Welcome to the CCS 101 College and Career Success Subject Guide.  Using this guide will help you complete your CCS 101 College and Career Success research assignments.  Using this guide you can find help with:

• Career resources
• Information literacy including
  • Evaluating the information you find online, including on your social media
  • The ethical use of information
  • The best way to access information inside and outside of the library

The library is here to help if you would like any additional assistance.

Research we do for an academic assignment is not the same thing as research we do at home.  Think about the last few things you asked a search engine.  Most of the time we look for things like: what other movies is this actor in, what's the phone number for my vet's office, where is the nearest Mexican restaurant, etc.  All of these searches are quick because we have a specific question that can be answered using one web site. 

Now think about what you are asked to find for your academic assignments.  The first big difference is that you are unlikely to be asked to find a specific answer that only uses one web page to answer.  More likely, you will be asked to find multiple sources to formulate your own, individual answer.  This means that academic research just takes longer, and that's fine. You will also be expected to keep track of where you got the information to create your answer. 

If research is going to take us longer than we are used to, we want to make sure that we do not accidentally redo our research when our research occurs in chunks over multiple days or weeks.  We also want to make sure that we do not redo our research when it comes time to acknowledge the sources we used to create our answer.

This Research Tracking Worksheet will help you keep track of all the steps that are a part of academic research as well as giving you a place to save your research as you go.  We recommend that you save another copy of this worksheet whenever you have a research project.