Jess and I are making some progress on our topic. The good news is that we definitely have decided to settle on fracking. We talked to one of our librarians and she was able to help us find a few books on the general topic of fracking, but the librarian who had expertise in our topic was currently unavailable. Unfortunately, this put us back a little bit with our plans. However, we plan to set up an appointment with the librarian who would be able to help us find more information within the next week. The librarian we spoke to said that our campus library does not have any old newspapers or town files for us to look at, but she told us that we might be able to check the town library. Even though they would be the more recent ones, the town library does have a section of local newspapers. She also directed us to a website that holds electronic records of all the local newspapers dating back to the late 1800s, so we think we may be able to utilize that website for a lot of information.

One of the books that we checked out from the library has a section on the benefits of fracking, so we are also obtaining information that will make our argument more well-rounded. Although we have plenty of information about the science aspects of this topic, we are planning on meeting with professors from other disciplines and hopefully will be able to interview them. One of the professors currently on campus actually wrote a book about how life in Mansfield has changed with fracking, so we are hoping that he will be able to provide a lot of insight on the topic. We also are looking into interviewing people who live in town to see what their opinions are on the subject. As members of the campus LEO club, we plan to reach out to our local Lions club to see if they have any interesting information about how the town may have responded when fracking first began here in Mansfield. Overall, we have a lot of plans to further our research within the next week, and we are anxious and excited to jump right into this project.