Sample Term Project

Basic Information About the Project

The Term Project is designed to let you demonstrate your understanding of the research process and how libraries and information systems fit into that process. The resulting Research Guide that will be the result of the project should be something that you can refer back to when you encounter research project assignments in subsequent classes. Even though this project will focus on a specific topic, the methods will work for any topic you might choose to explore later.

A Sample Project

Research Guide for Literature; A Narrative Approach
Designed and Written by Frumious Bandersnatch

Topic: Noted American ex-patriot writer Mademoiselle Fifi S.V.P. LaRue has been cited by many literary critics as one of the most influential American writers of the first half of the 20th century. Her primary influence was on poetic form, herself creating nearly a dozen new forms that experimented with punctuation, line breaks, meter, page layout, and word and phrase repetition. Nearly all of her poetry dealt with her "wonderful life," as she termed it, a life full of adventure and misadventure.

Although many studies have been devoted to examining either her life or her technique, few have tried to tie together the two. This project will attempt to show how specific life events are reflected in stylistic changes in LaRue's poetry.

Foundational Sources :

Dictionaries, Handbooks, and Encyclopedias: For an understanding of poetic forms and terms, I relied on sources in the UNF Library's Reference Collection. To locate relevant materials, I used the library's online catalog (WebLUIS) to search for dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks of poetry and poetics. A couple of sources that proved particularly useful were the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and the Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms. These two references were valuable for developing an understanding of the terminology used by literature scholars.

For a better understanding of the time period in which LaRue wrote, I consulted the Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary. This source covered not only background on over 500 literary, critical, and theatrical movements worldwide but also provided additional terminology associated with each of the movements.

From these first few sources I was able to build a concept of the atmosphere that surrounded LaRue and a better grasp of the terminology that I would need to further research her life and art.

Basic Biographical Sources: I was able to find a number of sources giving basic biographical information on LaRue in the library's Reference Collection. The Twentieth Century Literary Criticism series provided a concise sketch, while the Dictionary of Literary Biography provided more in-depth coverage of her life and works. I also was able to uncover additional resources in Gale's Literature Resource Center, an online resource subscribed to by the library. Gale's system provided me with biographical and critical sources that helped further my understanding of LaRue and her works.

Secondary Literature:

Criticisms: To uncover criticisms of LaRue's works, I identified databases that would focus of literature. The best of the sources I discovered was the MLA Bibliography, an international index of articles and book essays covering literatures of all nations. The UNF Library subscribes to the database through FirstSearch and through SilverPlatter. The FirstSearch version was the one that I used.

My first approach here was to look for criticisms of LaRue's poetry and poetics. I also tried to limit my search results to articles that dealt specifically with her life as well, hoping to find other research that linked the two topics. What I found most helpful in this strategy was to identify specific life events and titles of poems that LaRue wrote during those events and to search using keywords that described both. For example, in 1919 LaRue led a demonstration to protest the use of bright orange lipstick, a fad that she found distasteful and unfashionable. In the incident, she was arrested for smearing orange lipstick on a Parisian gendarme's face and uniform. In a poem published later that same year, LaRue described a dream-like sequence of events in which a young woman found herself being twisted out of a silver tube into an apocalypse-like environment bathed in burnt orange. I searched MLA for "LaRue" and "protest" and "orange" and turned up three articles providing background on the foundations of LaRue's protest and that provided me with references to original newspaper accounts of the incident and to the titles of several poems written during LaRue's "Orange Period." The most useful of the articles was entitled "LaRue sans Orange: Displeased and Squeezed." This article identified the titles of three poems written by LaRue that would later prove useful to proving my thesis.

I also used the Humanities Abstracts database to locate additional literature. Even though the MLA Bibliography is a wonderful resource for literary research, the Humanities Abstracts revealed a few more items that I didn't discover in MLA. Using multiple indexes is the best way to ensure comprehensive coverage of the best sources of information.

Biography: The UNF Library catalog also revealed 5 biographies of LaRue, which I located and checked out. Two of the biographies were written by people who never knew LaRue and were written much after her death in 1940. The other three were written shortly after her death and were by close associates who were able to provide anecdotal evidence that I would eventually use in my research. The anecdotal evidence falls more into the realm of primary literature, but the majority of the information in these three biographies was based on second-hand recollections of LaRue's life, so I've included them as secondary sources.

I was also able to locate a few articles on LaRue's life by using the MLA and Humanities databases. These sources really didn't reveal a whole lot more than the full-length biographies, though.

Primary Literature: Primary resources consisted of LaRue's poetry, her memoirs, and her correspondence with her friends, family, and the literary community with which she was associated.

For this study, I focused on her "Orange Period," since this was a productive period in her life and because I had already discovered leads that I thought would enable me to link her writing style to life events. I discovered, by using the library's catalog, that the UNF Library had LaRue's Memoirs of a Literary Life: Je Suis un Artiste Magnifique! in its collection. This proved to be one of the best sources for exploring LaRue's own individualistic perspective. I also discovered that UNF Library owned all of her poetry, so I grabbed all of her works for analysis.

The most difficult to locate materials were old newspaper interviews with LaRue during the time period that I was covering. I used indexes to the Times of London and to the New York Times to uncover a half dozen interviews in those publications. This led me to microfilm editions of the two papers in the library's periodicals collection. These articles proved very useful in understanding LaRue's ideas and opinions during her "Orange Period."

Once I had located and evaluated the primary materials and compared them with secondary sources that I had previously reviewed, I was ready to work the project. Even though I had gathered numerous sources that seemed to cover all my concerns in the project, I left open the possibility that I might have to identify additional criticisms or interviews to answer all my questions.

Outline of the Process:

If I were to outline the process for someone who wanted to take my approach in a future, similar project, the following would take care of the steps that I took.

This is one approach to the assignment. Pay closest attention to the Process Outline as a guide to how to organize your project. Remember that the most important result of the project is an understanding of how the research process works and how library resources fit into the process.

This sample uses a narrative approach to describing research. This is not the only way to do this. If you have your own preferences, follow those, as long as you adequately describe the process.