WebCAT Assignment
For Mark Smith's C/I, Fall 2000
What is WebCat and how does it work?
Library materials are indexed on an online catalog called WebCat. There is an excellent WebCat tutorial that will take you through the steps of how to use this online catalog at http://artemis/help/WebCatMain.html. Go through this tutorial before you start this assignment.
Assignment
The main goal of this assignment is for you to learn how to work with Library of Congress Subject Headings. If you don't learn this, you may spend four years not being able to find things in our library. Each year Austin College faculty and librarians purchase new library materials to add to our collection in order to provide relevant and useful resource materials for AC students. We don’t want our collection to just sit on the shelf and look pretty; we would like students to be able to find these materials and read them! After you do the WebCat tutorial, complete the following tasks, using the Library of Congress Subject Headings books at the Reference Desk.
- Look up modern art. What do you find?
- Follow the reference. What do you find?
- Follow those references. What do you find?
- Using WebCat, find three works that our library has on 20th century modern art or architecture. Try to find works that relate to your research project or a topic being discussed in course. Look at the subject headings listed for each item to determine the subjects covered by each title. Some titles may relate only very generally to your topic, but try to have some goal in mind for the three works you choose.
- Create, as an e-mail message to yourself, a bibliography listing these three works as was demonstrated in the WebCat tutorial. Then, using the e-mail program forward the bibliography and the answers to questions 1-3 to one of your CLs.
- Based upon the bibliography you received by e-mail through WebCat, re-arrange the information into a generic citation format used in the bibliographies of papers. Citation format varies in different academic disciplines. For the time being, use this one as your model:
