Simple Visuals for Complex Research was a physical poster resented at 2nd Joint Conference of the Visual Resources Association and Art Libraries Society of North America (VRA + ARLIS/NA 2011), Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 24, 2011.  The images within were created and/or compiled by Jesse Vestermark in Microsoft PowerPoint as communication tools for use in library instruction sessions during the school year 2010-2011.

To view and download each image individually, click on the tabs above.  To download a high-quality copy of the full poster, click the PDF link below.

The Classroom Activity lesson is best performed at the start of an instruction session on evaluating web resources and then re-visited for discussion at the end of the same session.  

Students are handed post-it notes with pre-selected, briefly-explained information characteristics and resources written on them and asked to place each post-it on the "spectrum of reliability."  Post-it topics may vary, but some examples are:

• peer-reviewed
• uses bad graphics
• uses cool graphics
• lengthy (5+ pages)
• gives evidence of author's expertise
• includes substantial references/bibliography 
• Google
• Wikipedia
• library databases