Chapter 1 : Library Services

• Research help.

o In person, by email, over the phone.

o You can schedule a research consultation, in which you’ll meet with a librarian

who can help you choose a topic, ask a research question, find and evaluate

sources, and even help with your citations

• Interlibrary Loan.

o If we don’t have an article or book you want, request it and we will get it for you.

• Remote access.

o You can pull up lots of our e-books and scholarly articles without having to leave

the house.

 

The Library Catalog

• If you really want to find something, you need to use the library catalog. The library catalog

is a database that tells you what books and other physical items we have, and most

importantly, where you can find them.

• Searching a keyword will bring up everything anywhere: translations, criticism, history. If

you get too many results, you can narrow them down.

• The call number, which tells you where exactly in that collection the book can be found.

Video: How do I find a book on my topic?

 

Choosing a Database

Subject-specific databases vs general databases

• Subject-specific databases contain documents that cover only one topic. Like medicine,

anthropology, or history.

o Have a lot of one thing.

o The deeper you delve into your topic or the farther along you get in your major,

the more you’re going to want to go to the subject-specific databases.

• General, or multidisciplinary, databases contain documents that cover a variety of

topics.

o have a little bit of everything

o That makes general databases great places to start your research

• Finding the right database.

o Databases have names you might not recognize, and they’re all good for

different things.

o Librarians organized these databases according to their subjects to make it

easier for you to find the right database for your particular discipline.

o On the library home page, look for the “databases” tab. In here you’ll find

“databases by subject”. This page contains a list of databases organized by

subject.

Video: Finding Specialized Databases

o In addition to these subject-specific databases, there is also a collection of

general databases.

o You can also locate relevant databases using the library’s research guides, which

are web pages the librarians made to guide you to resources in your major or

discipline.

video: Initial Search

 

Finding a Scholarly Article in a Database

• Scholarly articles can be found in a library database

o Databases contain different kinds of documents

o Option to limit results to peer-reviewed articles.

▪ Peer-reviewed articles are a big deal because they were evaluated by

experts before they were published.

▪ The terms “scholarly, peer-reviewed, refereed, or academic” can all refer

to this same kind of high quality article.

o The title is at the top of each entry and usually prominent. Below that, the

smaller black text tells us who wrote it, the journal it comes from, and then the

particulars of date, volume, issue, and so forth.

o If the entire article is there, it will say “full text,” which also comes in different

flavors, like linked full text, HTML full text, and PDF full text

Video: Finding Scholarly Articles

• But what if there aren’t any full text links? That’s because the database knows this

article exists, but doesn’t have a copy available. This happens often enough that we

have a special link for it: the “find it” button. Click there, and you’ll get a page that might

have links to other databases that might have a copy, to the catalog so you can search

for a print copy here in the library, or to Interlibrary Loan so you can request a copy

from somewhere else.

Video: Where is the article?

 

Interlibrary Loan

Databases have lots of articles. Tens of millions of them. The vast majority of them are full text.

Sometimes they don’t have the whole article. We only have a record that it exists.

Interlibrary Loan allows you to borrow materials from other libraries all over the country; it’s free; and

it’s integrated with most databases.

Check for print holdings first, because you can read it right away by going to the library.

 

Finding Information in the Workplace

Choose to look where you think the best information will be, whether or not it’s easy to look there.

• Avoid the streetlight effect. The tendency to search where it’s easy to LOOK, but not

necessarily where it’s possible to FIND.

• Google is convenient AND a lot of good information lives there. So you check there first.

• A lot of professions have web sites that provide useful job-related information. These

sites might show up in a Google search, but it’s easier to learn which ones are good and

go there in the first place.

• Your coworkers

• Internal documents.

• archive of job-related documents

• Even if you’re not a student, most libraries will let you use their resources for free as

long as you’re in the building. And their librarians will even help you use them.

 

Seeking Knowledge from Others in the Workplace

• Institutional memory

o The intellectual blueprint brought by coworkers of an organization.

o New people are EXPECTED to be ignorant of workplace procedures and policies,

and part of adapting to a new workplace is learning from your coworkers.

• If you’re the only person with a particular skill set in your organization, you need to

o seek out someone with similar job duties who works somewhere else

o try reaching out to someone who runs a professional blog,

o A professional listserv.

 

Searching Google Effectively

By enclosing keywords in quotation marks, you can search for documents that contain an exact phrase.

That means those exact words, with that exact spelling, in that exact order. Run the search with quotes

around it, and the results will be much less.

You can also use Google to only search a specific part of the web. The web is divided up into domains.

They’re the last two or three characters of a web address:

• .com, .edu. .org, etc.

• Certain domains can only be used by certain organizations. .gov is for the US

government

• .edu is for universities.

• No domain is inherently trustworthy or unreliable, but some domains are better places

to look for certain kinds of information.

o U.S. government statistics? Search in .gov.

o Science, try .edu.

o Punch in your keywords, use quotes if you want to search for an exact phrase,

add a space, then add site:.edu. For example, “invasive species” site:.edu. Hit

search and you’ll only get results from university websites.

For more Google search techniques see this optional

video: Google Search Techniques

• The best results of any Google search won’t always show up on the first page. You’re

more likely to find what you’re looking for if you dig through a few pages of results.