By now in your academic career, you have developed your own set of search strategies and have successfully identified a set of core information resources that you typically use to find information.  Most likely, Google or its academic counterpart Google Scholar is your go-to information resource and has influenced the type of search strategies that you have used in your job, life, and school. 

There are many different places to find information. This tutorial is intended to introduce you to other places to find potentially valuable information. It also serves as an encouragement to take the time to think about and to further develop your own information-seeking behaviors.  You will be introduced or reminded of other information resources as a method for discussing searching techniques.  You are encouraged to keep in mind as you systematically work through the principles laid out in this tutorial that information seeking is as much an art form as it is a set of discreet steps. Information seeking is messy and failure is expected. It is your ability to learn from these failures that will ultimately improve your searching strategies.  

This course guide is designed to help you identify relevant material that you can include in your Preproposal for APDEM 803. Each lesson will help you build a bibliography of resources as well as develop a reproducible searching framework:

1. Developing and managing search strategies (Lesson 1).  this module will help you think about how to articulate your own strategy for managing and searching for information. 
2. Background resources (Lesson 3) that will help you define the scope of your topic such as: encyclopedias, handbooks, edited books and book chapters, and review articles.
3. Scholarly articles (Lesson 9) from peer review journals