Hi, I'm Paige Eggebrecht and I am an Assistant Index Editor for the MLA International Bibliography. I hold an MLIS from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University, where I also taught first year composition for seven years and served as the director of the University Writing Center. One of my favorite activities as a teacher in composition courses and in the writing center was helping students start researching, guiding them through the early exploratory stages of writing and research for their papers when they really weren't sure where to start. Often, students believe that research begins after they have formed their ideas and arguments. Students who do have an idea of what they want to write about often limit themselves to narrow searching. Meanwhile, students who aren't sure what they want to write about get stuck, afraid to approach searching until they're struck with inspiration that might never come. Novice researchers need to understand how research can be more open ended, especially in the early stages. So I'll be sharing a lesson plan for early stage exploratory research in the MLA International Bibliography designed for first year undergraduate students, but it can easily be adapted for other early stage researchers. The lesson plan focuses on searching the bibliography for research on “news reporting” and “contemporary society”. This lesson aligns well with a composition course, but can also be used in introductory courses in media studies or communications. It can be adapted for any course with a research project assignment. The goal of the lesson is to introduce students to database research as an exploratory and iterative process. The lesson meets the ACRL information literacy frame Searching as Strategic Exploration, which emphasizes familiarity with search tools and the serendipitous, exploratory and creative aspects of information searching. It also highlights the importance of remaining patient, flexible, and persistent throughout the research process. The lesson plan additionally showcases the bibliography’s rich indexing of discourse studies. Ideally, you can do this exercise before students know what their project topics are. And before you start, make sure you tell students that the goal of the lesson is not necessarily to find specific sources, but rather to brainstorm and explore the database. In the first part of the lesson, which was originally taught to me by Brandeis librarian Zoe Weinstein, takes place before you are in the database. You and your students will brainstorm potential topic keywords together, starting with a pre-chosen term from the bibliography. We'll use “news reporting”. Together, you'll build a list of related terms ranging from broader, narrower or equivalent terms to “news reporting” - for instance, “news media”, “journalists” or “CNN” - to terms that relate to news reporting in society - for example, “misinformation” or “bias”. You can even have them brainstorm subjects that might be covered by news reporting - for example, “politics”, “business”, “health”, “celebrities”. This part of the lesson aims to get students started thinking flexibly and creatively about potential search terms before you even start searching for anything. Make sure you get a big, juicy list of terms before the next stage. The second part of the lesson involves adding controlled vocabulary from the bibliography’s thesaurus to your advanced search in the EBSCO platform starting with your core term “news reporting”. Before searching, find several more of your brainstormed terms together as a class in the thesaurus. Then have students try on their own to find more. You'll want to help students find preferred terms, synonyms, or related terms when they get stuck. As new terms arise in this process, add them to your brainstorm list. A key takeaway from this part of the lesson is that the searcher’s language often differs from the language of the database's controlled vocabulary, emphasizing again the importance of flexibility and creative thinking in the search process. This stage also introduces students to the thesaurus. Now you'll do some searching with your terms found in the thesaurus. Demonstrate first with “news reporting” and one other term to an advanced search and discuss with students the amounts and kinds of results the search produced. Try several different second terms together as a class and give students opportunities to try additional ones. At this stage, you still aren't looking at specific records. Instead, you're drawing students into a discussion in a descriptive and broad way about the results you're getting, how different search terms bring in different themes and topics. Encourage students to share their struggles in making searches yield results so that the class can learn how to approach these difficulties later. In the course of searching and discussing results with students, don't shy away from getting stuck when you're doing full class demonstrations. Be a good model for how expert researchers expect to iterate their searching, and don't stop when the search doesn't work, or when you can't find the right thesaurus term. In the next stage, show students how to narrow results using filters. Demonstrate with the search for “news reporting” on its own, and then use the filters to narrow the search results by subject. Have students try this on their own and share what they got. Discuss how this particular approach is helpful when looking for new sources and new search terms to use later. You can add these search terms to your brainstorm list. In this part of the lesson, emphasize how information searching can be strategic and serendipitous at the same time. In the final stage of the lesson, you'll do some hyperlinked subject term hopping, which again focuses on exploration and serendipity. In this stage, you'll demonstrate how you can open a record such as a journal article and click on subject terms in the indexing to start a new search with that term. You repeat this process until the search results are significantly removed from the original topic. Have students try on their own and share their hyperlinked subject term journeys with the class. This stage also highlights the wide breadth of topics that the bibliography covers, because it will bring up lots of new searches that aren't necessarily what the class started with. This part of the lesson can yield some crazy results, which is also really fun. You can get from “celebrities in Belgium” to “genre mixing”, to “horror television”, to “settler colonialism” to “Hawaii” in a matter of a few clicks. At the end of the lesson, depending on how much time you have, have students discuss the kinds of subjects they found in the bibliography and reflect on the experience of searching and any frustrations when searches don't work well. I also make sure to review the three database search strategies we used. I usually followed this lesson with a low stakes assignment, where students turned in a short list of sources they found in the bibliography, along with the subject terms and search strategies they used to find them. I hope you like this lesson for getting students into database searching early in the writing and research process, excited about researching in the bibliography, and comfortable with the tools and searching methods available to them.