Seminar #8: Information Skills - Laura Williams

Today's seminar was a little different as we had a library session with Laura William instead of having our usual seminar with Polina on a Friday. Within this seminar we started out by talking how we should do when writing our essay and where we can get help or what information and materials we can use to help us produce our essay. The first is to identify all the keywords for the essay topic that we want to explore, this would then allow us to explore all of the areas of our chosen subject to see what we can look into further to find the answers for our essay topic. The next one is that we need to evaluate our information sources, are they reliable or useful. Are they up to date? Is the source trustworthy and can we trust and relate it to our essay topic to back up to our point that we are wanting to make. The next is finding your information for your essay, where could I find this. I could use books, magazines, newspapers or article and internet sources. The final point that we were told was were can we find help, we can find help from tutors and the people that are in the library, so that if were struggling to find something we can find it easily.

We then moved on to how we should generate keywords from our essay's research question. For example by following the process of looking at the research question, then breaking down the question and finding keywords from there. For our task we were told to look at the words in our question and see what words we could come up with from this. My research question was:

"How has the technology in Title Design in Films between the 1960's to Now".

Some of the keywords that I thought of from my research question was:

• Technology
• Film Design 
• Title Design
• Title Sequences
• Films
• Short Films
• History
• Old
• Modern

The next part that we looked at was something that is known as the CRAAP test, which a process that you should use when examining a source that we have found to use for our essay. The CRAAP test stands for:

C- Currency

This is the timeless of the information which means is the information and source you have researched up to date, when was it published? Was it published around the date of the original event because this is very important to consider.  

R- Reliability/Relevance

This is the importance of the information for your needs. We have to consider who published the source? Is the source that you found primary or secondary information? Also does all the information that is provided within article or source all relevant to the essay topic that you are writing. Can we trust the article, as it may contain some false answers and maybe misleading for your essay. 

A- Authority

This is the source of the information. For this we have to consider who the author/publisher is of the source that your looking at? Is the publisher qualified to write about the topic. 

A- Accuracy

This is the reliability, the truthfulness and correctness of the content. Never rely on just one source and the information that is told in the article. Another point to look into is where the information is from and when you look at the information throughly are there any spelling errors.

P- Purpose

This is the reason the information exists. What is the purpose of the information that you decided to look at, is it to inform people about the topic that you have researched. Do the authors make their intentions or the purpose of the information clear. Does the point of view seem impartial or objective?

The final task that we were given for this seminar was to put the process into action, to do this we were given two different sources of information. We were told to find out whether the source of information was useful or not using the process of the CRAAP test. 

I found that this seminar was very useful, as I will be able to se this process when looking into different sources of my own for my essay and topic.