Prepare yourself for research trips and visits by building a take-along tool kit. Pretend you are headed off to school because, after all, this is just another academic research trip!

Include a small stapler and staples, zipper-lock sandwich bags containing different size paper clips and rubber bands, several sharpened pencils, an eraser, small notepads whose pages you can clip to others or stick-on notes, a lined pad or notebook with pages for copious notes and transcriptions, and a zipper-lock sandwich bags with a variety of coins and dollar bills for copy machines and microfilm printers. Libraries and archives may have CD-Read/Write machines that allow you to save images and other data to CD. Therefore, take along a writable CD that allows you to write to it and a thin CD case to protect it.

Share some of the items in your toolkit in the comments section of the blog.

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