Chapter 16 Response

   Chapter 16 discusses the very important topic of finding and evaluating sources, which is a skill every Student needs to have. The chapter begins with the sources you can find related to your campuses library such as online catalogs, electronic data bases, reference works, and sources for facts and statistics. The chapter then goes on to explain and define each one of these such as an electronic database is "Libraries subscribe to electronic databases- for example, Expanded academic ASAP or LexisNexis Academic Universe. These are electronic databases enable you to access information from hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and journals." (713-714) The chapter then goes on to discuss the difference of scholar sources you can get from your library vs normal articles you find online. The article explains how to evaluate the source to see if it credible to use in your work. Some of questions you can ask your self while reading an online article can be is it current? Is the author an expert in the subject? Is the information influenced? Does it provide professional examples to shoe it's accurate? Does it cover the subject in depth? Then the chapter explains that when using a source from the library it has already been checked through and approved. So you don't need to worry about those things when using a source from your library.
    My personal reaction of this article is that I know a lot of this information all ready. Growing up in today's generation teachers understand that this is a skill all students need to learn at an early age. The book states to never use Wikipedia, but that is something I've known since my early stages of learning to write research papers in middle school. So overall I personally didn't take anything in from this article, but that doesn't mean this article is a waste. This chapter can possess great information for someone who is returning to college in there late 30's and up who didn't grow up with this information being standard. So this Chapter can be really helpful to the people who need it.

- Timothy Wellmann


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