Welcome everyone to this Overview of Library Services from Webster University
library. We're coming to you from our home campus in St. Louis Missouri.
Thank you for joining us this evening. This session will be recorded. So if you
signed up for the webinar, but couldn't make it tonight
this copy of this recording or recording from an earlier session will be sent to
you after we're done. So two of us will be presenting to you today my name is
Eliot Boden. I'm the assessment librarian and I'm
also the liaison to the School of Education and also the Department of
International language and cultures. With me tonight is Sara Reando who is the
communications and outreach librarian and her liaison areas are the school of
communications. So before we talk about the different resources that we have
available through the library let's talk about how you can get help
because you will have questions, I still have questions, we all have questions
right? That's what the library does is answer questions. So we need you to keep
us going. So for those of you who are taking a short course, an eight or nine
week course, you don't want to let yourself stay stuck for too long. So you
can ask us questions early on with your assignments or your research. Maybe
you're just starting to formulate an idea for a topic or a research question.
Sometimes maybe you're already doing some searching and you're not finding
the results you need. Those are perfect times for you to reach out and talk to a
librarian and we're happy to help you. So starting here at the library homepage,
library.weber.edu, under the "Research help" column in the bottom half of the
page I'm going to go to the first link which is "Ask a Librarian, that's where
you can get in touch with our research librarians. It will take you to this page
and you'll see our contact information is in the top left under "Contact us". We
have a phone, email, and chat reference. We have professional librarians who are on
staff during the day, evenings, and weekends and we're happy to talk to you
by phone or answer any other questions that you might have. Things you might ask
is "Where can I find a journal for my major or my class", "How do I cite this
resource, this book, this article in my paper". These are all things that we can
help you with. Now if you're using the library from outside of the St. Louis
area you want to be sure and call us from that toll-free number
1-800-985-4279. So that will work for Webster students worldwide.
We also have a chat service you see down below the phone numbers and emails and
that's staffed 24 hours a day. So you will either be connected with a
librarian here at the home campus or someone else here in Missouri who can
help answer your question. Above the chat box we also have a link to our subject
liaison librarians where it says "Contact your subject liaison". These are
librarians like myself and Sarah who support students and faculty in various
different subject areas we're happy to help you as you go through your program
at Webster. So if you have a question that's related to a specific course feel
free to reach out to the librarian for that course or for your major. On the
same page as the contact information, over on the right-hand side of the page,
we also have this searchable database of our frequently asked questions. so
sometimes you can talk to us and we can help you answer a question sometimes
you're not the first person, believe It or not to be stuck at the library and so
we've recorded many of these answers here and usually these are pretty quick
questions about how to get access to books that are on reserve for your
course how to log into our databases these are pretty common issues. So if
you're getting stuck somewhere be sure and check our frequently asked questions
here and we'll be covering some of the most frequently asked questions about
where things are on the library page in our webinar tonight. So going back to the
library homepage still under that "Research help" section looking at the
second link that we have which is called "Research guides". So the research guides,
if you click on that, are things that we have for most different departments and
programs here at Webster. Research guides are all
put together by our subject librarians and what they really do is sort of bring
together all of the different ways that you can get to our resources in that
area. This is a really great place for you to get started with research
especially if you're new to a major or a degree program or maybe you're taking
some interdisciplinary courses and maybe you're in an art course for the first
time for example and you haven't really done any art research before the
research guides are very helpful ways to get started we usually have a guide
that's an overall sort of overview for a department or a field, but then sometimes
individual courses will have research guides as well, so that can be extremely
helpful
and here's a great example of a research guide that was created by our business
and management librarian, Mary Anne Erwin. Mary Anne works with the business and
management program as well as Human Resources, procurement, marketing, and
other related programs. you can see Mary Anne and her contact information at
the bottom right hand of the page there's a link where you can email her
and most of our librarians also provide their phone numbers and other contact
information as well. So this is a research guide. You can see on the main
page it's sort of a top-level overview of what's available in this example in
the business and management program you have some more specific research guides
listed in the bottom half of the page, but then along the top you see different
tabs and that's something that all research guides have in common
regardless of what program or class that they're for and often these will give
you research help on finding more specific resources. For example Mary Anne
here has put together some resources that would be especially helpful for
business and management students first of course is scholarly articles also are
books and ebooks and specific to business and management we have company
directories and financials industry information SWAT or strength weakness
opportunities threat information. So if you're doing business and management
research these are some things that you would want to look for for your
projects, but that you might not find right away from the library homepage. So
diving deeper into your field of study is something that research guides are
really helpful for doing.
Going back to that library homepage library.weber.edu I'm still looking
under the "Research help" section we also have a link to "Tutorials and webinars".
This is where you can view recordings of our past webinars as well as sign up for
upcoming ones. We don't have any scheduled as of yet, but check closer to
the fall semester and you'll see more webinars coming up and just like this
one you can register and attend or if you can't make it you'll will get the
link to the recording later on and we have webinars on a wide variety of
topics and so feel free to watch them or watch parts of them to help with
whatever stage of the research process you're at or whatever kind of
information that you're trying to find. Speaking of the research process, my
favorite part of being a librarian by the way, let's talk about that for a
second the image we have here on the screen is sort of a simplified version
of the steps that you might go through if you're working on a paper,
presentation or some other sort of research project and these steps are
more or less the same regardless of the type of information you're finding. So a
history research paper would follow the same steps as a business research
paper or a sociology research paper. As librarians we can help you with all of
the steps of the research process. We are especially helpful at the two top pieces
defined tasks and identify options. So this sort of wheel of steps really
starts with defined tasks right? First you figure out what is your assignment,
what is the problem you're confronting or what is the question most importantly
that you're trying to answer. All great research starts with a question. So we
can help you better understand the boundaries of that question. Maybe you
have a really broad area of interest and you're just not sure yet what about it
you can stay in your research or maybe you want to answer a very very specific
question and aren't finding the resources that you need. So that sort of
goes with defy options Right. We can help you
choose the information sources that will help you get the information that makes
your the rest of the research and writing process easier. So this
is our bread and butter. This is what we love to help with and then looking at
the center of puzzle piece evaluate as you go along through the research
process, hopefully with a little bit of help from a librarian, be sure to ask
yourself how the process is going where you feel confident about the information
you have, are you still finding some stumbling
blocks? If for whatever reason things aren't going quite as well as you
imagined that's a great indication that you can reach out to us and we can help
you get a handle on your research.
Speaking of information and research let's dive into some of the sources of
information that we can help you find.
With both the traditional library resources at the top like articles and
books but also a lot more information resources available online and even
traditional sources like articles and books that are also available online
you're really in a tough spot as researchers because there's more
information available to you than ever before
and it's also both easier to find things and harder to find the right things. So
we're going to focus in our overview tonight just on talking about the first
two categories here articles and books and ebooks, since those will be the
common resources that you'll probably use no matter what program you're in
here at Webster, but there is a wealth of other information sources that you have
access to as a Webster student through the library. We are very happy to show
you in other webinars and in your classes how you can get to that more
specialized information that's right for your field. So starting with articles, their are most often requested type of information
source both from our students and our instructors as well. Most of us in our
daily lives are probably pretty familiar with the first two of these kinds of
articles ones that come from popular magazines, Time as our example and also
it come from daily newspapers. Whether you read magazines in print or on the
web these are the kinds of things that are written for a general audience that
are usually very up-to-date and usually don't go into too much detail compared
to some of the other article types that we have available to you in the library
and those are those are articles that come from trade journals and you may be
familiar with some of these depending on your profession usually they're targeted
to a very specific audience. I don't know if every everyone in your family would
love to discuss the latest article in Beverage World but maybe if you know if
that is your business then that would be a special interest to you. So trade
journal articles are usually a little more focused than the types of articles
you'll find in more general interest publications, but they're also a little
different than the next kind of articles which are called scholarly or
peer-reviewed articles and these are articles that are usually much more
in-depth and usually written by experts in the field and sometimes that means
they're written by professors at universities sometimes by doctors or
other specialists and there's a lot of emphasis when you'll be doing research
assignments on using scholarly journals in your research and one of the reasons
that these are emphasized so heavily as opposed to the other kinds of articles
is that I think I mentioned that they're called peer-reviewed and what that means
is that the research presented in the articles is usually reviewed or looked
over by a board of other experts in the field and is sort of certified as
being up to date or being of being relevant to to the topic. So your
assignment will often require you to use these peer-reviewed or scholarly
journals. So at this point I believe I will turn our presentation over to Sarah
who will show you how to locate these types of sources for your research and
will show you how to do that in the library. Thank you Eliot. Hi everyone.
I'm Sarah and we're going to kind of move on to the next step now that we
know what resources partially the library has to offer us it's time to
decide where to get started and we have a lot of work to do before we even start
looking for resources. Our first step is going to be to formulate a research
question right? If our class is a human resources class that's a huge topic we
could have multi-volume books about human resources and just scratch the
surface. We need to decide how much information we want to find in order to
sort of match the size of our assignment. So one way we're going to do that is
to narrow it down based on what we're interested in and so say we want to talk
about training, it's still a huge topic, we need it to be a little more specific.
So orientation and on boarding for new employees is getting us in the right
direction it's a little more specific but we want
to ask a question and asking that question gives our research direction
right? That's what separates us from you know writing a book report like we did
earlier in our academic careers. This keeps us focused and gives us
a question to answer and that's really important in
college-level research. All right, so we're starting with this question and we
need to know where is the first place we're going to look for information
about this once we think we have our a research question. What do we do next?
Well we're going to start out at back at library.webster.edu at the
library homepage and you can see here we have it circled in the left hand corner
there in orange letters it says "Are you looking for...?" and there's a link that says
"Articles / databases". That's a great place to get started if we know we need
scholarly peer-reviewed journals or any other kind of articles. So just a moment
I'm going to give you a live view of my screen here. Okay there we go
wonderful. So I'm going to click this right here this "Articles / databases"
and as you can see these are kind of broken down by discipline and a lot of
times that can give us direction when choosing a database. It's also a good
time to ask a librarian, but these are big collections of these journals and
magazines and newspapers and other kinds of data to videos even audio
sometimes, but you know in this instance we're looking for peer-reviewed articles.
So we're talking about management of Human Resources right? So let's click
that and we have a pretty lengthy list of all of the different resources
available to us that could be useful for management and Human Resources and they
all have these nice descriptions that can help you pick one. For our purposes
today we're just going to choose this first one, "Business Source Complete".
It's a set of information within EBSCO, if any of you you might be familiar with
that. So let's go ahead and click and then we are going to sign in you'll use
your last name and your 7-digit Webster ID. Okay and see where we're in and some
of this looks kind of familiar to us. We have a search bar here where we're going
to type in our search term.
Let's try onboarding
and employee retention. Right this is a little pickier than Google. We don't just
want to type our question in. We want to break it down to the the most basic
elements and with this first search we're just sort of getting our feet wet
and seeing what's out there and it's a little nerve-racking trying to pick
those first set of terms to type in there but the absolute worst thing that
can happen is that we'll get zero results and we'll move on to the next
thing. So it's important to remember not to get discouraged if on your first. second or even third try you you feel like you're not getting anywhere you know
that's the time to call a librarian and often this is just a process of finding
the right words. Can I say something really quick Sara? So
this is Elliott again. Something else with searching and this took me a while to
sort of get comfortable with on my own. You know when you start searching you're
sort of use to answering the question and if you take your first search and
you're thinking "okay I need to find a source for my paper" as Sara said
sometimes you don't always find the source right away. If you're researching
something that's new to you or less familiar, which is sometimes the case,
right? You're researching something out of curiosity. I would say that sometimes
even if you don't leave a search with some articles for your paper if you
leave with a better understanding of what's out there in terms of what
journals maybe the articles are showing up in or if you search for certain terms
and you find that a lot of the articles are using different terminology to
describe the same thing or you find something that is related and of
interest to you but isn't exactly what you started searching for like that's I
think a very useful way or very fruitful first search is if you just use
it to gather information even if you have to do a second or third or another
search later on to find that article. Yeah absolutely thank you Eliot that's
a great point that often you will in one of those first searches you might find
one thing that's sort of useful to you but use what you've learned in that to
find the words that will lead you to more information. So it's
not very frequent that we're going to try one search and get everything we
need all at once, even those of us that do this for a living, that does not
happen terribly often. So let's see what happens right we're curious we need to
move on to the next step. So let's click search.
Alright and we can see our results here. Before we even get started
we can see a few things. We have 51 results, but we need to kind of make sure
that these results meet the requirements of our assignment right?
Make sure that they're the ones that are useful to us. Sometimes you can get tens
of thousands of results in one search and one of the most difficult
things is weeding through all the things that you don't want and removing those.
You're not going to sit and look through 10,000 results because you have a life
to live. So one of some of the ways that we can do that limit this search to
things that we know we want if we come over here to "limit to" we can limit it to
"full text" and that gets rid of results that we might have to go to another
database to find we might have to even request from another school and those
are options but you know there are instances where you don't have time to
do that or you just want to see what's available to you. Initially we can also
click "scholarly peer-reviewed" and that takes out all of the
the results that are from magazines and newspapers and things that we can't use
for our research. Another thing that we want to look at is the publication date.
So a lot of times we say look maybe 5 to 10 years in business. You know sometimes you
can have results from the 19th century in here and we don't want to know
about employee onboarding from the 19th century because it's not a history
report. So you can change the date here or slide it this way. We are getting too
few results. So one way to resolve that is to usually remove a search term.
So even before we get started and before we know we want to look at an
article we can can get some more information about it. So this first one
is higher right? The first time let's say that one looks interesting to us. So
we're going to click that and we can get an abstract sometimes these are a little
longer but this is a short summary of what the article is about and this
is a huge time-saver this one is only four pages but sometimes these are 30
pages long and that's really frustrating if you kind of look through a lengthy
article and then find out that it's not what you want. A few other tools here,
we have these subject terms and these are almost like hashtags like I can you
know click this and say give me more about onboarding
right? But it didn't keep the limits that you'd apply that previous circuit.
This is true. We would have to put those back on. Luckily these all seem to
be pretty recent and it took us you know about back to where we were before
including this article and some other things that we can do here when we
decided we actually want to read the article we can come up here there's a
red and white logo in the upper left hand corner that says PDF full text
sometimes it will say HTML full text. The content will be the same it's just if
you're going to print it out PDF looks a little better and one more thing I want
to show you before we move on all the way over on the right hand side there
are these colorful little icons that allow us to safe, you can email it to
yourself, which is very nice and there is this feature here that says "cite" and if
we click that and shows us how to cite it in just about every style, styles
you didn't even know we're out there, and these are not foolproof there is a
disclaimer here that you do still need to double check it for instance the
capitalization is off in this APA citation and every once in a while you
can run into one that's just completely wrong, but it is often better than
starting from scratch. Okay since we have kind of got
an idea of how the databases work let's move on to...
and another instance say we've been told about a specific article that's going to
be helpful to our research and we want to find that. Sorry just a moment. We seem
to have lost our PowerPoint we had some more slides queued up for you give us
just a second to find out where it went.
Wonderful. So now we should be back and you
should be seeing the live demonstration slide at the library homepage so yeah
okay. Our screen was just so darn interesting you couldn't get away from it. anything
right right oh no you now you're sharing again stop, sharing.
There we go and then they're saying those great great okay. so as I mentioned
sorry thank you for your patience with that distraction. As I mentioned
there will be instances where you will have in the citation information about a
certain article but you'll have to go and find that and rather than searching
all of those databases at once there's a much easier way to do that on the
library website. So back at library.webster.edu at our
home page just like before we're going to click "Articles / databases" and in
the screen that shows all the different disciplines that kind of leads us to the
right database there's this grey box over on the right hand side and the
first link says "Journal / magazine / newspaper list" and that is a searchable
list of every single publication that we subscribe to. Even
beverage world and so this article that we were looking at is in Harvard
Business Review our first step is to find that publication and this the
searchable list which were you found here and then pay attention
you can see that there are dates when it's available in different
databases. So if we needed something from the past ten years we would not look in
biography in context because it only has the Harvard Business Review up to 2000.
We're going to look in business source complete and we're probably not going to
look in Webster periodicals because that means that that that publication is you
know available in print form that you would hold in your hands and the
basement of the library. So chances are we're going to use business source
complete because it's readily available and it's the most reason
and once we click that we can see a list of different volumes and issues. We
can go by year as we know the date and then select that particular volume and
issue. Right, we know it was June 2007 and we can go in and find that and then just
see a list of all of the articles and that issue that came out that month in
Harvard Business Review and it's generally pretty easy to find after that.
So the picture that we're looking at here looks a lot like our search results
from earlier and this is one way that the era of finding information online
can actually be more confusing because when you're doing a search you're seeing
articles from lots of different journals, lots of time periods all pulled together
in one place and what we're looking at right here is a list of the articles in
order as they appear in one issue of a magazine. So if you were rather I think
in this case an academic journal so if you had the Harvard Business Review in
your hands from June 2007 and we're flipping through the pages you would
read "newly acquired executives adapt quickly" after employees get an earful
but because this format looks very similar to the results page it's very
easy to get confused as to what exactly you're
looking at when you're searching. So when you're ever confused just call a
librarian and we're happy to help. Sorry to interrupt Sarah.
No no thank you it's a great point great point. Okay, so then we can move on to
finding books any books we've pretty thoroughly covered databases but we also
we have some other resources available to you in just plain old books which
some of us still prefer. I love books Don't we all? That's way we'er in
this business partially and ebooks which are books that are
available online you read them on the computer just like you would any of
these articles. So in this instance we'll go back to the
library homepage and underneath "Articles/ databases", where we've gone before,
we'll see "Books etc / library catalog" and also an option to just search e-books. If
we search the library catalog it will give us both print and ebooks and I'll
show you how to recognize those in just a moment and if we search e-books it
will give us only things that are available online. So if you are not able
to come to the physical library if you are studying in the middle of the night
before something is due, not that not that any of us would ever do that,
option that's you know if we're closed
for some reason these will all still be readily available. So we're going to
search e-books those are more likely to be useful to us for the reasons I just
mentioned. Most of us aren't here at the Webster Groves campus and we're going to
do just like we did before, we're going to search "employee orientation" and see
our results. We have a list of all of the different books available to us just
like we had with the articles. You can see that there's a little red e next to
the blue picture of a book a little icon and that signifies to us that it's an
e-book and that is not a physical print book that we would go and get off
of the Shelf. You can also see that it's an e-book under each title under
location it will say Webster Eden internet access. whereas if it were an in
print book or a physical copy of a book it would list the floor of the library
that the book was located on
Okay and now we'll see the difference if we go back and we went to search
both just see books and ebooks. Right now you can see the difference. The the print
books do not have that little red e and they will also, as Elliott just
mentioned, show us the floor where they are located. Floors don't matter when
you're online. that's right. One of the many advantages. So there might be
instances where we don't subscribe to the particular journal that you're
looking for right. If you use that journal magazine newspaper list and it
tells you that we don't have that it gives you a message that the zero
results or you look in the catalog and we don't have access to the particular
thing that you're looking for. If it's a specific book we have a few resources
about your topic but you really like to know more we can request those from
other schools and if you click this link down here under "Research help" and you
will fill out a form tell us about the information and we will talk to another
school on your behalf and you can get access to that. You can order chapters of
books. You can order articles where you can view them for a limited time for
a few weeks and that's another reason to start your research early because you
might find yourself in a situation where that will come in handy.
Okay so to
wrap up here to go back to the "Ask a librarian" feature. If there's one thing
we want you to take away today it's that we want you to ask questions. We love it
when you ask questions especially when they're really difficult.
We went to school to do that as something we enjoy that's why we
have this job. So never feel afraid and remember to ask us never be hesitant to
ask rather. So you can you can call us if it's a little more complicated. You might
send us an email and this chat box here there's a librarian on the other
end of that 24 hours a day but the exception of some US holidays. There is
there someone there waiting to answer your question. So We are always
available. So again we are here to answer your questions I am Sarah Reando
and here's my contact information. If you would ever want to reach out to someone
please do we are happy to answer questions and yeah thanks for
watching everyone. We are going to stop the recording but we'll stick around for
a few more minutes for those of you who are here live and maybe want to chat and
ask us any questions but thanks for watching and yeah reach out if you have
any questions.
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