Scholarly Research: Questions and Concerns

 3. What questions or concerns do you have about doing research on scholarly sources in our library? How are you feeling about doing research for this class?

I'm feeling semi-confident in my ability to conduct scholarly research for this class. In high school, I wrote a few research papers which required extensive time spent in my school's online databases. Because of this, I feel as though I have the skills and patience necessary to sort through data and identify which sources are important and relevant to my research topic of choice. At my high school, I knew how to efficiently navigate the websites and felt comfortable asking the librarians for help. This confidence and knowledge made me feel supported while researching. What makes me most worried about research at Santa Clara is the task of learning how to navigate a new research database. I believe developing this skill will take some time, but I am confident in my ability to do so. I think the most important thing for me will be reaching out to friends, teachers, and librarians when I need help! This will be especially important when searching for older primary sources. I often find that those, while necessary to fulfill project requirements, are tedious to read and take me a lot of time to determine whether or not they will be helpful in my research process. It's really easy for me to go down research rabbit holes where I get stuck poring over a source that turns out to not be helpful. I hope to continue getting better at quickly determining how useful a source will be before reading it, so that I can expedite my research process and waste less time looking at unnecessary sources.