Off The Shelf

Last week I blogged about a new guide for CQ Researcher recently available.  This week I wanted to announce the Credo Reference User Guide is also now available.  To access the guide just go to the to the Library Homepage and following this path:

1. Click Articles, Books and More (your one-stop-shop for all of the Capella subscribed databases)
2. Scroll down the alphabetical list of databases until you see Credo Reference.  Underneath the database link is the link to the User Guide.  Click to open!

Earlier this year Robin blogged about how Credo Reference (along with Gale Virtual Reference Library) are helpful in gathering background information.  Credo includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographies, quotations, and bilingual dictionaries.  Check out her blog post for more information!

-Sommer

October as National Information Literacy Awareness Month. Click here to view the  official  proclamation:

The ability to find, evaluate and effectively use information for a designated purpose is essential not only to every learner, but to every American.

“Hone”  your information literacy skills this month by checking out just one of the many guides or  tutorials on the Library’s Guides & Tutorials page.

Any questions about using the Library for coursework, comprehensive exams or dissertation research? Ask-a-Librarian!

Robin

There are two ways to use the journals in your discipline:  search them for articles on a topic or browse them to see what’s in recent issues.

As learners working on assignments, you’re probably searching pretty frequently.  But do you spend any time just browsing?

Browsing is useful in many ways.  Regularly browsing recent journals in your field can:

• Inspire you with new ideas
• Illuminate where the field is heading
• Show you areas that are being ignored

Newbies in a field often don’t know what they don’t know.  Browsing can help correct that.

Experienced researchers already know a lot about their field, but browsing can help them quickly stay on top of anything new.

Want to know how to browse journals in the library?  Check out our new guide: Browsing the Contents of a Specific Journal.

- Erin

For those of you who will soon be wrapping up at the Jacksonville colloquium (or have attended any other colloquia), here are some of the guides and tutorials the librarians talked about at the library sessions.

Nearly every guide mentioned at the library’s colloquia sessions are included in a special section of our Guides & Tutorials page. To get to that section, just follow these steps.

1) From the Library Homepage click Guides & Tutorials.

2) There are several bulleted links at the top of the page that link to different sections. Click Resources for Doctoral Learners to jump to the section that includes the guides you heard about at Colloquia.

3) From here you can select a guide that piqued your interest at the colloquium!

Got questions? Ask a Librarian!

-Sommer

If you’re reading this, you’ve figured out how to get to a blog.  But how much to you know about “microblogging?”

Or the biggest name in microblogging today: Twitter?

Twitter lets you quickly send out a short message of 140 characters, called a tweet.  Then anyone who is signed up to receive your tweets gets to read it.  You can create a network of friends who all watch each others’ tweets, or you can join the multitude following the moment-by-moment details of the lives of the famous.

Twitter may have started as a fast way for people to quickly update all their friends at once, but it has quickly moved beyond that.  With 6 million users, a recent Business Week article looks at some of the possibilities for businesses who want to tap that market.

Politicians have also joined the Twitter craze.  The Obama campaign ran its own Twitter stream, and the president got to be the subject (or not) of tweets when other pols used Twitter to comment during his speech.

Not sure how this will ever apply to your academic or professional life?  Think again.  Twitter is making inroads at professional and academic conferences, with audience members pouring out streams of tweets about what’s going on.   The ALA Annual Conference, where thousands of librarians meet to discuss things like Twitter,  isn’t even happening until July, and it’s already got quite a long list of tweets.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t Twitter.   If you read my blog posts, you’ll know that I can’t contain myself to only 140 characters.  And, like many others who work in academia, I have a real soft spot for long, analytical discussions with footnotes.  Not exactly tweet material.

Still, even if you don’t Twitter yourself, you may need to be aware of it in future.  If this trend really catches on,  you may be in the dark without it.

In the meantime, you can revel in your luddite attitude while watching this funny YouTube video from Current.

- Erin

While searching the library databases, you may have noticed that not everything is available in full text from the library. Why is that? Is it because the librarians want to annoy you?

No, of course not. There are several reasons that you may not have access to the full text you want. Some are economic, some are historical, and some are a bit of both. Here are some of the common reasons you may run into article records with only an abstract:

• When computerized databases first appeared, they couldn’t handle full text. The technology just wasn’t ready yet, so the index without full text is what showed up first.
• There isn’t as much demand to digitize back in time. Most journals today automatically create a copy for online distribution, but digitizing everything from 1974 is not a very pressing priority.
• Including older items raises the cost of library databases, even though the older content is in the least demand. Libraries have a hard enough time paying for recent content, so database companies are reluctant to raise prices just to include older stuff.
• Some current journals are so expensive that the database companies don’t include them in their packages. When a journal subscription can cost as much as a small car, adding everything can make a database unaffordable to libraries.
• Journals want to push paper sales. If a journal has an embargo, which stops the database from having the most recent issues, libraries are “forced” to buy both the paper journal and the digital version.
• Some journals want to do all full-text sales themselves. They’re happy to let people learn that a journal article exists, but they also want to maximize the profit from the full text.

Even though you’re using these databases as part of your education, the academic publishing industry is a business. That’s an important fact to remember whenever you are looking at information – knowledge isn’t just power, it’s also money as well. And that will affect what you can access and when.

- Erin

You’re often told to write about what you know, however when you have to support what you know with resources that back up your claims it’s possible you’ll have difficulty finding them.

Just because the topic matters to you, doesn’t mean it matters to the researcher applying for grant money to conduct a research study.

A good practice is to focus on a broader topic that interests you and then use what’s in the literature to formulate your topic. See what comes up in the literature about that topic. What subtopics or aspects of the topic are being researched or discussed.

Not sure where to start? Try your textbook or other course readings to discover some of the conversations and topics being studied and discussed and mold your research question within that context.

Robin recently posted about using the Subject Thesaurus and Topics to find the right keywords for your search. You can also use these to discover ideas for how you can focus your topic. This is what we librarians refer to as “playing in the databases.” Type in a broader subject keyword and notice the subject and topic terms that come up. Then try adding one or two of those as keywords to your search to begin narrowing and defining the broader topic you started with. As you “play” you may find yourself inspired and be ready to formulate your research question or thesis statement.

One of the biggest blunders is writing your paper prior to finding the resources you need, because you might find your thesis statement is not supported in the literature. While this might be tempting and you feel you have a good enough grasp of the topic to start writing, you might end up losing a lot of time researching and rewriting your paper. So start with the research and be sure you have support for your thesis statement. If your thesis statement comes from the literature then you have the peace of mind knowing it’s supported.

Below are examples from Business Source Complete (an EBSCOhost database) and ABI/INFORM Global (a ProQuest database) showing where you can find helpful subject and topic terms after searching with broader research topic keywords.

-Sommer

Subject Terms Business Source Complete

Suggested Topics in ABI/INFORM

The end of the quarter is no reason to give up on research, right? That’s why I’m devoting this post to something that is fun, informative, and very 21st century: the internet meme.

What is a meme? If you look it up in the library’s Credo Reference database, you’ll see the following definition:

A contagious unit of information (such as an idea, slogan, or fashion) that replicates through communication networks; a successful meme has bait (it promises something) and a hook (it urges people to pass it on to others).

meme. (2003). In Webster’s New World™ Computer Dictionary. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Retrieved March 18, 2009, from http://www.credoreference.com.library.capella.edu/entry/3484787/.

Memes are widespread on the internet. You’ve probably seen several of them without realizing that’s what they are. Someone posts a video to YouTube and within a few weeks, everyone you know has seen (and probably laughed at or been terrified) it. But have you ever wondered how they got started? How they evolved?

Or, have you ever seen something on the internet that seems like it’s an inside joke that you just aren’t a party to? Then it could be a meme. And memes are showing up everywhere – they simultaneously make people laugh AND show others how “hip” you are. One recent example is from Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who altered a common internet meme to be the title of a blog post on the economy: All Your Downside Are Belong To Us.

So how would you find out what that title actually means? One easy way is to let Rocketboom do it for you. They are an internet culture blog that creates “know your meme” videos to help the clueless among us become more internet savvy. It’s a one stop shop for finding out the history behind:

• LolCats
• The Rick Roll
• Fail
• Boom goes the Dynamite
• Disaster Girl
• many others

So, if reading scholarly literature isn’t exactly upping your street cred with the under 20 crowd, perhaps boning up on a few internet memes is just what you need to recuperate from your quarter and look cool at parties.

It may not be an academic endeavor, but this librarian is labeling it information literacy. (Knowing how information travels in the 21st century is central to being an information literate person . . . ) And we librarians are certainly not above a few internet memes ourselves!

- Erin

Article titles are very tempting things. You run a library search, get this list of titles, and want to immediately click the full text link when you see a title that looks good.

RESIST THAT TEMPTATION!

Article titles may not give you all the information you need to make a decision about an article. With only a small handful of words, a title won’t tell you about the methodology, unique characteristics of the study’s design, or the results of the research.

In fact, a title may not give you any relevant information about the article. Scholars, just like everyone else, like to think they’re clever. And that can result in some humorous, but uninformative, titles. For example:

Sidoli, M. (1996.) Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread. The Journal of Analytical Psychology 41(2), 165-78.

From the title alone, you’d have no idea that this is actually a case study looking at child development and defense mechanisms.

That’s why it’s so important to look at the ABSTRACT of an article. Sure, it’s an extra minute and an extra click to read the abstract before going to the full text, but it’s the most effective way to select appropriate articles for your research.

When you don’t look at the abstract, you’ll find yourself wasting time on articles that aren’t right for your paper, and you’ll completely miss out on important works on your topic.
- Erin

Most searchers have experienced the following at least once:

• You go into the library
• You pick a database
• You search for your topic

But nothing comes up.

Why does that happen? Most of the time it’s because the keywords you have chosen don’t match exactly with the keywords the authors have used in their articles.

To search the library databases well, you have to become a bit of a mind-reader. Think about the words and phrases an author probably used, and look for those. Here are some tips to help you do that:

Use the most current jargon in your field. Being familiar with the field and looking at the terms used in your course readings can help you pick the right keywords.

• Terminology can change over time, and scholars will typically be using the most currently accepted terms. Are today’s authors typically using Manic Depression or Bipolar Disorder?
• Sometimes there will be overlap between terms, with more than one accepted term in use. For example, either Aspergers or Autism Spectrum Disorder.
• The current jargon of your field may not match common, everyday speech. Think incarceration instead of jail.

Avoid phrases. Every extra word will limit your results.

• Only use multiword phrases if they are a specific, acknowledged term: United States is okay, “increasing enrollment” is not.
• Break up phrases into the different concepts that make them up. Elementary school teachers is actually two concepts: elementary (level of school) and teacher (profession).
• Remember: most phrases can be written many different ways. When you use a phrase, you are limiting your search to only one way to say the same thing. (I can skin the cat many ways. There are many ways to skin a cat. He found one way out of many to skin a cat.)

Search alternative terms. Sometimes there are multiple keywords that mean very similar things. Use or to link alternative terms in your search box.

• Look at the books and articles you already have to identify other useful keywords.
• Brainstorm broader or narrower keywords. When you want to find effects of the economic recession, you’ll have an easier time if you list out those specific effects as keywords: job loss or unemployment or consumer confidence or foreclosure . . .
  

To succeed at any of these techniques, you have to try to get in the mind of scholarly authors. What might they be saying? What kind of articles are they writing? What terms will they be using?

You may not really be a mind-reader, but trying to imagine what you’re searching for can help you find it.

- Erin