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Research exercise 1

Pretty straightforward exercise here, which will provide the foundation for our first substantive research project. I think you'll see that this first foray into library research will be interesting, possibly even fun!

1) Your first task is to locate the issue of Time Magazine dated closest to your date of birth (i.e. on your date of birth or within three days either before or after). For example, my birthday is July 21st, 1962, so I would use the Time published July 20, 1962. If you want to get more adventurous and "historical," you might use the issue of Time published closest to either your mother's birth-date or your grandmother's.

Our dedicated PFWR 3180 librarian, Deborah Stanfield, has very kindly provided a helpful tutorial for locating Time in the MGA holdings, which you can access here: http://mga.libwizard.com/Library-Tutorial-Time-Magazine.

2) Skim through the contents of the magazine, looking for articles that seem particularly interesting, dealing with topics that might be worth learning more about.

3) Print the magazine cover, the first page (at least) of the cover story, and the first page (at least) for six other articles. Ideally, you should print all seven articles in their entirety, but if this proves impracticable, just the first page of each article is okay. Note: you may want to save the articles digitally (as PDFs, e.g.) and then print them later.

4) For each of the seven articles you select, write down two or three different subjects from the article that you might explore further through research. For example, if you were born in 1982 and your cover story is about a nuclear arms reduction summit between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., you might explore nuclear arms treaties more generally, or US-USSR summits in general, or even aspects of nuclear weapons at any time in history, not just in 1982.

5) Bring to class Monday your printed pages from Time and a list of possible subjects for further research from each article.