research strategies 8.2 163
Develop a Preliminary Bibliography
Creating a preliminary bibliography, or list of promising potential resources,
should be your first research goal. You will probably discover more resources
than you actually look at or refer to in your speech; at this stage, the bibliogra-
phy simply serves as a menu of possibilities. How many resources should you
list in a preliminary bibliography for, say, a ten-minute speech? A reasonable
number might be ten or twelve. If you have many more than that, you may feel
overwhelmed. If you have fewer, you may find too little information.
You will need to develop a system for keeping track of your resources. Web
browsers let you bookmark pages for future reference and ready access; your
bookmarks can serve as one part of your preliminary bibliography. If you are us-
ing an online catalog or database, you can probably compile and then print out
a record of the references you discover. Such files can be a second part of your
preliminary bibliography.
Locate Resources
You should have no trouble obtaining the actual texts of resources from the Web
and online databases. For all other items in your preliminary bibliography, you
will need to locate the resources yourself. Use the discussion earlier in this chap-
ter on traditional library holdings to help you.
Assess the Usefulness of Resources
It makes sense to gauge the potential usefulness of your resources before you
begin to read more closely and take notes. Think critically about how the various
resources you have found are likely to help you achieve your purpose and about
how effective they are likely to be with your audience. Glance over the tables of
contents of books, and flip quickly through the texts to note any charts, graphs,
or other visual materials that might be used as visual aids. Skim a key chapter or
two. Skim articles and Web sites as well.
Take Notes
Once you have located and assessed the usefulness of your resources, you are
ready to begin more careful reading and note-taking. The How To box offers
some tips.
Identify Possible Presentation Aids
In addition to discovering verbal supporting material in your sources, you may also
find charts, graphs, photographs, and other potentially valuable visual material.
You might think that you will be able to remember what visuals were in
which sources. But many speakers have experienced frustrating searches for that
“perfect” presentation aid they remember seeing somewhere while they were
taking notes for their speech. Even if you are not certain at this point that you