Posts tagged search

We spend a lot of time talking about how to find articles and journals in the library, but that doesn't mean we're not a great place to find books!

Here's how.

From the library homepage, choose OSU Library Catalog from the Quicklinks:

This brings you to the OSU Library catalog, a big database of all of the stuff we own (digital and in print) at OSU Libraries.  The best and broadest place to start searching is with a simple (2-3 terms max) keyword search.

Here's a screenshot of the results screen.  The call number system we use to organize the books in the Valley Library organizes the books by subject.  Look to see if you can identify where the call numbers cluster - where there are several books in the same area.  If you are in the library, you might find it easier to just go to the place where that call number is found, and browse through the books themselves.

(Click the image to enlarge)

In the example above, there is a cluster of books in the PR4037-8 area.

If you are not in the library, you can still take advantage of the call number system.  When you see a book with a potentially useful-sounding title, click the title to bring up more information about the book.  At the bottom center of the page that comes up, you'll see the Call Number is a hyperlink.

Click that link to virtually browse the shelf around the book.

You can find more useful information from the book record.  The Location will tell you if the book is at the Corvallis campus, the Bend campus or the Newport campus, or found online:

1. Anything with "Valley" (Valley, Valley Docs, Valley Special Collections, etc. = the Corvallis campus
2. COCC Second Floor = Bend campus
3. Guin/HMSC = Newport campus

The Status will tell you if the book is checked out, available or on hold for someone else.

To find more books similar to a good one, when you find a good one, look at the Subjects (the green shaded area below).

To get your hands on the actual book, once you know you want it -

If you are in Corvallis - use this list of call number locations to find out where the call number is shelved (the first letter of the call number is what you want).

If you are in Bend or Newport and you want a Valley book, use the Request button at the top of the screen to have the book sent to your library.  (Obviously, if you are in Corvallis and you want a Bend or Newport book, use the same button).

If you are a distance student or faculty member located more than 30 miles from Corvallis, use the Request button to have the book delivered to your address.  Choose Extended Campus as your pickup location.

Everyone knows that images can make a paper or presentation more visually appealing and more effective.  But images, just like other types of sources, should be used ethically, with respect to the person who created them.

This is especially important when you are giving presentations that might end up on video, or posted to the web.  Luckily, it is easy to find images you can use with no worries.

Creative Commons is a project that allows authors, photographers, artists, musicians -- any kind of content creators -- to put a license on their work that tells everyone else exactly how they can use it.

Here's an explanation of all of the different licenses that are available.

Here's how you can use the online photo-sharing site Flickr to search for images with Creative Commons licenses that give you permission to do exactly what you need to do with that image.

Go to the advanced search page at Flickr:

Enter some keywords to find the image you want.  Be creative!  People tag these photos with all kinds of terms - names, colors, cameras, photographic techniques, locations, time periods, and more.

At the bottom of the page, you will see an section labeled Creative Commons.

Checking the box marked Only Search within Creative Commons-licensed content will make sure that all of the photos you find have licenses that say you can use them.  Most of the time, they will ask that you will simply provide attributution (provide a link/ citation crediting the photographer).

Checking the box marked Find content to modify means that you can not only use, but also change (photoshopping, cropping, adding text or captions, etc.) the photos you find.  Check this box if you plan to change the image in any way.

Here's an example of a photo with a Creative Commons license.

[Photo credit:  Oregon State Football Game, Upset #1 USC. Ryan Harvey]

The license is highlighted on the image above with a pink star.  Clicking that link will tell you everything you need to know about what you have permission to do with the image:

Good luck!

By checking a couple of boxes on a search form, you can improve your odds of finding the sources  that will work for an assignment requiring "peer-reviewed" or "scholarly" articles.

This trick won't guarantee that you find scholarly articles, but it will improve your odds by filtering out a lot of sources that are clearly not scholarly.

From the library homepage, choose Databases from the Quicklinks list.

This will work in most EBSCOhost databases.  If you are not sure which one you want to use, Academic Search Premier is almost always a good starting place.

Do a search on your topic.  TIP:  use just 1-2 important keywords.  Don't limit your results too much by adding too many search terms.

At this point, you might want to try a couple of different sets of keywords to see which one gets you the best results.  If you don't have enough results, try eliminating keywords.

Once you have a decent set of results, set your limits to get rid of the non-scholarly sources:

On the right side of the screen, you should see these two ticky boxes:

• * Scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals
• * References Available

Check both of these boxes.  The first one will limit to journals EBSCO thinks are peer-reviewed or scholarly.  The second one will limit to articles that have bibliographies available.

Here's the same search, with those limits attached.  Notice that the total number of results decreases from 786 to 64.

If you aren't sure how to get to the article from the results list - help is here.

I can't emphasize this enough, though - everything that is published in a peer-reviewed journal is not  peer-reviewed.  In addition to peer-reviewed, research-based articles, journals provide book reviews, website reviews,  editorials and opinion columns.  These might be useful for your work, but they aren't considered "peer-reviewed" articles.

If you're not sure if a particular article is peer-reviewed, that 's a great question to ask your professor or a librarian.

Launched in 2004, Google Scholar provides a way to use the power of Google to search for scholarly articles, presentations, reports and more.  While Google Scholar can be a great tool for finding scholarly sources, those sources aren't always free.  Anyone who has used this tool has clicked on a likely-looking resource, only to be taken to a page where they can get the article, if they pay for it.

The OSU Library spends a lot of money every year to give OSU students, faculty and staff access to those articles.  Here's how you can set up your Google Scholar to let you know when the articles you find are available at the library.

Go to Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com (if you click the link right now, it will open in a new window).

Click on the Scholar Preferences link next to the search box.

The next page will let you set your preferences.  Look for the section headed Library Links.

Enter the name of the library you want Google Scholar to connect to.  You can include up to 3 libraries.  Enter Oregon State University to connect to OSU Libraries' holdings.

Click all of the OSU options.  Now, when you search in Google Scholar, you will also get information about the OSU Libraries' subscriptions.

This is what the results of a simple search on "overfishing" look like before changing the preferences --

And this is what they look like after changing the preferences.  Look for the Find it at OSU link to the right of each result.

Clicking the Find it at OSU link takes you into the OSU Libraries' holdings.  If the source you want is something that the library had to pay for, you will need to log in with your ONID information to prove that you are from OSU and allowed to access the library's subscriptions.

If the system can, it will link you directly to the article.  You may have to link to the journal, and then browse to the article.   If the article is not available in print, you may have to get access to the print copy in the library.  If any of these options do not work, or if you have any questions, ask a librarian and they will be happy to help you get the article you want.

Good luck!