Research Assignment

The research assignment is intended to introduce you to the collections in Fenwick Library. This assignment has two parts: Locate five articles (not book reviews) about or by Tim Berners-Lee in any text format (print, full-text, pdf), and find the earliest article about the WWW by Berners-Lee

The GMU databases are grouped by topic (Business & International Commerce, Economics, Engineering & Technology, General Science, and so on), but many of the databases cover several topics. The individual databases may be part of a larger set of databases: ABI-Inform, for example, is one of the ProQuest databases. In some cases, you can search multiple databases with a single query.

You can also search for full-text articles; these articles are available for display and download as text (and occasionally pdf) format. But limiting a search to full-text may eliminate some important articles.

Once you find a citation of an article by or about Berners-Lee, print the citation and the first page of the article. An abstract will not fulfill this requirement — you must locate the actual text of the article, whether as full-text or in print. If the full text of the article is available, you can print directly from your web browser. If you need to locate the print edition, you'll need to check the GMU library's holdings. To check the library holdings, you use the main library catalog and conduct title search ("find results in journal title"). The holdings screen will indicate where a particular edition of a journal is located (bound periodicals, microform, open shelves).

You will hand in the printed citations (from the databases) and the first page of the article (not an abstract). Book reviews are not acceptable for this assignment (they're just too easy to find). To complete the second part of the assignment, turn in the citation of the earliest Berners-Lee article on the WWW.