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Introduction
Welcome to the APSU Library! Below is
information that you will find useful for English 5000. The following
information is intended to assist you in determining what your information needs
are, finding the information you need, and evaluating the information you find.
Links to various library services are provided throughout this document. You
will need to follow each link to find out about that particular resource or
service. Through the Ask A Librarian
service, you can request assistance via email, chat, or telephone. You also
have access to a librarian via telephone (221-7346 or 1-800-250-1890), via email
librarian@apsu.edu, or in person by
coming to the Library.
Information Needs
The first question you need to ask yourself is
"What types of information do I need for my research project or paper?" You
have access to many types and formats of information through the APSU Library.
You may have done library "research" for other classes you have taken at APSU or
other schools. You probably had to find a certain number of articles, books,
and/or web resources for your paper or project. Much of your previous research
was probably done in conjunction with writing a paper that was intended to
inform or analyze a particular topic. Your research for this class will be much
more intensive and include research involving literary analysis, criticism and
interpretation . Your professor will inform you as to the specific types of
resources he or she expects you to use for your project. So, how and where do
you find the information you need? The APSU Library is the place to start.
What does APSU Library have available?
A good way to think of the APSU
Library is as an information portal. The Library's website is a bridge to vast
amounts of information both inside and outside APSU. Use the Library's website
to find out what is available (http://library.apsu.edu). The
Library owns or provides access to a wide variety of materials.
Austin is the Library's
online catalog. It lists items that are available both physically in the
Library and items that you have access to through the Library. You can check
Austin to see if the Library owns a particular book (either in print or in
electronic format), a journal title (not a specific article), videos,
selected government publications, websites and other materials. The Library
subscribes to a number of general and specialized
databases that provide you
with bibliographic citations to resources, and in some cases the full-text of
the resource. Subject
pages (arranged by discipline) have been developed so that many of the
information resources for a particular discipline are grouped together in one
place. Now that we have determined that the place to look for information is
the Library, we need to find out how we find the needed information.
Searching for information
You will find the following search protocols
useful when searching for any kind of information.
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Start with a specific topic. Broaden or
narrow it as necessary. In literary research you typically begin your
research by searching for an author or literary work.
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Use
Boolean operators
(AND, OR) to help construct your search strategy. Boolean operators assist
you in combining search concepts and defining your searches. The AND
operator narrows your search. The OR operator broadens your search.
The NOT operator excludes information from your search. Examples:
Shakespeare AND Women would retrieve resources containing
information about both Shakespeare and Women.
Argumentation OR Rhetoric would retrieve information about either
topic.
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Limit by format and material type when
searching databases. Many databases allow you limit your searches by
material type and format such as journal articles, refereed publications,
research, literature reviews, and many others. Check in each database you
use to see how to limit by publication type and format.
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Use the references at the end of an article
or book chapter to find other resources. The references used by someone
else in their research are extremely valuable to you. By consulting those
resources, you may find information that you may not have known about and
that will improve your research.
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Check subject terms assigned to an article to
see if there are more accurate or specific terms for your topic. Whenever
you search a catalog or database, always look at the subject terms that have
been assigned to the resource. You may find a better or more accurate
subject term for your topic and improve your research.
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If you are having trouble finding information
about your topic, think of other terms to describe your topic. Example:
another way to describe rhetoric might be persuasion.
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If the database or index you are searching
uses a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus, use it! Your search will
be much more accurate than if you use keywords. By using the thesaurus in a
database, you are using the language used by the indexers and abstractors.
Note: For new concepts or buzz words, you may have to use keyword searching
because the new terms may not have made it into the controlled vocabulary of
the discipline. Also, if you are having no luck using the thesaurus in
particular database, you may want to perform a keyword search and check the
subject headings or descriptors used for a relevant article.
Databases
Databases index a variety of information
including articles, book chapters, book reviews, letters, retractions,
editorials, and others. Some databases you will use contain only bibliographic
citations, some include an abstract, and others include the full text of a
resource. I will describe some of the subject databases you will use in your
research for this class in the next section.
Databases are produced by many different vendors
and each vendor has their own search software. Wouldn't it be wonderful if
there were a uniform search platform? The search protocols that I mention in
the previous section will help you to search each database effectively
regardless of the vendor.
Many database vendors provide abstracts
for many of the publications they index. Be sure to read them carefully. They
can save you a lot time. An article may seem to be perfect from the title, but
may discuss something irrelevant to your topic. The abstract helps you
determine if the publication is meaningful to your research topic. The
abstract is NO substitution for consulting the complete article or study.
Consult the specific databases listed below to
determine which one or ones you need to use for your research topic. You may
need to consult the list of all
databases to decide if there are other databases that will assist in your
research.
As an APSU student you have access to databases
available through the APSU Library both on campus and off-campus via remote
access. Consult the Remote
Access to APSU Databases guide for assistance.
Specific Databases
Literature Resource
Center (LRC) is a comprehensive
literature reference database. LRC contains biographical,
bibliographical, and critical content, much of it full-text. LRC is an
important resource for information on literary figures from all time periods
writing in such genres as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history,
journalism, and more.
MLA
Bibliography, created by the Modern Language Association of America, is
the fundamental research tool for languages and literature. The database indexes
international scholarly material in over 4,000 journals and series on modern
language, literature, linguistics, and folklore. Covering 1963 to the present,
it includes 1.3 million citations (no abstracts) to journal articles, books,
conference proceedings, films, sound recordings, microforms, and
machine-readable materials.
JSTOR provides
full-text access to back issues of selected academic journals in
the following areas: African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies,
Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, History, Languages & Literature,
Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Sociology, and
Statistics. JSTOR does not include current journal issues.
Project MUSE
includes current issues of nearly 200 quality journal titles from
some 30 scholarly publishers, covering the fields of literature and criticism,
history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political
science, gender studies, economics, and many others. Links to back issues from
JSTOR are available for some titles. These direct links only work from
on-campus (access JSTOR from the Jump to Database box if off-campus).
Dissertations and Theses
offers access to more than 90 percent of the
doctoral dissertations accepted each year in North America. The database
also covers thousands of dissertations and theses from around the globe.
Each dissertation published since July 1980 includes a 350-word abstract
written by the author. Master's theses published since 1988 include
150-word abstracts. Bibliographic citations are available for
dissertations dating from 1861, and more than 55,000 new citations are
added to the database every year. Over 1.7 million dissertations and
theses are available from the UMI vaults on microfilm or in hardcopy,
and researchers can preview many recent documents electronically through
the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database, which lets users see the
first 24 pages of thousands of documents online. (Digital dissertations
are archived as submitted by the degree-granting institution. Some will
be Native PDF, some PDF Image).
Be sure to consult the
Literature Resources
subject page for many more specific literature databases.
Does the APSU Library have the
periodical I need?
The easiest way to determine if
the APSU Library has the journal you need is to search Austin ((Library Catalog)) by
title. If you have identified an article in a
periodical database or index,
and the complete article is not available from that database, check to see if
the needed periodical is available by searching Austin.
All Periodicals (both electronic and print or microfilm) are now listed in Austin
(Library Catalog).
Evaluation of Information
Material that you find in Austin
has been selected for the APSU Library by librarians and subject faculty using
formal selection criteria and professional reviews. Resources indexed in
subject databases have met certain criteria set forth by the database publishers
such as subjects covered, publication type, and others. You will have to
evaluate this information further to determine if it is appropriate for your
research purposes. There are various criteria to assist you in evaluating
materials for your research project. Here are some links that will help you to
evaluate journal articles and books.
How to Evaluate
Journal Articles
How to Evaluate Books
Internet
I'm sure that most of you are aware that there is
some very good information, some very bad information and much in between
available on the Internet. How do you tell which is which? As with all
information that you examine for your research, you must evaluate its usefulness
and relevance to your particular project. You must ask yourself questions such
as who is responsible for this website? Are they an expert in the field? Is
this information relevant to my research? Is sponsor of this website a
commercial entity or an educational institution or an organization or what? Is
the information current? Can the information be verified in other sources?
Here are a several links that will help you to evaluate websites.
How to Evaluate a Web
Page
Five
Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages
Evaluating Web Sites
Interlibrary Loan
You may need some resources for your project that
the Library does not own. If that is the case, you need to use the Library's
interlibrary loan service (ILL). The APSU Library uses
ILLiad, a web-based
interlibrary loan system. We can borrow materials that you need from
other libraries worldwide. Just fill out the online
ILLiad form and submit it
electronically. One of the best features of the ILLiad system is that it will
"populate" the ILL request form for you when you request an article while
searching in a database. The most important thing to remember about ILL is to plan ahead!
While we have the technology to receive articles via the internet and send them
to you via email, we still use
regular (snail) mail for books and other resources. Not all libraries that we
borrow from have the technology to send articles via the internet and still use
regular mail. Plan ahead.
Citing Sources
Once you select the sources to
use in your research project or paper, you will need to put them in some type of
order and format. You will use MLA format to document the resources used in
your paper/research project. There is an online style guide for
Citing Sources in MLA
Format that you will find helpful. Not every type of resource is covered by
this guide. You may need to refer to the MLA Handbook for Writers of
Research Papers, 6th edition, for resources not covered by the Library's
guide. There are two copies of the MLA Handbook (Ref LB 2369 .G53 2003)
in the Library, one at the Information Desk and one on reserve.
RefWorks is
bibliographic management software that allows you to import references from
online databases, organize your references into folders according to your topics
of interest or various assignments, insert references from a variety of formats
(MLA and APA) into the body of a research paper, and generate formatted
references pages. RefWorks
is free for all APSU students, faculty and staff. It is available from any
computer with internet access. Click on this link
RefWorks for
information about using the service and links to helpful tutorials.
Help
There is help available to you in
a variety of ways. The Ask A
Librarian service provides help via email, chat or via telephone. You may
also contact me personally (see contact information below). Please don't spend
hours looking for something and get frustrated. Ask for help. That's why the
Library is here.
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