Postcard of Queens Point, McCoole, Allegany County, MD (circa 1925).
Queens Point is a sandstone cliff overlooking the Potomac River, 400 feet below.
This LibGuide provides information on resources you can use for completing your Rock and Mineral Report assignment in Professor Van Vranken's GEOL 102 course.
For general information on rocks and minerals for your report and presentation, we recommend you look at the Browsing Library eBooks tab.
You should use The Handbook of Mineralogy and the mindat.org Database for more specific information on rocks and minerals.
Remember to cite your sources properly. Look at the Citing Sources for more details.
Choosing good sources for your lab report is important. Because this is an introductory class, we've tried to make this easier for you.
The Good |
The Bad |
The Ugly |
Your textbook Click here to access your textbook online (if you are not already signed-in, you may be asked to sign into your Pearson account) Not sure what terms like specific gravity, fracture, cleavage, and so on mean? You can look them up in your textbook's glossary or index. |
Wikipedia Wikipedia can be a useful tool for some classes, a good way to get background information and so on. But for this class assignment, we've already identified the resources you need to do the assignment and we've identified good places to go for background information. |
Chegg and other homework help websites (Quizlet, Course Hero, and more) Why? These sites aren't written by experts or knowledgeable people. They're usually put together from student notes or copied out of test banks. You don't know the context necessarily that they were written for. |
Library owned eBooks or websites vetted by your instructor eBooks: Websites: |
Random websites not vetted by your instructor Why waste your time wandering the web looking for alternate sources? There are already great sources highlighted on the left hand side here that are perfect for this assignment. |
"What's the Difference?" and similar content aggregator sites Why? The writers aren't experts or knowledgeable people. The writers could be anyone using sources from anywhere. For you to know if they're accurate, you would have to verify them independently, in which case you'd already be looking at more reliable sources, like the ones your instructors picked out for you. |
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