2. @ the library:
get access to the info you need that isn’t freely
available online
Library resources are free and only for ASU
community members, including students!
Hi, my name is Sarah Schmidt and I am the Reference and Government Information Librarian at Porter henderson Library. In the next 20 minutes, I’m going to quickly outline the library services we have available to you, as distance, graduate nursing students. I’ll be talking about the library website, Libguides, interlibrary loan, and really focus on our databases. If there’s anything anyone wants more information on, please don’t hesitate to stop and ask me about it!
Let’s talk a bit why I’m even here, talking about library resources, when I think most of us start out all of our research with Google. So why use the library at all? The reason is, for many, many of your projects in grad school, your instructors will want you to use peer reviewed, scholarly sources. Does anyone know what those are? ...Peer reviewed is the gold standard for information; it means it was written by an expert and approved of by a group experts on the subject, or peers of the author. The reason why your instructors ask for scholarly resources is because, now that you’re here at ASU, you’re part of the scholarly community. Scholars are very selective about what they use in their research, because if you use bad information, it really detracts from the credibility of your work. So, they strongly value peer-reviewed information, which tries to ensure a higher level of quality. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of peer-reviewed information available for free online. You might find free citations online, but you won’t find the full text of the articles. That’s why I’m here to talk about how to use library resources that are free to you, as students -- because they’ll give you access to the full text of thousands of peer reviewed journals, as well as all sorts of other types of information.
With that, let’s take a tour of the library webpage, so you can see what we have for you! To find the library homepage from anywhere on the ASU website, scroll down to the bottom right corner of the page…
The library will be your first link.
Go ahead and click it
And now you’re at the library homepage. On resource you’ll want to take advantage of is LibGuides. If we click that link…
We’ll find the nursing libguide. LibGuide is short for Library Guide and libguides are lists of high-quality online and print research materials for a subject. This is the home tab, which has lists of key resources for nursing.
On the reference tab you’ll find specific titles of helpful handbooks and encyclopedias…
On the books tab you’ll find titles of E-books and print books…
And on the databases tab, you’ll find musicdatabases. Databases are composed of several journals, books, and other types of information. We’ll scroll down just a bit…
The libguide also has a websites tab, which has sites focusing on professional development resources, health stats, and academic writing.
The videos tab has streaming videos and DVDs. So, as you can see, the LibGuide is chock-full of resources for you to begin a research project.
To find more information about the services we have available for you, click “undergraduates” under “services for”…
And you’ll see a big menu of services.
Let’s talk about how to use U-Search. As I said before, it’s a database, just like Google.
You know how when you put words into the Google search box (point) it looks for your words on millions of webpages (point), and gives you a list of those webpages with those words on them (point)?Well, U-Search does something similar. It looks for the words you put in its search box on millions of pages of electronic articles and books the library owns.
But, it doesn’t search the contents of all of the electronic information we have. Not all of our databases are plugged into U-Search. For example, U-Search searches the databases CINAHL, Health Source, and Medline, but not PubMed or Cochrane Library.
The library homepage defaults to a basic search. where you can search by author, title, or keyword.
If I have an article title or a book title, I can put it in and see if the library has it. So, let’s say I’m looking for the article “most frequent nursing diagnoses”. I put it in, select a title search, and click search…
And this is our results page. Our article is the first result – the title is the first line. We can see the library owns the journal through the CINAHL database. And we have access to the full text with a PDF.
If we click PDF…
The actual article will open.
Once you've got a good results list, a quick way to figure out whether the articles will be meaningful to you is to read their abstracts, which are a summary of the author's findings. So let’s say we were interested in this second article, which tests wheelchair seat cushions. We click the title link…
And we’re taken to the item’s record. If we scroll down…
We can read the abstract to see if it meets your needs. This is much more efficient than reading entire articles. Feelfree to contact me or anyone else at the library if you do.
