Written by David Lapakko\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n When doing research was quite a search!<\/strong><\/p>\n You could say that when it comes to doing research, today\u2019s students are incredibly spoiled–and they probably don\u2019t even realize it.\u00a0 But leave it to us old geezers to explain why!<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the old days (read: anytime before 1995), there were three main places to find material for papers: the card catalog, the <\/span>Reader\u2019s Guide to Periodical Literature<\/span><\/i>, and the <\/span>Social Science Index<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 The card catalog was the size of a small room and had scores of drawers.\u00a0 In these little drawers were thousands of 3 x 5 note cards–on each card, a different book was listed, with its call number.\u00a0 To actually get the book, you\u2019d need to trudge to the \u201cstacks\u201d where all the books were housed, find it on the shelf, and then check it out.\u00a0 But the card catalog didn\u2019t have a way to tell you if a book was already checked out, so you went to the stacks and crossed your fingers.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The <\/span>Reader\u2019s Guide<\/span><\/i> was an index to a wide variety of popular magazines such as <\/span>Time<\/span><\/i> or <\/span>Newsweek<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 There was such an index for every year–each one was a hardbound book at least two inches thick.\u00a0 If you wanted an article on, say, capital punishment, you could look in the 1990 index, and then the 1989 index, and then 1988, etc. and hope that you might a few articles listed that would be helpful.\u00a0 Then you could go to the <\/span>Social Science Index<\/span><\/i>, which was an index to many academic journals, and do a similarly laborious search–again, year by year.\u00a0 Then to find the actual magazine or journal, you\u2019d once again trudge to the stacks, hunt for the bound volume of that publication, and hope that you had a way to photocopy it, since you didn\u2019t just check out an entire year\u2019s issues of bound volumes; they didn\u2019t leave the building.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n When all was said and done, if you found three or four relevant books and three or four useful articles through this laborious process, you thought you had quite a treasure trove of information!\u00a0 Now, of course, all of this seems incredibly lame and antiquated.\u00a0 The next time you Google a topic and wind up with 750,000 hits in 1.4 seconds, don\u2019t take that sort of thing for granted.\u00a0 The power that today\u2019s students have to access the universe of information is nothing short of mind-boggling–at least if your reference point is thumbing through <\/span>World<\/span><\/i> Almanacs<\/span><\/i> and encyclopedias to find something out that Siri can now tell you in five seconds!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 10) Written by David Lapakko\u00a0 When doing research was quite a search! You …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,13,2,8,12,88],"tags":[114,65,113],"class_list":["post-25672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-communication-studies","category-faculty","category-film","category-new-media","category-students","tag-campus-history","tag-david-lapakko","tag-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25672"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25702,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25672\/revisions\/25702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}