FILA 150 Adulting Class Guide

Welcome to the FILA 150 Adulting Course Guide. This guide is designed to help you with your research project for this class. You need to find three to five sources (not including those used for class) for this assignment. This guide is designed to help you to:

• develop a topic and select keywords
• learn database research strategies
• find credible web articles
• find popular and academic sources
• use your sources
• cite your sources

If you're having trouble with this assignment, I am more than happy to help, as is BC's other research librarian, Vickie. Feel free to email us at research@bridgewater.edu or make an appointment using the button below:

For your Adulting paper assignment, you should consider what topics in the course interested you the most.

When trying to select a topic, make sure that it is something manageable. If you're researching time management and procrastination, it will be impossible to cover everything to do with either topic. Looking at the context of time management and its relationship to being an adult in today's society would be a much more narrow, manageable lens for the assignment.

Below, you'll find a couple of sources that will help you in this pre-writing/topic formation stage:

Keywords are the terms you will use to search for information. Just typing in your entire topic sentence is not an efficient way to search. Here are some tips for using keywords effectively.

As you search for resources, consider what you might like to write about in your paper and use this as a keyword.

Examples:

• If you're interested in time management and its relationship to being an adult in today's society, some keywords might be:
  • "time management", adulthood, "United States"
  • Note: when you are using a phrase like time management, make sure to search it in quotation marks to ensure the words appear together in your search results
• I've included "United States," because it might be more relevant for you to look at results that talk about adulthood in American society than those from another culture. On the flip side, if you're interested in what it means to be an adult elsewhere in the world, maybe try searching for a different location.

As you're searching:

• Look for other relevant keywords
• Keep track of the terms and indicate which ones are most successful
• See if there are any relevant subject terms you might like to use

Librarians love to organize information. One way we do this is by using subject headings. Since some subjects can be described using various terms (like cats or felines), librarians have come up with a standardized list, or controlled list, of subjects that can be used when describing resources. This list (known as the Library of Congress Subject Headings) provides the controlled vocabulary that every librarian uses when they describe the subject of a book, DVD, or any other object in the library's catalog.

The easiest way to understand subject headings is to see it in action. The most convenient example is the library's catalog. When you pull up the full record of a title, it will give you the subject heading for that item hyperlinked, so you can search for other titles with that descriptor. 

You also will find subject headings in many of our online databases (like Academic Search Complete), where they help organize thousands of articles. They may not utilize the same list of subjects as the Library of Congress, you can still approach searching them the same way as in the library's catalog.