Research Journal Post 11/2/2010

The one thing that i learned how to do better was search through article databases. There are a lot of publications out there too so it can be hard sometimes to find certain things. The data bases are usually huge and it was nice to learn to get right to the point when searching.  It is the same as hunting through music archives. I couldnt imagine doing these types of searches using microfilm. Most magazines and newspapers are online now so everything is saved and easy to find if you look right.  I will most likely use this new information outside when researching for my industry.  Article databases can hold some very useful information that is quick and easy to find.

Class notes 10/28

Article Databases Advice
(Badke p. 93-94)

– Stay calm
– Stay focused
– Read the directions
– Plan your strategy
– Ask for help if you need it

Strategies for Article Databases

– Have your keywords and subject headings ready

– Choose a database: general or subject-specific?

– Use your advanced strategies: Boolean, truncation (*), quotation marks

– Use the database limiters to narrow your results

InterLibrary Loan for Students

The Library now offers InterLibrary Loan (ILL) for Students. If you are interested in an article that is not available in full text in our databases, click the Find It button to see if it’s available in another database we own. If not, you can request a copy using ILL.

To use ILL you’ll need to create an account, which takes a few minutes. Link through the Find It window or you can create an account on the Library’s website by clicking Student Services –> InterLibrary Loan –> signup. Or go directly to the sign up page: http://citytech.cuny.illiad.oclc.org/illiad/FirstTime.html

If you have any questions about ILL, please ask me!

Class notes 10/7/10

In class we discussed search mechanics: databases, search engines and a bit on search strategies (we will spend more time on this in the coming weeks).

• How Google Works is a short video by Google which works well with the content of the Liddy article: http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/.

• This image may also be useful for understanding how Google searches the internet: http://ppcblog.com/how-google-works/

• Yippy is a clustering search engine (mentioned in Badke Ch. 4 as Clusty): http://www.yippy.com

• Quintura bills itself as a visual search engine: http://quintura.com/

• Searching the library catalog from the Queens Public Library returns 3 kinds of results: a visual depiction of subject headings (like Quintura), the list of books/other media themselves, and a list of subject headings, formats, dates, etc. (similar to Clusty): http://queenslibrary.org/

• During our searching session in class, Richard found a search engine called Zuula that aggregates results from many search engines, including Google, Yahoo, etc.: http://zuula.com/

Here are the powerpoint notes from the first part of the class: LIB1201_1007 (PDF)