Sixth Class: Liberry!

I thought the tour was reasonably straightforward, so I won't reiterate too much. I'll make three bullet points.

1. As swell as RefWorks may be at helping you with your bibliographies, there's something amiss in the world when they (you know, the man) don't think you need to learn how to do references and citations by hand. It's a skill that really helps you explore the work and, in the practice of it, forces you to understand something about what - and more importantly why - information is considered necessary for academic purposes. It's kind of like learning how to cook: other people may be able to do it for you, but self-sufficiency is a good thing. If the benefits of a liberal arts degree are all about learning to express oneself and present an argument (and it therefore has applications far outside the disciplinary boundaries of which it is constituted), then you should learn it. This is not (entirely) an old coot decrying the younger generation, but I understand some things better (not 'than you' but 'than I would have otherwise') because I struggled to understand the apparati that surrounds their use.
   
2. As in all things - cooking, making love, calligraphy - as much as one wants instant gratification one will discover that taking time will yield better results. When you look up things in the databases - either the Novanet Catalogue or the MLA or PAIS - take time to look around. Look at the subfields and cross-references. Enter new search parameters if the first ones are too wide, too narrow, or off-kilter. Browse, don't hunt. You will be surprised how central serendipity is to the researcher: you can simply chance upon something while looking for something else (I know: 'Come on people now/Smile on your brother/ Everybody get together/ Learn to love one another right now').
   
3. And, in the name of all that is good, holy, and sacred to you, when you find something, read it. Read it. For goodness' sake read it. Take time to read it. Just sit your ass to an anchor, take a few minutes, and read it. You don't have to rewrite it: just read it. You don't have to translate into Urdu and then to Ugaritic: just read it. You don't have to write a Michel Foucault-style treatise on why it is incorrect or representative of a bourgeois attitude: just read it. Please, I beg you, read it.

For those of you who actually read this thing, you are getting advanced warning of a reading being put on reserve, Roland Barthes' "The Photographic Message." It's a hard one (don't... just don't), but should make you scratch your collective chins and ponder.