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> I've been invited to team teach a course on doing library research in
> geography.  We've decided to have much of the course revolve around the
> six step model of research proposed by Carol Kuhlthau (task initaition,
> topic selection, prefocus exploration, focus formulation, information
> collection, search closure). The course is a upper 400-level class
> and is usually fairly small.
>
> 1) -- Has anyone out there in MAPS-L land ever taught a course like this?
>
> 2) -- Does anyone have a favorite article/piece about doing geographic
> research? -- we're talking about the books and journals type of research
> not the scientific method with all of the number crunching.  It would be
> nice to be able to read about real geographers doing real research
 
I have just started a vaguely similar course for my second-year undergraduates
this year. It is not a LIBRARY research oriented course as such, but does
have active participation by / collaboration with the library staff. In fact
one of the Library staff, who is in charge of our "Official Publications"
section of the library (which includes EC Deposition material) has just been
presenting an overview of UN, OECD, World Bank, British, Irish and EC
sources of official information and related documents, to 70 odd students
(some very odd :-)
 
Two books that I have found VERY useful - and in fact am strongly urging my
students to buy - are
 
1) "The Student's Companion to Geography", edited by Alisdair Rogers, Heather
Viles and Andrew Goudie, 1992. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell; ISBN 0-631-17088-X)
This book brings together essays on a range of topics - the nature of geography,
various personal perspectives on the importance of geography; techniques of
effective study; biographies of key geographers today and in the past; how
to arrange postgraduate studies in the UK, in Canada, in the US, New Zealand;
how to get research and/or travel and expedition funding; etc.
 
2) "Introduction to Scientific Geographic Research" 4th ed, by Haring,
Lounsbury and Frazier, 1992. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Publishers (ISBN
0-697-13741-4). This is a bit too "American" for my tastes - that is, it
is oriented towards writing "term papers" and so on, which we don't do as
such here in Ireland. However, it has a clear progression from research
definition, through data collection and analysis to writing up the final
product. It doesn't cover any of it in any great depth, but the scope and
breadth of the book make it very useful as a first port-of-call, after
which students can probe specific issues in greater depth.
 
> 3) -- How about ideas for a quarter long project -- or maybe some way to
> tie/link the course with other courses being offered at the same time.
> There has to be some way of making this kind of information "real."  One
> thing we had thought about was having people work on the background
> information required for a "grant application."
 
Strangely, I set the second year science geography class (I do separate
but parallel classes for Science and for Arts geographers) just such an
exercise last week - I told them they had to prepare a research proposal
for hypothetical submission to the EC for funding under a new scheme for
assisting young academics (would that there were such a thing! Would that
I were young enough to take advantage if there was!). All our undergrads
and postgrads have to present a properly thought-out and prepared "research
proposal" as the essential first step in their independent dissertation and/or
thesis study. This exercise was aimed at getting them thinking of necessary
content of a research proposal; how to draw up a realistic timetable for
the research; possible sources of data; scientific approach to be adopted
(experimental, historical, normative); etc. It was a two-hour lab exercise,
pen-and-paper and group discussion oriented, and seemed very popular with
the students themselves...especially when graduate demonstrators explained
that they (teh grads) had actually had to do such an exercise "for real"!
 
If you want any details - or a copy of the actual exercise - let me know.
Monday is a bank holiday here so don't expect an instant response!
 
All the best,
Darius Bartlett