As
a History Major, most of the work for my Major courses tends to revolve around
one of three things: reading books and articles, writing papers, and research. In fact, a course I was required to take,
titled “The Study of History,” completely focused on the proper ways for one to
conduct research and write essays. It is
through classes like these, and other assignments like I will discuss below,
that I began to see how essential technology can be to a History/Social Studies
classroom.
Beginning
in the sixth grade, my hometown’s school district (Rockaway Borough) required
all students to write a yearly research paper.
It was here that I first had to do any serious research of any kind for
an assignment. Prior to this, the most
that was ever asked of us in the way of research was to find something in the
course textbook or in an article that was given out by the teacher. It was here that I began to use databases
like EBSCO to find articles from magazines and newspapers to use as sources for
my research papers. Prior to the
creation of online databases such as this, one could only rely on the archives
of libraries for their sources. There
was no way to search catalogues on the computer, everything had to be done by
hand. Databases such as EBSCO make the
life of a historian (along with anybody doing research for a school assignment)
much easier, and it puts information literally at our fingertips.
As
I entered college, I was required to take “The Study of History” due to my
major, as I discussed briefly earlier in this post. Along with the proper form and formatting of
writing papers, much emphasis was put on the different ways to research when
finding sources. It was here that I
first worked with online catalogues for libraries, specifically Sprague Library,
located on our campus. Both my middle
school and my high school still had card catalogues, and to my knowledge have
only recently transferred them to the computer.
What may have taken a considerable amount of time to search through the
catalogue to find one book can now be done in seconds. It can save a considerable amount of time
while finding resources, which may ultimately give one more time to work on the
paper or assignment at hand.
It
was also in this course that I began to work more with the databases I had
first been exposed to back in middle school.
After previously working with EBSCO, I began to work with databases like
JSTOR, and found databases and search engines that are subject-based, which I
was not previously aware existed. These
are great tools for students to utilize, and can expose our minds to new
material that we would have never otherwise seen.
Research
databases are a great help to a History Major, and anybody taking a History or
Social Studies. It is a way to access
and gain information quicker. It is
convenient for those conducting research for assignments, and it can help
expand one’s knowledge. It is a very
useful tool.
