Reed Library Comp 250 Presentation for Spring 2017
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This presentation is given in library instruction sessions for COMP 250 to help students learn how to search the library's resources, why to use them, how to evaluate what they find, and how to pull those sources together into a bibliography.
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Reed Library Comp 250 Presentation for Spring 2017
- 1. Welcome to Reed Library COMP 250 – Spring 2017
- 2. If you took COMP 150, you might remember…
- 3. Don’t worry: You’re going to learn something new.
- 4. Let’s talk about • Topic selection • Search strategy • Credibility • Managing your citations
- 6. EndNote
- 8. Picking your topic Refine as you go. search refine search refine
- 9. Let’s start with goal setting as our topic. Search the LibraryEngine for that phrase and we will review the results.
- 10. You have a topic. It’s time to explo re information.
- 11. BEFORE you search, consider… “goal setting” “college students” motivation Keywords Boolean Operators (connectors) Nesting Truncation
- 12. Keywords: Words or concepts of great significance to your topic “goal setting” “college students” motivation 1. Goal setting 2. Motivation 3. Achievement 4. College students 5. College 6. Academic success 7. Higher education
- 13. Boolean Operators connect and define the relationship between keywords AND – all search terms must be present. Use for narrowing your search. Goal setting College students
- 14. Boolean Operators connect and define the relationship between keywords OR – any of the search terms can be present. Use with synonyms to broaden your search. success achievement
- 15. Boolean Operators connect and define the relationship between keywords NOT – excludes search terms. college high school
- 16. Nesting groups keywords when you have multiple operators “goal setting” achievementsuccess “goal setting” AND (success OR achievement)
- 17. Truncation searches a keyword stem Educate Educated Education Educating Educator Educates
- 18. Search Strategy “goal setting” “college students” motivation “goal setting” AND Motivation AND “College students”
- 19. Use the limiters. Many databases, including the LibraryEngine, offer limiters. Use them to refine your search results.
- 20. Now YOU try. Find one article about your topic that interests you and put it in your folder.
- 21. Where will you search? The Library Engine, the catalog, another database, or the open web? Why did you make that choice?
- 22. LibraryEngine doesn’t search everything. Google only gives you 5% of what we have in our databases. • If you use LibraryEngine, you need to use limiters and a good search strategy with multiple keywords. • Try a subject database. Some feed into LibraryEngine but not all.
- 23. If the book or article you want isn’t available, we can get it for you.
- 24. What sources are credible? How do you decide?
- 25. Helpful indicators: • The author’s credentials • What references (if any) are given • The type of publication • The currency of the source (if applicable to your topic)
- 26. Does the information fit your need? Relevance Purpose
- 27. Once you’ve found a few good sources, save them in EndNote. 1. Put them in your folder. Note: the folder will be empty once you leave the database. Use it or loose it. 2. Open the folder from the toolbar at the top of the database. 3. Export the folder’s contents to EndNote.
- 28. Putting your bibliography together Why should you cite? • Knowledge is advanced through scholarly writing and citations. • Citations lend credibility to your work. • Readers can read your sources for themselves and draw their own conclusions. How do you do it? • EndNote • Citation tools built into library databases • Reed Library’s citation guide • Ask a reference librarian for help
- 29. Need more help? Schedule an appointment Stop by the reference desk Give us a call at 970-247-7551 Email us at library@fortlewis.edu Chat with us
- 30. Citations available upon request ghwilliams@fortlewis.edu
Editor's Notes
- (Introduction) If you’re not already logged into the computers, go ahead and do that now. We’ll be using them a lot today, and hopefully you’ll go home with a few new sources for your annotated bibliographies.
- If you took COMP 150, you were probably introduced to LibraryEngine, our catalog, how to renew your books in your library account, and our 24/7 chat. Those are all important things to know how to use, and we will be using LibraryEngine more today.
- But don’t worry. I promise that you’ll learn something new today. If you don’t, feel free to stop by my office and I’ll teach you something else.
- Here’s what we’ll be focusing on today: picking an appropriate topic, how to search effectively and efficiently, who is an authority on a particular subject, what it means for a source to have adequate coverage of your topic, how to decide whether or not information is reliable, and how and why to use citations.
- Now I want you all to go to the library website, either by following the link from the Fort that’s shown here or by entering our url.
- Before we even start searching, go to EndNote under Library Logins so we can create your EndNote accounts. EndNote is a citation manager that the library subscribes to for you guys. You’ll be able to use it to format bibliographies and store citations to all of your research.
- Click on “sign up” and create an account. It might ask you to go to your email to verify your account. I’ll give you a minute or two to do that, and if you have any problems let me know. We’ll be using EndNote later in today’s class. When you’re all set, open a new tab and go back to the library homepage.
- Picking a topic is a process of revision. Start with a topic in mind and search for information on it. What you find will help you refine your topic, either by giving you an idea of how to focus your topic or by telling you to try something different if you aren’t seeing anything about it.
- We’re going to try searching in the LibraryEngine with the topic of “goal setting” in mind. Go ahead and search for “goal setting” yourselves and we’ll go over the results together. (Go through and point out the following things from the results: A research starter, at the top, is an encyclopedia entry. Usually this means your topic is too broad, but the research starter is a good place to get an overview of a topic. LibraryEngine searches for books, articles, videos, and all kinds of materials. You can see a mix of those in our results. You can use the titles and the subjects of things in your results to get ideas you want to write about. Now, take a minute or two to do a search on your topic and see if the results help you refine it a bit. (Time for searching.)
- Once you have a good idea of what your topic will be, it’s time to actually find the information you’ll use for your annotated bibliographies and papers. It’s going to be a process of exploration.
- It’s best to explore with an idea of where you want to go and why. Before you search, you should always think of the keywords you’ll use and how you’ll connect them so the library’s databases understand what you want. I’m going to keep using my example about outdoor recreation for now, and I want to look at the benefits of outdoor recreation or if there’s an impact on mental health.
- First, break your topic down into keywords. Databases don’t understand what we call “natural language”, or how we actually talk. You should pick words or phrases of great significance to your topic. If they’re phrases, you need to use quotations to do a phrase search. This works in Google, too, by the way.
- Once you have keywords, you need to connect them with Boolean operators so the database understands how they’re related. Using AND narrows down your search because the results should have to do with both search terms. So, in this case you wouldn’t get things that have to do with outdoor recreation but not benefit.
- OR gives you more results. In this case, using benefit OR mental health expands your search, because you could have results about benefit, mental health, or both of those terms.
- NOT is the last Boolean operator. You won’t have to use it as much, but it’s really helpful for excluding results that are problematic. If you’re interested in college and want nothing to do with cycling high school, NOT can fix that.
- When you use more than one operator, such as AND and OR, you need to nest the birds of a feather. It’s just like distributing in algebra. Draw on the board: A (B + C), then AB + AC. A (B + C) is the same as AB + AC. It’s the same with nesting. In this case we will get goal setting AND motivation as well as outdoor recreation AND mental health. If we left of the parentheses, we could get things about outdoor recreation AND benefit, or things that are only about mental health. That isn’t what we need.
- Truncation is a great way to search for all of the words that start with the same stem at once. You can search for educat*, with the asterisk, and that searches all of these words and more. It’s a more efficient way to search than trying to remember if you’ve searched for educate or educational yet.
- So what we end up with looks like this. Go back to LibraryEngine and click on advanced search under the search box, then put “outdoor recreation” on the first line and (benefit OR “mental health”) on the second line and search.
- To get good results, we need to use the limiters on the left side of the page. It’s just using Amazon to search for a tablet and narrowing by size, limiting to iPads, etc. In this case you need to limit to peer reviewed/scholarly journals. Limiting to full text means just the articles that you can click on and read right now. Some of the articles in this list are just citations, and you would need to request them through Interlibrary Loan. Limiting yourself to full text might be necessary sometimes if you don’t have a lot of time to do your research, but it might be eliminating some results that would be really good for your topic. It doesn’t take long at all to get articles through ILL, so if you’ve planned ahead a bit, feel free to use that service.
- Go ahead and do an advanced search for your topic now. If you need help figuring out which keywords to try or how to connect them just ask. When you find one you think you might want to use, click on the folder on the right side of the screen. We’ll get back to the folder later so we can export these articles into EndNote. (Time for searching. This will take at least 10 minutes because lots of students will probably have questions.)
- Today, we’ve been searching in LibraryEngine because I told you to. But when you’re doing research on your own, you get to decide where to start, and that’s worth thinking about. LibraryEngine is a good starting place, but it’s not the only resource you should use.
- LibraryEngine searches most of the stuff the library gives you access to, but not all of it. There are lots of databases, like JSTOR, that won’t show up in your results. They’re often subject-specific databases that might be a great place to research your topic. I can point you towards some of the databases that you might want to try. It’s also worth mentioning that Google Scholar has different content, and most of the books and articles you can get from the library won’t show up there.
- I mentioned Interlibrary Loan earlier, and this is how you’d get to it. You can log in to request books and articles. Articles are usually delivered pretty quickly because we can just get a PDF for you. Books have to drive over the mountain passes, so they can be somewhat slow to get here, especially in the winter. It just depends on which library it’s coming from and how far it has to travel.
- Credibility is something you need to consider when you’re evaluating books and articles to use in your research. It’s something you’re required to address in your annotated bibliographies as well.
- When you’re deciding whether or not a source is reliable, these are several things you want to take into consideration. The author’s credentials let you know whether or not someone is an authority on the subject they’re writing about. They’re usually given in a database (show how to find them from an academic journal article record in LibraryEngine by going to the full record and looking at the footnote for author affiliation). You can also do an author search to see what else they’ve written on the subject and Google them to see if you can find out where they work. Use sources that give references so you can tell they did research and look up their sources for more information. Think about the publication type, because that can tell you a lot about why information was published and who benefits. Example: Time magazine (entertain and inform) vs. peer reviewed journal (talk about peer review process and why anyone would suffer through it). As I mentioned before, think about relevance when you’re evaluating something. The bulk of a source should speak to your topic in some way. Finally, there are many topics that need current information and many that don’t. Who can give me an example of a topic that changes so much that you need a source from within the last few years? (Medicine, etc.) What topics don’t change as quickly? (Literature, geology, etc.)
- You always need to consider whether or not the information you’ve found is really a good fit for your information need. Relevance means that a significant portion of a source speaks to your topic. If it’s mentioned in passing or there’s only a paragraph on your topic, it’s best to keep looking for another source. Also consider whether or not a source helps you make your case. You’ll want several sources that back up your claim and a few that don’t. A strong argument presents both sides. Think about why a source was created in the first place. Does someone benefit from it, either by selling you something or convincing you of their point of view? (Yes!) Is it biased? (Yes!) Bias isn’t bad. Everyone has biases, but it’s important to recognize them so you know whether or not their information is appropriate to use. I’m biased towards the library, obviously, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s just my perspective. Not all information sources are appropriate for college-level writing. Buzzfeed and Huffington Post are often informative and interesting, but they’re not academic. Even Snapchat has stories that are really interesting, but just not appropriate. If you’re at all unsure, ask your professor or a librarian.
- Let’s go back into LibraryEngine now so you can save the articles you’ve found in EndNote. Add them to your folder if you haven’t already. Click on the folder at the top of the page, select all, and export to EndNote. Export something to EndNote, show how to format a bibliography: all references or a group, add MLA or APA to favorites so you won’t have 10k to scroll through each time you use EndNote, and export as RTF. You can just show a print preview so you can talk about looking over the results and correcting them as needed. Note: as of 10/4 EndNote wass still using MLA 7. If they need MLA 8 they’ll have to make those corrections manually for now.
- If you love citations as much as we do, then putting together a bibliography is a reward unto itself. If not, there are plenty of good reasons that should motivate you. You’re engaging in the scholarly conversation by citing your sources. Your work is more credible. You’re giving your readers the opportunity of consulting your sources so they can see for themselves what those authors have to say. There are lots of ways to go about creating citations, too. You can use EndNote like we did today or the citations you see with each article when you’re in the library’s databases. You can use the examples on our citation guide (under research guides on our website), too. You can ask any of the reference librarians for help if you’re not sure your citations are quite right, too.
- We want to help you out if you’re having any trouble at all with your research. For this class, you all need to schedule an appointment with a librarian. We’re also available at the reference desk, by phone, chat, and email, too. Let me show you how to schedule an appointment. Go to the website again, contact us > appointment link. Thank you!