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I love this new database we just subscribed to! The Global Road Warrior (funny name, don’t you think?) is a guide for individuals traveling abroad or companies doing business in foreign countries.  As a Greek myself, I checked to see how accurate this database is for information it provides about my own original country.  My favorite section to explore was “Society & Culture.”  Here is one of the “Stereotypes of Greeks as accepted by Greeks “  I found in that section  - I thought you might appreciate it!

“There are two types of people in the world: Greeks and people who wish they were Greeks.”

By golly, quite true!

This database even has a section for “Essential terms,” important words to use when you travel to the country.  Ok, now practice …“Den katalavéno”;  in Greek it means I don’t understand! This expression may come on handy if you plan on visiting my country soon.

So, in my recent May 6 post,  I showed you how to look for and request books on a topic of interest using Summit.  Now, let’s work together to see how you can find articles!  

Academic Search Premier is one of the main databases students use to find articles in journals and magazines.  As a matter of fact, students seem to really like this database because of the simplicity of its interface and its ability to retrieve full-text articles (full-text means that you can retrieve the text of the article right on your screen)!

Here is how you may get to this database on or off-campus:

-          Start with the COCC Barber library web page.

-          Under “Articles & More: Databases,” select  All Databases and hit Go.

-          Academic Search Premier is listed first.  Go ahead and click on it!

-          After you press on Continue, you enter the database and you are ready to search!

Now notice that a search using the phrase “birth order,” similar to the one I described on May 6, will give you more than a thousand of results!  You see, compared to books, articles tend to focus much more on very specific topics.  As a consequence, a broad topic such as birth order tends to produce hundreds and hundreds of results on any possible issue that may relate to the subject area.  That’s why it’s always a good idea to start thinking of ways you may need to narrow down when your database search gives you way too many results.

For example, here are some searches you may try on the topic of birth order: 

birth order and intelligence

birth order and first born child*

birth order and psycholog*

Did you notice the * symbol in these last two searches?  Well, this is a clever way to tell the database that you want it to search for all possible endings of a word (child, children; psychology, psychological, etc, etc)!  Also, the “and” between your words tells the database to look for ALL of these words simutaneously.

Next, in the list of your results, you get article citations with the indication HTML Full Text or PDF Full Text.  This indication means that you are able to retrieve the article right on your computer screen!  Isn’t this cool? Hooray!  No need to take a trip to the library! If an article is NOT available full-text through the Academic Search Premier database, you will see the link Request this item through interlibrary loan, which you may use so that we can get this article for you from another library (this is called “interlibrary loan,” a completely free and wonderful service!). 

Try a few other searches yourself!  What do you think?  Aren’t students right when they say they love Ebsco’s Academic Search Premier?

Looking for that perfect topic for your college project?  Well, this first step of your research assignment may not always be as easy as so many students, even instructors, may want to think… So, why not turn to the news for some help?

MSNBC just got a news story about a recent study confirming what most of us have always suspected: “The oldest kid in the family really does bear the brunt of parental strictness, while the younger brothers and sisters generally coast on through.” According to the research findings, the first born is more likely to be the rule-abiding and responsible offspring while younger siblings have a higher tendency to take more risks and get into trouble!

Now, this can be a great research topic for you students out there, especially if you come from or raising families with siblings! Finding something engaging and of personal interest to complete your writing or speech assignment is the first ingredient to a successful project! And since this piece of news certainly caught my attention (I am the youngest of two siblings, plus I am raising two boys with distinct personalities…), I decided to do a quick search on the topic using Summit, one of my favorite tools to use when looking for books! To do my search I used the expression “birth order,” which gave me a list of great titles to pick from. And remember, in Summit these are books (and videos, too) that you can request from other libraries and pick up from the COCC library within 2-3 working days! If you haven’t used Summit before, it’s easy to find the link on the COCC Barber library homepage, under “Books & More: Library Catalogs.”

So, now you got the first two steps of your research project done (topic selection and use of Summit)!  To be continued….

Ever wish you had your own private researcher who could scan hundreds of scholarly journals every day and alert you when a new article is published on a certain topic? You can use EBSCO’s RSS feature and have exactly that.

Do you already use a RSS Feed Reader (aka news aggregator of news reader) to stay up on your favorite news sources and blogs? You can use that same tool, combine it with the powerful research capabilities of EBSCO, and be alerted when there are new magazine, journal or newspaper articles on a research topic of interest. Once you’ve set this up, you will see the latest articles as soon as they are made available. And it’s a just a few clicks away.

Choose the EBSCO database of your choice, and perform the search on your topic. (Your search can be as simple or sophisticated as you want. Consult a librarian if you’d like help with this step.) Above your results list, you’ll see the RSS symbol and the words “Create alert for this search.” A pop-up screen displays with the search alert information. Copy the Syndication Feed URL into your newsreader.

You can set up a feed for an entire journal as well. Click the Publications link on the sub-toolbar. Once you have found the desired publication, click the RSS alert icon to the left of the publication name. Of course, there is more you can do. Click on Help once you are in EBSCO, look for the section on Saving Searches and Alerts and you will see even more explanation on how to set up RSS feeds and alerts.

At this time, EBSCO supports the following newsreader programs: My Yahoo!, CustomReader, FeedReader, Wizz RSS, Bloglines, Pluck, Safari 2.0, NetNewsWire, NewsGator, and Google Reader. If you’re not already using a newsreader, check out some of these. It’s a great way to stay up on your news sources without visiting every page.

After the topic is chosen, the research is completed, the ideas are synthesized, and the paper is written, there is that last important detail that can slow you down - citing your sources correctly. Of course we have books that can help with that — the MLA Handbook, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, to name a few.

But the the library also has a page with links to some great online resources. Visit Research and Documentation Online or the University of Wisconsin’s Writing Center if you are looking for thorough explanations and exact information. To truly understand the citation process, these are great sites.

For quicker fixes, there is the Son of Citation Machine and KnightCite, two places where you pick your style, fill out their forms with your information, and they create the citation for you. Of course, both of these cites have disclaimers reminding users that though the citation creators work pretty well, YOU, the writer of the paper, are ultimately responsible for the correctness of you work. So be a little careful, but with most straightforward citations, they work great.

Remember, all these great links can be found in one convenient location, on your library’s homepage.

Your library just got a new set of exciting e-sources for you to explore!  Here they are:

Encyclopedia Judaica, an encyclopedia of the Jewish people and their faith, Judaism.

Encyclopedia of Small Business, a source for detailed articles and overviews of all the key information needs of small business users, including financing, financial planning, business plan creation, market analysis, sales strategy, tax planning and more.

Encyclopedia of Everyday Law, a publication covering important statutes and cases, including historical background, profiles of various U.S. laws and regulations, and details of how laws and regulations vary from state to state.

How to get to them? On our library web page, under Articles & More: Databases, select Encyclopedias and other sources.  That’s it!  From there you may select any of these or other electronic encyclopedia we have available for you!  What a wealth of information!

Whether you are a web designer or wish to spice up your own personal web page, you may want  to check out “10 Places to Find Free Images Online and Make Your Content More Linkable,” by Loren Baker in Search Engine Journal.  In this web site, Baker offers a great list of sources for free or royalty-free images you can upload and/or edit for your website.  I don’t know about you, but this has been a list I have been waiting for for a long time!

Do you love to gaze at the stars in the night sky?  Want to experience some of the beauty of the Universe? I spent more than an hour with my child last night exploring Sky-Map, a web site which presents a detailed map of the sky and a huge collection of images of all objects outside our solar system.  When you are in this web site, use “Show stars above you now” (click on the time icon next to the search box) to enter your location and find all constellations viewable in your area, right above your head!  Want to search for a specific object in the sky?  Just do a search by typing its name in the search box, “Find Object”.  I addition, you’ll find so much more to explore in what’s featured under “Attractive Spots of the Universe”!  And for the real astronomer inside you, this web site is also filled with all kinds of hard-core information to satisfy your whole scientific appetite! 

There are (at least) a couple fun sites for sharing your books and socializing with other readers. There’s the relatively new Goodreads where you can see what your friends are reading, find good books to read and keep track of what you have read and want to read. It’s free and fun and worth a look if you enjoy reading, discussing and discovering new books.

I See Dead People(’s Books)

Also there’s LibraryThing, which has been around for a bit longer. Here you can do the same kinds of things, plus you can find people with similar reading interests.

Not quite as morbid as it sounds, at LibraryThing, there’s a group devoted to cataloging the collections of dead people. Wanna see what was on Tupac’s bookshelf? Wanna know what Sylvia Plath was reading? Now you can. For a complete list of cataloged authors, including libraries in progress, visit the group I See Dead People(’s Books) over at LibraryThing.

We are almost beyond mid-term, but new tips on study skills are never too late to learn! So, if you need some advice by finals week, check out the web site, How to study. Here you’ll find all kinds of helpful tips from strategies to reading textbooks, to steps you can take in dealing with test anxiety or in overcoming procastrination(!). Note that through the main web page you can even submit your own tips on improving study skills! Although the purpose of this web site is also commercial trying to promote other study skills programs and books you can buy, there might really be something valuable for you to discover to improve your college performance and grades!