The Information Literacy Tutorial

Growing up with two teachers for parents, I am no stranger to the library. Library trips were a bi-weekly excursion in my household. I love to read, too. One summer, I decided to conquer my local library's Classics section. I read Gone With the Wind for fun. Reading builds knowledge and knowledge is power.

So, Howard University has eight libraries!!!! I could try my hardest and still there is NO WAY I could finish all those books. Still, they will be very useful to me during my tenure here because this school is very research-oriented.

This week, for my Freshman Seminar class, I had to take The Information Literacy Tutorial, which taught me all about the different resources here and how to best use them. A lot of this stuff I already knew. But some of this stuff was new. For instance, I learned that when you use a search engine, if you truncate (put a * next to the root of) a word, you can search for all the words with the same root and their variations. For example, if you put in expos*, you can find exposition, expose, exposes, expository, and more.

 I will be honest, the tutorial was a bit boring. But the information was very useful. I feel like I will be able to use the libraries to their full extent. I even know how to read and find call numbers on books. Now my next objective is to go to the Library of Congress and another D.C. public library to get library cards....