available on the Internet. We propose to design an interactive bibliographic tutorial which would demonstrate the ongoing connections between researching a topic and developing a relevant and useful bibliography and body of data. The rapid increase in the number of available on-line databases which provide access to works by historians, primary documents, and statistical reference sets has made it difficult to keep up with methods for finding this information. Since the Library's holdings cannot accommodate many potential thesis topics, Reed students need to learn how to find these sources. The often bewildering number of resources means students also need to practice sifting the wheat from the chaff, a skill which is only acquired through hands-on research. Thus one of the most important pieces of the Junior Seminar is the creation of the annotated bibliography. Finding works related to their chosen topics tests students' ability to discover the range and parameters of historical debates. Once appropriate titles have been gathered, students must track down available sources and discard those which are not available. Composing the annotations forces students to actually review the work and judge its relevance to the topic.

Junior Seminar course evaluations and anecdotal evidence reveal that many students often see the annotated bibliography as a rote assignment which bears little relation to their final research paper. Faced with an overwhelming number of sources, some students simply rely on canned bibliographies created by others. Creation of a bibliographic tutorial program which instructs students in ways to find secondary and primary sources on-line and on library shelves would help more of them to see the vital connection between the process of research and the evolution of their own arguments and papers. Such a tutorial would also be far more cost-effective, reducing the amount of classroom instruction and professors' office hours spent in repeated explanations to students of both the research process and its connection to paper preparation. Professors' time could then be spent in discussing the substantive issues of the students' proposal instead of reviewing the mechanics of research.

A crucial part of this project is to involve Reed's librarians in the creation of a bibliographic tutorial, in order to make students better users of the library. Though the Junior Seminar often includes instructional sessions with Reed's librarians, and these have been very useful, students often fail to take in the most important information, and many return to ask for individual instruction. The library seminars are often scheduled during regular course time and the information presented must be limited to an hour and twenty minutes. A bibliographic tutorial could potentially provide broader instruction in library research techniques. Students could repeat the tutorial as many times as they found it necessary to do so.

An interactive bibliographic tutorial designed for the History Junior Seminar would supplement and enhance professorial instruction and enable students to ask better questions of library staff. The tutorial would begin with a hypothetical research topic (or topics from which the student would choose) which would give the student access to actual on-line databases. The bibliographic exercise would then require browsing the Internet. The goal is to have the tutorial offer the student suggestions, among which he or she would choose, which would then yield actual sources and an explanation of the advantages and disadvantages of the various options. Instructing students in the principles of selection is one of the basic techniques taught in classic guides to historical research, such as Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff's The Modern Researcher (c1957). A bibliographic tutorial would use new technology to illustrate those research principles as applied to on-line research. As more and more bibliographic information goes on-line, such research skills become ever more critical.

Implementation: The development of the interactive bibliographic tutorial and an associated database of resources would proceed in five stages. First, faculty from the History Department will work with Reed librarians to define the key features of the tutorial. Second, technical staff from Reed's Software Development Laboratory will implement the specifications of the tutorial using a multimedia package such as AuthorWare(TM). Third, Reed Librarians will develop a modular database of current History resources on the Internet that can be updated easily from year to year. Fourth, the tutorial will be made available to students in the History Junior Seminar. At the end of the seminar, usage of the tutorial and student reactions to it will be evaluated. Finally, modifications to the tutorial will be made, as necessary, and the revised version will be made available to other departments at Reed and elsewhere.

Impact: An interactive bibliographic tutorial designed for the History Junior Seminar would benefit all History majors. The tutorial could potentially affect all majors which have a Junior Seminar which requires a bibliography (e.g., the English Department) and all majors in which bibliographic research is part of the senior thesis. It would therefore benefit approximately a quarter of Reed's student body each year.