Learn how to go beneath the headlines and current debates to examine the text of laws and/or proposed legislation with a focus on Congress, the Supreme Court, Executive Orders, and state legislatures. This introductory workshop will highlight library resources, open government resources, and search strategies to support researchers across many disciplines and interest areas to navigate legal and legislative history resources.

An icebreaker activity for students at any level, “Visualizing Research” employs tactile or kinesthetic learning techniques to illustrate research as inquiry. This group activity can be used in a variety of disciplines and contexts. By having students create and share visual models of their ideas or experiences with research, the lesson plan increases classroom engagement and supports an understanding of the iterative process of research.

This lesson, created for English 2010, or Argumentative Writing, teaches students how to use library databases and keywords in order to focus their research topics. Most students come prepared with a general or broad topic in mind, but they need to narrow their focus in order to get more relevant search results. Here they simultaneously learn to search in and use the library databases and to focus their research topics.

These materials support a workshop for seniors on losing access to information after graduation. After a short lecture on why information costs money, we used each exercise, which focus on students making their work open, to encourage students to think critically about how their information sharing decisions impact others. We used three types of exercises--academic, creative, and work/corporate--to acknowledge that students are creators of multiple kinds of information.