Library Research Skills

1. Library Research Skills
ENG 111

2. Agenda
• Attendance and Housekeeping
• Library Resources Overview
• Example Search Using Boolean Operators and Key term search
• Practice Searching Library databases worksheet
• Begin looking for sources for your Project 3 annotated bibliography.

3. Attendance and Housekeeping
• Put your name on the piece of paper going around the room.
• Julie will see whether or not you were here for class period.
• No Class on Friday.
• Instead, complete the online homework that’s on the homework
schedule.

4. Library Resources Overview

5. Today we will discuss
• Contacting librarians for assistance
• Locating appropriate library databases
• Searching library databases effectively
• Locating full texts of articles

6. Contacting Librarians
• Phone Number: (252) 985-5350
• Email: reference@ncwc.edu

7. Kinds of Sources: Peer-Reviewed, Scholarly,
Academic Journal Articles
• Written by experts in the field
• Peer reviewed—reviewed by
other experts
• Contain bibliographies
• In-depth and lengthy

8. Kinds of Sources: Magazine Articles
• For general interest and/or
entertainment
• Not necessarily written by
experts
• Short and don’t contain
bibliographies
• Examples: Psychology Today,
Time, Newsweek, National
Geographic

9. Kinds of Sources: Newspapers
• Current and past events
• Use to find:
• Interviews
• Personal accounts
• Local news
• Not scholarly (not necessarily
written by experts and no
bibliography)

10. Start Your Search Here
• https://ncwc.edu/library/

11. Brainstorming and Using Key terms
• Start with your topic. Write it down. Then, brainstorm ideas that
relate to your topic.
• When you do your search, you will find that you need to come up
with more than one way to say the same thing through synonyms.
• Use your search results to help you refine your key terms
• Keep track of the terms you use that help you generate the best
results

12. Boolean Operators
• And, Or, Not
• Use to search for two terms together: street art AND graffiti
• Use to search for one term or another: graffiti OR street art
• Use to search for one term not the other: graffiti NOT murals

13. Quotation Marks and Truncation
• Use quotation marks around terms to search for them exactly
• “global warming”
• Use truncation * to search for variations on a word
• Cultur*  returns culture, cultures, and cultural

14. Example search

15. In Class Work Time
• Complete Worksheet for a topic you are interested in to generate
search terms and strategies
• Start looking for sources