By Ms Tracy Kelly and Dr Rebecca Barlow

The Radford College IBDP students have been hard at work over the summer holidays with their research and writing efforts for their major extended essay project. The extended essay is one of the three core components of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, and grants students an opportunity to investigate a topic of special interest to them, which is also related to one of the student’s six IBDP subjects.

To that end, the students are assisted with research lessons at school and the resources available at the newly renamed Franklin Library on the Radford College campus. In order to further aid our students with their research efforts, they also had the opportunity to use the National Library services.

The IBDP students travelled with Dr Rebecca Barlow and Ms Tracy Kelly to the National Library of Australia (NLA), where they took part in the NLA tour, Online and Underground. The tour began with a research presentation with valuable information to support our extended essay students to better utilise the NLA catalogue, research spaces, print and digital collections.

The IBDP students learnt how to use the NLA catalogue effectively and make requests for books from the stack. They also really enjoyed the underground element of the experience where they were able to go behind the scenes and look at some NLA artefacts in the archive collection.

Our IBDP cohort truly have amazing resources at hand to continue their research for their extended essay, and we wish them all the best.