Library as Digital Repository

Digital Literacy Library Guide

Google is great but our library's resources are tailored to your needs.  Academics (that's you!) need data and original sources on which to create your own analysis and interpretation.

You'll be starting a paper that deals in some way with the concepts of copyright and creativity. This paper will be due week 8.

Your Thesis Statement, or the idea around which you will form you paper, will be due to me next week ( you can hand this document in on Slice). You'll need to conduct some preliminary research in order to create an original Thesis Statement.  Please post the citation for one of your library sources to our blog before next week's class. All sources must be unique.


Let's review the basics of a Term Paper

Planning a thesis
• What your paper is about (the topic);
Normally, the audience of a scholarly paper consists of people familiar with the general area but
not with the specific topic. The topic of a paper is often expressed in the first sentence.

A Good Thesis Statement:
"Dinosaur extinction may have begun as a severe reaction to the Rotovirus."

A Bad Thesis Statement:
"There are many scientists who have theories about how the dinosaurs became extinct."

State your conclusions at the beginning, and then state the reasoning that leads up to
them. Never leave the reader wondering where you are heading with an idea.
Outline the whole paper before you write it. If you find this difficult, make an unordered list or
collection of ideas you want to include, and then sort it.
The first paragraph of a paper is the hardest to write, and itʼs a good idea to try writing it — or at
least sketching it — long before you write the rest of the paper. Often, once you compose the
first paragraph, the whole paper will fall into place.

You do not need a long introductory section. Many term papers wander around for a few pages
before they reach the main point. Donʼt do this. If you have an introduction (necessary in a long
paper), it should be an overview of the paper itself, not a disquisition on other “background”
topics, nor a record of everything you looked at while starting to research the topic.

You do not need a “conclusions” section at the end unless the paper either. When you come to the end of your argument, stop, ending, if possible, on a general point.

To get things started:
Tales From The Public Domain
Copywright Basics    (start by skimming)
Good Copy Bad Copy