Teaching electronic communication skills to graduate students

Abstract

For the past six years I have been co-teaching the Research Methods course required of all English graduate students. Entitled "Introduction to Graduate Studies in English," the course has two primary goals: to socialize students into the profession, and to teach them advanced research skills. As the English and American Literature librarian, I am responsible for much of the latter. Traditionally I teach sessions on major research topics, such as doing biographical research, compiling bibliographies, locating archival and manuscript resources, working with national bibliographies, and conducting interdisciplinary research. There has always been a computer component to the course. Its main focus is database searching how to search the MLA International Bibliography, Dissertation Abstracts International, and other files relevant to literary scholarship. Some attention is paid to wordprocessing/ bibliography software, such as Nota Bene and Pro-Cite, and sometimes we have a guest speaker address computer applications in humanistic research. Topics range from the use of concordance software to the management and organization of machine-readable text files located at a