CMP100, CMP102 Information Literacy 2013
Instructor: Assist. Prof. Mark Jackson, Reference and Online Resources Librarian OR Prof. John Hinchcliffe, Reference and Database Resources Librarian
This is my premise for my research: Media Violence and Children or Adolescents
Why do we still need books for our research?
Books are an extremely important part of a well-rounded and thorough research process. Books provide in-depth information not available on the Web. If you take the typical Wikipedia article, it will be a few pages long. Wikipedia may provide enough information to give you some background understanding of the topic, but not in sufficient depth and quality to make it suitable for an academic college research paper. CATALOG FOR BOOKS AND OTHER MEDIA [http://sirius2.bloomfield.edu/]
How do we find a book in the Library?
To find a book in any library, one of the first places to begin is by using the online catalog. A library catalog is an organized and specialized collection of data (titles, authors, dates of publication, etc.),
specifically the books and other media that the College Library owns. You may
search through fields (segments of the database, such as title keywords,
author, etc.) to find what you are looking for. Once you have located the item
in the catalog that you think may be relevant to what you need to do (write a
paper, for example), you will need to find the item. This is done by using the call number that is found in the record
for the book. The call number consists of letters
and numbers. Books are arranged on
the shelves by call number order, the smallest to the largest, A to Z and 1 to
whatever number. Here is a link to an explanation of the Library of Congress Classification System.
My professors want me to find "scholarly" articles in "peer-reviewed" publications? What do they mean?
When your professor
requires "scholarly" sources, what does he or she mean? Click on the
attached document below for a handy guide that you can print out for
reference. The document is named What are scholarly resources?
Google Scholar [http://scholar.google.com/] is a simple and easy to use tool to search for scholarly articles and books. It is an excellent starting point for your research project.
Why use databases? Isn't everything on Google?
Databases provide authoritative, research articles that are usually NOT
available on the Web. These articles are from journals. A journal is a
type of periodical that contains scholarly articles written by
specialists aimed at other specialists in a particular field. An article
in a scholarly journal is usually documented with footnotes and/or a
bibliography. For the most part, scholarly journals are published
monthly or quarterly and contain little advertising or few, if any,
color illustrations. Also referred to as "Peer Reviewed" or "Refereed," a
scholarly journal features articles that usually contain original
research (qualitative or quantitative) and have been reviewed and
selected by other scholars in order to be published.
Books are only one part of your research project. Often you will need to find a scholarly article, an article written by a scholar or professional addressing a specific topic, usually written for other scholars (or potential scholars) or professionals. Because of economic and copyright considerations you will usually NOT find these types of articles on the Web. You will need to use a database to find the article. Journals contain research articles or literary criticism that is usually more up-to-date than books.
Some databases are very specialized. For example PsycARTICLES is a database specifically for the discipline of psychology. CINAHL is a specialized database for nursing and allied health. The Literature Resource Center is a database for literature. Other databases, such as ProQuest and Academic Search are general multidisciplinary databases.
DATABASES FOR ARTICLES [http://ezproxy.bloomfield.edu/public/databases.htm]
How can I evaluate what I find?
You are researching Presidential speeches, specifically the State of the Union Address. Here is a video that would probably be helpful:
Finally, we find a tremendous amount of information on the Web. Unfortunately, much of it is not suitable for academic writing. Whatever our uses for the information we are trying to find (health issues, buying a car, a new car safety seat for our children, or information about education) we need to EVALUATE what we find. Opinionated, ill-informed, outdated, and erroneous and incorrect information may not only get us a lower grade on a paper, it may be injurious to our health!
Library of Cornell University has developed a short and concise guide to
evaluating Web pages, Five
Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages [http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webcrit.html].
This guide will help you to evaluate whether or not to use information, either
for academic purposes or personal life decisions.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to your helpful librarians firstname.lastname@example.org OR email@example.com
Research Guides >