First steps in research – by Pablo the Penguin

Being a Library Penguin, I thought I knew all about finding information. This week though, while I’ve been looking for help with the “Giant Pip” problem, I’ve realised that although I can waddle among the shelves and look at the books, and I can (admittedly rather unelegantly) type words into Google, there might be something I’m missing.I looked in the books about penguins in the “animals” section, but none of them had anything about gigantism. Or sudden growth spurts. Or bigness.

I typed “how to make Pip small again” into Google, but that didn’t produce anything even remotely relevant. Neither did “why is Pip gigantic?” or “really big penguin”. Not even when I tried using Google Scholar, which is something I’ve heard students talking about.

I’ve heard librarians talking about “alternative search terms”, so I didn’t give up. Eventually I found this wikipedia page which seemed to imply that giant penguins existed but were all extinct. Hmm. But is wikipedia reliable? Those same librarians say it’s a good starting point but that you shouldn’t use it as a source on it’s own, so on I went…

And then I found a really interesting report in the Book Nook! It was written by someone called HP Lovecraft in a book called “At the Mountains of Madness”. I say interesting, it was actually very scary. It described blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering placidly around in caves.  I read it, and then had to go and check that Pip still had eyes! *shudder*

I think maybe Halloween is the wrong time to be doing this research…