Hayley's First Blog Post

My research style up to this point has been quite rudimentary. I mostly searched in Addison, and tried to stick with JSTOR or Project Muse as an undergraduate, because I did not know a whole lot about evaluating information sources and wanted to be sure that what I was using was scholarly.

To begin researching for the wiki and the ENGL 5014 essay, I plan to use Summon—the “brand-new ‘library search engine.’” This is an especially attractive resource for me, because, as an undergraduate here at Virginia Tech, Summon did not exist yet. I know I want to research in the field of Medical Humanities, or illness in literature, so I hope that with thought, time, and Summon I will be able to refine this broad research interest into a manageable topic that fascinates me. Once I find this topic, and a few search results that seem dependable, I will begin evaluating/analyzing the information resources each result comes from, using, for example, the site (http://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/ref/research/skill26.htm) included in Module 2 for guidance. I will also use the specialized collections that were suggested to me when working on the Module 2 assignment: “Humanities International Complete,” and “Literature Research Center,” as well as related journals I already know of: “Literature and Medicine” and “Journal of Medical Humanities,” which Summon linked to here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/104920/. This site is very exciting for me, as it includes all articles that were published in the journal from 1997 on. Also, I would like to complement the scholarly journal articles I find with novels—which Module 2 described as primary sources—that depict different facets of medicine, illness, and dying.