LBCC LibGuides: ENGL1 Olivas: Social Issues: Your Course Guide

Prompt & Game Plan

Prompt

Identify a community issue (local or beyond) that needs attention.
Make a claim (thesis) about why this issue needs attention and find data/evidence to support your claim.
Form an argument from your claim/thesis about your issue - remember to present and refute opposing arguments.
Five sources must be cited from the library (books, ebooks) or library databases (articles).

The Game Plan

First, log into the Viking Portal to ensure the links below work properly.
We will use this Course Guide to discuss where and how to find information that is related to your prompt.
The side navigation tabs will help you understand how your LBCC Librarians conducted their searches to find information from OneSearch, Academic Databases, and the World Wide Web.
You can also "Schedule a Research Consultation" to follow-up with one-on-one research with an LBCC Librarian.
- Bonus: Use the links below to expand your skills to learn more about searching OneSearch, databases, and the World Wide Web.

Spectrum of Credibility

The LBCC Library, like many academic libraries at colleges and universities, lives within the credible web domain of .edu.

The Spectrum of Credibility helps illustrate why your professors want you to use library sources. After all, librarians and scholars have spent decades curating credible resources for students like you to easily access and use.

3 Resources We'll Search

OneSearch

You will likely begin by searching one or more of your keywords in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), also known as OneSearch.

Learn how to use OneSearch to find books, ebooks, articles, and other media that are housed within the LBCC Library, academic databases, and even at external publisher sites.

Get started right away! enter keywords into the OneSearch bar below.

Individual Databases

Learn how to explore individual academic databases that are relevant to the assignment. We'll learn about general (multi-disciplinary) databases and subject-specific databases.

Or jump in right now. Use these popular multi-disciplinary databases to search for a little bit of everything.

Academic Search Complete (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
Covering Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Social Sciences, this very popular database is user-friendly, with a clean and simple interface. A "Go To" websites for college students.
PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
Explora (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
A great student oriented database with current events, consumer health, and career information. Topic overviews, reports, biographies, journal articles, and more. Education majors can access Curriculum Standards.
ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
One of the most used and popular academic databases for college students, Proquest uses a student-friendly layout and covers business, medical, social sciences, arts and humanities, education, science and technology, and religion. Formats include books, articles, dissertations, videos and blogs. Use the thesaurus tool to use the databases' keywords.
Starting from 1985 to the present. The database is updated daily.

World Wide Web

Learn about effective search and evaluation strategies when searching the World Wide Web for relevant and credible sources.

Get started right now with effective "domain" searches:

site:.gov
- ex. site:.gov immigration
  - allows you to search only government websites for this term
site:.org
- ex. site:.org climate change
  - allows you to search organizations that have published information for these keywords
site:.edu
- ex. site:.edu transgender
  - allows you to search for this term across educational institutions

LibGuides

ENGL1 Olivas: Social Issues

Strategies via PDF

Research Orientation Assessment