Off The Shelf

When we librarians bring up blogs, learners often ask, why should we care about blogging?  Blogs can’t be cited in my dissertation, so they don’t matter, right?

That may have been true a few years ago, when just about all blogs were personal or covered popular interest topics.  In recent years, however, blogging has become more popular with academics.  It’s still not equivalent to peer review (and may never be), but it is the digital equivalent of those 5 minute conversations that take place between experts who meet in a university hallway or in the back row of a presentation at a conference.

And those types of conversations can be invaluable if you want to keep up with what others in the field are thinking and doing.

As budding experts in your field, blogging may be a great way to start tossing about your own ideas.  See this list of reasons academics should blog from Hugh McGuire’s blog.  It might just inspire you to find or write your own academic blog.

- Erin

Last week at Colloquium, during our new technologies session, learners were curious about how to access YouTube’s OpenCourseWare movement channel. (I was under the impression there was a YouTube channel similar to the ITunes U channel, where a person can watch and freely listen to lectures from big-name universities and researchers across the country.)

Well, this article let me know that:
“YouTube does not have a single page from which all the university channels can be accessed.”

Instead, here are some sample individual channels:

• Vanderbilt University
• University of California Berkeley
• University of Southern California
• University of California Television
• Duke University
• Washington University
• Purdue University
• Auburn University
• MIT

I did discover one way to search for University channel lectures directly, though:

1. Go to www.youtube.com.
2. Click Channels tab.
3. Search for a topic, combined with the word “university.” E. g.: “university anatomy.”
4. Click Channels link below the search box.

So if you have a specific research interest or just want to download some high-intellect shows for your morning bus commute, this should help you get started.

Articles:

• Lens on the Future: Open Source Learning
• Opening Up Itunes U

– Erika

There are many legitimate reasons that learners don’t use newspapers when they do research:

• The articles have little depth or perspective on large issues.
• They are not scholarly or peer reviewed.
• Tight deadlines make it hard to stop mistakes from creeping in.

Those are important considerations, but before you completely write newspapers off, remember that they love to report on recent events. That includes recent happenings in the scholarly realm. And reporters love to include numbers.

Articles in newspapers can bring important, scholarly information to your attention:

• Announce the findings of interesting academic research.
• Summarize government reports and laws.
• Provide statistics from research organizations or government agencies.
• Identify major individuals, associations, research foundations, or other organizations working in your field.

Once you’ve identified that important information you want, you can search the library and the internet to get back to the original source.

For example, this recent article from the New York Times, “Full of Doubts, U.S. Shoppers Cut Spending,” cites consumer confidence statistics from the Conference Board. Knowing that, you can go to the Conference Board database in the Capella library to explore their consumer confidence data along with their other economic resources.

- Erin

The librarians will be at the Lansdowne colloquium! If you want to build your library research skills while attending the colloquium, you have a few different options:

• Get the lowdown during a Track 1 cohort meeting
• Come to the library and grab some of our guides
• Schedule an Individual Reference Appointment
• Attend a Library Session

The librarians will be in room N3.790, and we’re available for individual appointments Saturday afternoon through Wednesday morning.

We’ll also be running three different library sessions:

Finding Scholarly Articles & Books

• Sunday, 1:45 pm
• Monday, 11:00 am
• Wednesday, 9:15 am

Advanced Searching & Finding Dissertations

• Sunday, 11:00 am
• Sunday, 3:30 pm

Enhancing Library Research with New Technologies

• Tuesday, 1:45 pm

See you in the beehive!

- Erin

What is Questia?

Questia is a commercial digital library of books and articles that promotes itself as a replacement to traditional school and academic library collections.  It is target market is primarily high school level students and undergraduates, who may prefer it over their school library collections because of its Google-like search interface and basic reference list generation tools.

How does Questia’s library compare to Capella’s?

The Capella Library purchases its collection material specifically for the schools it supports, as well as its primarily post-graduate degrees, based on scholarly and industry standards.  We also provide a RefWorks account to every Capella learner, which offers advanced citation and bibliography-building tools.

Collection breakdown

Questia:
“1.5 million articles”
1.1 million of those are news
185,000 of those are magazine
articles
Approx. 215,000 scholarly articles

Capella:
31.8 million articles
Plus 16.5 million company
records
Plus Test and Survey Instrument Reviews
Plus 600,000 dissertations
Plus many millions of news articles
Approx. 8,111,000 scholarly articles

Cost?
Questia: $240/year
Capella: Free for active Capella learners

– Erika

Most of the Capella Library databases are set to search only the journal holdings of the Capella Library. However, the Library databases also index journal articles that are not available in our Library. Most of the time you want to search just the Library holdings, however one time you want to see “everything” that is available on a topic is when you are conducting a search for the literature review of your dissertation. So how do you see all that is out there?

First you need to uncheck the box in the database that is labeled: Full Text.

Second after you have searched you want to click on the link that says Check Article Linker , if you do not see a .pdf file for the article. The article linker will give you the link to the article, if it is in another library database OR if it is not available you would request the item through interlibrary loan.

You get 25 interlibrary loan requests per quarter and a copy of the article will be obtained from another library and emailed to you in 3-5 business days.

So make sure you are seeing all that is out there on your dissertation topic by unchecking the Full Text box in the database and if you have questions just Ask-a-Librarian!

Robin

RefWorks rolled out at the beginning of the summer, but many learners are just discovering it now.  It’s a great tool to help you stay organized and painlessly create bibliographies, but it’s not perfect and it can’t do everything.

So, if you’ve been on the fence about a RefWorks account, here are some important considerations that can help you decide.

Pros:

• Keep citation information about all of your resources in a single location.  No more lost citations.
• Access RefWorks anywhere you have an internet connection.
• Organize your citations in folders as you see fit.  Create as many or as few as you want.
• Use Write-N-Cite to create your in-text citations and bibliography – don’t let a moment of distraction turn into plagiarism.
• Link back to the full text in the database.  Save space and paper.
• Save time – let RefWorks take care of a lot of the data entry that makes bibliographise so time consuming.

Cons:

• RefWorks isn’t as smart as you are.  It’s just a computer program, so it will get some citation details wrong.  Be sure you check your bibliography before you turn it in.
• RefWorks can’t hold PDFs of articles.  You’ll have to link back to the full text in the library.
• If you have a ton of resources already, it can be tough to get them into RefWorks.  RefWorks does import EndNote records and BibTex records, but if you just have a list in Word, it’s tough to move them over en masse.
• Some databases don’t export records directly to RefWorks.  Check the library’s guide on importing into RefWorks.

 - Erin