Thursday, October 21, 2010

Reminders

  • No office hours on Monday (10/25)
  • No class on Tuesday (10/26)
  • Database presentations are on Thursday (10/28)
  • The next part of your bibliography (scholarly articles) is due on Thursday (10/28)

I will be out of the office from Sunday (10/24) until Thursday (10/28) but hope to have e-mail access.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Schedule change and .ppt

As we discussed in class, the database presentations will be on 10/28. On 10/21, we will talk about the library website and catalog and you will have a group activity. This is reflected on the syllabus.

No other changes (due dates, etc.) have been changed.

The slides about finding full text are available: .ppt

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Search Strategy Help

We discussed various search strategies yesterday in class:


  • Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
  • Truncation (Example: teen*)
  • Limits (Example: limiting by date or limiting to scholarly publications)
  • Field searching (Example: Searching for a particular word in an article's title)

As there was no PowerPoint, here are some resources to help you:

Monday, October 11, 2010

PowerPoint on Databases

We will pick up with slide #22 tomorrow in class: .ppt

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Announcements

1. No Class on October 14th

As we discussed and voted on in class, we will not have class on 10/14. You are responsible for the activity we would have done in class. In class on Tuesday (10/12) I will distribute the activity. You may work on this individually or in a small group. We will discuss this more in class on Tuesday. If you will not be in class on Tuesday you are required to e-mail me to obtain the activity. You must e-mail me by midnight on Tuesday (10/12). The activity is due at the beginning of class on 10/19.

2. Extra Credit Opportunity

It occurs to me that in our discussions about scholarly communication that the reasons for participating in scholarly communication and research are lost. While university faculty do research in part to attain tenure, the reasons for doing research are far greater. It is research that helps us understand human and animal behavior, helps us find cures for diseases, works to create new technologies to better society, and so on.

You can learn more about current UNCW research here: http://uncw.edu/research/

So for you to see what type of research is being done I'm offering you an extra credit opportunity. To earn three points of extra credit, you may do the following:

  • Find three scholarly articles written by faculty members at UNCW or any other university. Hint: If you use the database Web of Knowledge, you can type "Wilmington, NC" in the "Address" field so you can retrieve citations for articles written by researchers in Wilmington. Many of them are at UNCW. We will talk more about how to retrieve the full-text of these articles in future classes.

  • Write a blog posting about these articles. For EACH article, provide a complete citation, summarize the purpose of the research, and briefly discuss the importance of this research.
  • I would expect that it would take a minimum of 300 words to adequately describe each article. So your blog posting would be a minimum of 900 words plus three citations.
  • The deadline to complete this is November 16.

3. Directions for Retrieving the Next Reading

When you have a citation for an article, your instinct is most likely to Google the title of that article. In some cases you might get lucky and find that article for free using Google. But as we've discussed in class, most of the time you can't. This is the case for your next reading. I did not place this reading on Reserve so you can start getting in the habit of locating articles on your own. Here are the steps:
  • Go to the library website and click on "Have a citation? Looking for a journal?" which is located below the search box on the homepage.

  • In this case you are looking for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Type this in and click "Go!"

  • You are now taken to the library catalog which you might think of as a "portal" to get to journals that are in databases.

  • Under "This title is available electronically via" you'll see a list of databases.

  • Click on the first one (EBSCOhost MasterFile Premiere).

  • You are now accessing the Chronicle of Higher Education through this library database.

  • On the right side of the screen, click on "Search within this publication."

  • As one of the words in the title is very unique ("Infodiet") you can type this into the second search box to retrieve the article you need.

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Intellectual Property Slides (Copyright and Plagiarism)

The slides on intellectual property (from 9/28) are online: .ppt