Bruriah’s annual library trip landed the tenth graders at Rutgers and Montclair Universities to learn how to conduct research for their term papers. This year, the paper is combining both History and English. The students are tasked with writing a convincing, articulate and well-written paper about a specific topic in history. For their research, the students needed to find reliable and accurate sources from which to base their factual information, which is where their trip came in.

The librarians delivered an information session on how to efficiently search for and sift through articles, journal entries and books written about the student’s specific topic. This is useful because when a search is done about a vague topic, many sources come up, many of them unreliable or irrelevant. The students were taught how to specify their searches and narrow down the results to only reliable sources such as history books, edited journals, and historical reports. After this, the students were set free to use the skills they acquired to find as many sources as they could pertaining to their topics.

The students found this helpful for searching for reliable sources with a lot of information for them to use in their papers in a fast and easy way. It was also a good tool they could use to access the information they looked at in the universities at home and in their local libraries, ensuring that the students could literally “take home” what they had gained on the trip. Overall the trip was enjoyable, helpful and effective for the students as they now have enough information to write an informative well-written paper.

By Kayla Goldstein (‘20)