From Karen:

Be aware that there's a UWP instructor named Richard Jean So who is sending his students to the library with what he calls a "pre-assignment." He wants each student to come up with the citations for the "four best secondary sources" on each of three topics:

• Chinese Exclusion Laws
• rational choice theory and economics
• American Literary Naturalism

He then wants the librarian to sign the bottom of the form to prove

that the student actually talked to us.

The exercise is difficult enough so that the student is unlikely to figure out how to do it on his or own, and also so that the librarian in effect does the students' work for him or her, thereby imparting no real research skills.

--great book of essays for topic three: "Twisted from the ordinary"!

She adds:

For the first, I did a keyword search on "Chinese exclusion laws" in CLIO and also in "America, History and Life," which had a lot of good results.

For the second, I found that there's an LCSH for "rational choice theory" but it applies to several different disciplines, so it's good to combine it with "economics." We also looked in Proquest (which we did for all three, topics, actually). EconLit is a little too esoteric.

For the third, we discovered that doing a keyword search like this was helpful:

skey american and skey "naturalism in literature"

Although, of course, searching on keyword "American Literary Naturalism" also worked. The MLA was too arcane, so we stuck with Proquest on this one, too.

Anyone else find something that works well?

Other thoughts?