Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P59U2uhgzrM

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>>:  Hello, welcome to our webinar this evening.

 

>>:      Hello.

 

>>:  I would love it if someone could go to the questions panel and just let us know that you can hear us before we get started. If you just want to click where it says questions - - yep, we have confirmation that you can hear us. Thank you. It's good to know we are not talking to ourselves.

 

I want to go over this housekeeping slide while we wait to get started, and I will wait until the half hour to get into the content. The PowerPoint that we are using tonight, it is available right here on the screen you are looking at. If you go over to the side and it says handouts, you would click on handouts and then click right on the PowerPoint, it has a P icon next to it, it says Mysteries of the Library Revealed underscore and then it cuts it off.

 

Click right on it, you can save that PowerPoint. We will record the session and you will automatically get a copy of that recording in whatever email you used when you registered for this webinar. It says in a few days; I usually set it a few hours after we are done, so you should see that a couple hours after the webinar wraps up. If you don't see it, check your spam or your junk mail, sometimes it likes to go there, and it would actually say it's from Susan Stekel, and she is one of our other librarians and the account is in her name. So it's not just a wrong email, it’s us and it's the recording.

 

We will be happy to answer any webinar-related questions as we go along, but if you have questions about other things than what we are talking about tonight, please go ahead and use our Ask a Librarian service and we usually show that at the end in case you need that. Again, if you have a question about what we are talking about at the moment, or if you want to see something again while we are talking, feel free to put that in the questions box. If you have other questions we can't really go off-topic tonight so just use the Ask a Librarian.

 

All right, and with that we are now actually a minute passed so let me go ahead and start the recording and we will get started. Let me have just one second, if I start talking too soon it starts in the middle of the word. Here we go.

 

Again, welcome to this webinar. This is a Mysteries of the Library Revealed webinar. It’s part of a series and it's on search alerts and I am Erin Guldbrandsen, hello, and with me is the wonderful Kim Burton.

 

>>:  Hello.

>>:  Now that you see we are real people, I am going to turn off my webcam because it can be a little distracting. I will tell you a little bit about what we are going to do this evening.

 

Like I said, this is a series of webinars that we are doing about all different topics related to the library. So we do one every month, the third Monday of the month. If that's confusing, you can look on our website and you can see when the next one is going to be. I can't keep track of those. They are always at 8:30 PM Eastern Standard Time and the next one is going to be on July 16th and that one is going to be somewhat similar to what we are going to talk about tonight. They are different. The next one is going to be specifically about setting up alerts for journals, for just a particular journal, or a few particular journals.

 

Tonight, we are doing search alerts, we are going to show you all about that and then if you want to learn about setting up a different type of alert for just one title, one journal, you can come back in July and learn about that and we hope that you will.

So these are the questions we are going to address in this webinar. What are search alerts?  What does that even mean?  What is this topic and why would I want to use them?  How would they be helpful to me in my research and how do I actually set them up?  That's probably the most important part. That’s probably why most of you are here.

 

So what are they?  I will go ahead and address that. It's just what it sounds like. You do a search in a database or we are going to show you can also use Google Scholar which technically is a database, too. So you do a search and you like your search results, and then you set up an alert so that if something new gets published or gets added to that database, an article gets added because it's new or it’s new to that database, it matches your search and then the database will automatically notify you that that article exists. Okay, this matched your search, it's new, you just got it, there you go. So you don't -- in other words, you don't have to keep going back into the database and doing the same search over and over again.

 

Kim, did you have a question for me?

 

>>:  Yes, I did. I'm trying to read two things at the same time. When you set up these alerts, how are you notified when something new is out there and how often should we expect to get emails from databases when they find things?

 

>>:  That is a wonderful question. A lot of that is going to depend on where you set up your alert, what database it was in, and what you told that you want. This should make more sense once we show you how to actually set up the alerts. But, for instance, I have an alert set up in Google Scholar for a search and because it's through Google Scholar, I only get things when something new is found and so I could go months without seeing anything from Google Scholar. But in some of our databases it will actually let you get an alert, even if nothing new is there, so that you can see it really depends on what service you need on which database.

We will show you all of that in just a little bit. Now, I think I am ready to hand it over to you, Kim, so you can talk to us about why you would want to do this.

 

>>:  Great, thanks. I am just waiting to get my notice. I'm letting everyone know what's going on. Okay, so do you see the slide, why should I want to use them?

 

>>:  Yes.

 

>>:  Okay. All right, there are a couple of reasons why you might want to use search alerts. They are so wonderful to stay current in your area of research. As a scholar, it's really important to keep up on newly published research. Having alerts set up to continually look for new articles will keep you aware of the current conversation in your field, so you know what other people in your field are researching and other things that they are talking about. As part of your literature review, you have to show how your study or research is going to be contributing to this current conversation.

 

So by setting up an alert you can have all these brand new articles sent to you and you are going to know what’s new out there. You can also learn about gaps that may be existing in the research. So you are learning about the new research that is happening, that research may talk about future research that might be necessary. These are all things that you're going to look at. You want to start looking at them now, so you are ready when you are at that stage of doing your literature review for your dissertation or your project study.

 

Search alerts also can be sent to you, as Erin mentioned, by email but you can also set up an RSS feed and new items will come matching your search terms when they are added to the database and you can go to this RSS feed and have a whole list of them. We have new ones popping up all of the time.

 

You can help find new articles for your dissertation or doctoral study, you are being comprehensive, so you are finding everything you can out there, so you don't miss anything new, and it saves time. So you do a great search, you get all of these really relevant focused results back, you're gonna want to go back in to that search again to see if anything new has been published. Well, setting up a search alert you don't have to do it, you tell the database to do it, it’s going to run it for you and is going to send you the results so it's like passive searching, it does the work for you.

 

 

>>:  Excellent. So we are saying pretty much these are really helpful -- hint, hint -- if you are doing a dissertation, if you are a doctoral student. For some of you who are not doctoral students, we didn't limit this for who can sign up for this webinar, so it still can be fun if you are getting a master’s degree or something, you are not looking at doing a dissertation, it can still be a fun thing to do or just to stay current in your area. But, Kim, you mentioned finding new articles for those doctoral, those [inaudible] students, how many new articles should they be finding each week?

 

>>:  Well, that really depends on the topics. Some topics are just more popular than others and there's just more information out there. Sometimes you have a topic that is really hot right now in the field and in your field of study that people are discussing, and you want to be able to find a lot, sometimes it's not that popular of a topic and you're not going to find them.

 

But I have had some faculty tell me that they recommend that their students find one to five new articles every week in their subject area so that they are aware of what is going on and what that current conversation is. That's a lot so this is a really helpful way to stay on top of all of this new research.

 

>>:  Very cool, yep.

 

>>:  So where do we set them up?  This is where we get to the nitty-gritty of the webinar. These are two links. The first one is a link to the library guide on search alerts that talks about setting them up, and the second one is how to set up alerts in Google Scholar. I am going to do a demo and show you how you can set these up right now.

 

The first thing you have to remember is that you are not setting up a search alert with a specific database. What you are doing is you are setting up with a vendor and some vendors can provide numerous databases to us. Let's just go in here to our databases from the library homepage. I will click on databases A to Z and we will just go into - - since I'm Education Liaison Librarian, I just always go into education resource, but this will work in any of the EBSCO databases. This is an EBSCO database. I know that because I have this EBSCO icon here. If I click on choose this database link, it’s going to list all of the EBSCO databases that the library has access to. So what I'm going to show you now is how to set up a search alert that you will be able to set up with any of these databases such as on Medline, [inaudible] business source or psych info. All of them.

 

So the first thing I want to do is just do a simple search. Let's say I am interested in teacher's career development, let's do that one. I will do a really easy career development and barriers or obstacles or challenges for teachers to get - - to do career development. I am going to go down here and I'm going to limit my results, I'm going to uncheck full text because I want to find everything out there. You don't have to. If you are just doing a search for something for an assignment, you will leave full text checked off. I am interested in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and I only want articles since 2015.

 

I will go ahead and hit search and I got 176. That's a lot, I want to narrow this down a bit. I will just search for teachers in the abstract of the article and that brings it down a little bit. I am getting a nice group of focused results. Let's say the state a really relevant group of results I have here. I am finding articles that are very helpful to me and I want to find more so I want to keep running the search. I'm going to tell EBSCO to have an education source run the search for me.

 

So, as I mentioned, this is through EBSCO and in order for it to run a search alert I have to make an account with EBSCO. This will allow me to not only set up search alerts but also save articles to my folder. It is very easy to do, all you want to do is go up here to the sign in. I have an account but if you click on sign in and you don't have one, you click on create one now, and it's very easy to do. You just walk through the process and once you have one when you sign in you will know that you are in your account because it will say my EBSCO right up here on the left and my name is up here.

 

Now, when you are doing searches in any EBSCO database such as an education source, when you get in there you will not automatically be in your account. You are going to have to sign in so that means when you are doing a search you're going to have to sign in twice, you will sign in for the library and then you will sign in here for EBSCO.

 

Now that I am signed in, I can set up my alert. I want to go over here to where it says share and just go down to create email alert and click on that and here I have it. So there are a couple options that you might want to choose. It starts out with what the alert is, in the subject line of the email it's going to say your EBSCO alert with this information of what you are searching. I like to click HTML. If you do that when you get the email you have a direct link to the article so it's not just going to tell you what the article is, you can actually link right to it.

 

Then I am going to go here and I'm going to put in my email address and – where did it go?  I hit return so it's easy to find your search alerts, we are going to go to folder, search alerts, and this is the alert right there. I will continue to edit that. I am going to tell it how long I want to run, let's say I want them to run it once a month, I had my email in there, I will go ahead and click save and then once a month EBSCO will run the search and send me the results.

Now, right now I am in my folder, I clicked on this little folder icon right up here and you can see there is a link down here to search alerts and I have all of my alerts here. Some of them have names, some of them -- this is what I just did. But you can see with this search alert I have right here it has all the dates that the search alert has run. So I can click on -- I can go back, I received the email to look at it but let's say I want to go back. I come back here. Let me look at the search that was run on June 13 and there, that search brought up four new articles for this search.

 

So it's a really great easy way to get these new articles. Now, as I mentioned, it's really important to sign in when you are doing this. There is no reminder that you have not signed in, so you just always want to look and make sure it says my EBSCO here and your name is up here. As you are doing your searches you can save things to your folder, but if you are not in your account when you exit, you will lose everything that is in that folder. So you want to double check that you are actually logged in if you're planning on saving anything.

 

I also really want to show you, very quickly, how to set up an alert in Google Scholar when you are doing some citation chaining. So Google Scholar is a great resource, it really has so much great information, it's really good for finding exact articles because it does have so much information in and I always want to access Google Scholar through the library.

 

So what I will do is this banner at the top of the library page, which is always at the top of every library page, I'm going to click on start your research and then I'm going to click on Google Scholar. So now when I do a search in here, I am automatically linked to the Walden databases. So what I will do is, let's say I have an article, I am going to copy this article and just past it in there. So this is an article that I found that was really helpful in my search. It was published in 2009. I want to find some newer articles that I can use so if I just search for this in Google Scholar, it will find me the exact article, here's a link so I can look at it in the Walden databases, but if I click at those cited by 84, it will bring me to the 84 articles that cite this article so I am moving forward in the literature because they've all been published after 2009. So now I can also click on search within citing articles and in here I will type in distance education and it’s going to find all of the articles that not only cite this one, but they also talk about distance education.

 

So now I have focused results. This is a good time to set up an alert in Google Scholar because Google Scholar has so much information I don't want to be inundated with emails from them. So by setting up now, I'm only going to get articles that not only cite this original one, but also discuss distance education and it’s really easy to set up an alert in Google Scholar. We just click on create alert, you type in your email address and then click on create an alert and it will email you every time something new is published and Google Scholar has access to it.

 

Now, I'm kind of jumping ahead and I have to apologize to Erin because once I start talking, I have a hard time stopping. I wanted to pass this over to Erin, so she can set up an alert in another database as well. Sorry about that Erin.

 

>>:  No, no problem. That was very informative. So I do want to mention that Kim showed us how to set up an alert in any database that comes from that EBSCO company. So many times students don't realize that we have a lot of other databases from other companies, too, and they are often very important for your area of research. I just want to cover one other of the main ones because we don't have time to show you every single type of database, but I want to show you another main one. There is a company called ProQuest and we get several databases from them as well.

 

Let me go back over to the library homepage. I am the Liaison to the College of Health Professions so, especially for my nursing and health science students, there are some ProQuest databases that are focused in those areas that are really important for their research topics, usually. But if you are not in health sciences or nursing the ProQuest databases also we have one is a multidisciplinary that is called ProQuest Central and you can find articles on all kinds of topics there. Business, education, all different areas.

So just because you are just not health sciences or nursing don't think this doesn’t apply to you. I'm going to start. There are multiple ways to get to every database. I am going to show you getting to it like Kim did through databases A to Z and then I'm going to jump to the P’s for ProQuest and let me scroll down here and I will get to where you will see all of the ProQuest databases listed. ProQuest Central, that's our multidisciplinary one. If you did want to look in e-books, you can do that or the dissertations, you can specifically do that.

 

I want to point out that the ProQuest Health and Medical database, Nursing and Allied Health database, the Science Journals and just like we saw in EBSCO, we could do a search across more than one ProQuest database and set up an alert. I am going to show you that really quickly. I know we are running close on time. I'm going to ProQuest Central and its multi-disciplinary and to choose more than one database I would click on change databases up here. It's above the advanced search box. I would click on change databases and then I can just, if I wanted to do, let's say, ProQuest Central and the Nursing Allied Health database, I can have that check marked. Actually, ProQuest is going to include all of these that are automatically check marked underneath it, so I have a lot that I am searching here.

 

I am going to say use selective databases. So maybe, let's say I just wanted the nursing and other health and medical collection, I can just use whatever I want. Use those selected databases. And again, like Kim did in the EBSCO database I would want to do a really targeted search. This was something I just did earlier today, so I am going to use it because it's on my mind and it's probably going to be a little bit too broad but let's say I'm looking for articles about caregivers with patients with dementia and their attitudes about change -- actually I'm going to say their attitudes with transitions and I will go ahead and do that search.

 

Now things are little bit different here in the ProQuest database. I don't have to have a login, I personally like that because I don't like having the login. So I do have a lot here. I might limit down a little bit more, I could add another keyword. Let's say I like this, I'm going to go save search alert, click on that, it's right underneath my search box, and I'm going to click on create alert. Kim mentioned RSS feeds. If you want to create an RSS feed, you can also do that. I personally -- I don't how you feel about this, Kim, but I personally like the alerts, I like it to come to my email because I have to remember to check an RSS feed. I used to do RSS feeds and I never remembered to check them, so I like to - - so I will click on create alert and I will show you it’s similar to what we saw before. I can name this alert. Let's say I want to say this is my broad search because I did not narrow it down too much whatever I want to name it and then it will give me what I actually searched for. Sometimes people can just copy and paste that and make that the name, so they can see what they actually put in as their keywords as the name of the alert.

 

>>:  Erin, I just want to mention, because somebody just asked a question about this, but naming the alert is really a great idea because sometimes you forget why you're searching it or what exactly it was, so it is really very helpful if you just name it something right away and then you'll know what it is.

 

>>:  Yeah, something like that. Remind yourself why you did the search. Just as we saw, I would put in my email, whatever email I want it to go to. None of this is linked - - I mean, you have to login to get into our databases, but if you don't want to have to check your Walden email for these alerts, you don't have to use your Walden email for this. I like to mention that because sometimes students say that they really don't check their Walden email. Make sure you put in an email that you will actually check.

 

The subject line will be what the search terms were in your search, so that is different than the name that you give the search, and then this is the part that you want to really pay attention to. These steps three and four. So do you want the search details?  What it was that you searched for, yes or no.  Do you want them to include highlighting?  This is where you will see it on the results screen too. It gives you the little snippet of part of the article or part of the abstract and the title and if your keywords that you searched for are part of those, it will highlight your search terms. So you can see this one has my search terms in the title. I like the highlighting, but some people don't care, they don't notice it.

 

And then this is really important. Do you want to include newly published documents only?  And I hinted at this a little bit earlier, sometimes this database will get new content that is historical, it gets a whole journal that it did not have before and it's getting everything that has ever been published in that journal and it's new to ProQuest Central but that does not mean that it's actually newly published. It gets the whole run of a journal that could go back to the 1990s or 1940s or whatever.

 

So maybe you don't care about those old things because you only need newly published research. So make sure you keep that on newly published documents only unless you are interested in older things too that maybe are new here to this database but not actually newly published. Just pay attention to that and then how often do you want it. Again, same as we saw with Kim and EBSCO.

 

But I also like to pay attention to this stop after. It is defaulted to two months, so that means it won't send you anything after two months. Let's say you are working on your dissertation you might want to set that to six months or a whole year because you don't want to miss out on something as you're moving on from your literature review part of your dissertation and writing the rest of it. So you might want to change that to six months or a year. It is going to default to two months, just be aware of that. So maybe I will change that there.

 

Then this is something I mentioned a little bit too. Do you want it to send a scheduled alert even when there's nothing new?  You can go ahead and check that, so you know that you are going to be getting those emails monthly or weekly. You can choose which day of the week you get them on. It can be search alert Sunday. And then you know you will get one even if nothing new has matched your search. I think sometimes people like that reassurance that it's working, and it’s still set up.Then you just click create an alert.

 

I know I'm running out of time. Were there any other questions about that?

 

>>:  No, no other questions. I also, when it comes to putting an email in, sometimes I also recommend for some people to use their personal email because you will still have these accounts with these vendors after you leave Walden so if you have access to any of these databases through a public library or through your work, you can still access them so sometimes that can be helpful to have on your personal email.

 

>>:  Great tip. Because I have had access to EBSCO databases since I was an undergrad and I still have the same personal email and I can still access and boy is that fun to look at sometimes. So before we wrap up completely, I did want to point out let's say you are using a completely different database. You have more questions about this or you have questions that we could not answer tonight because they were outside of the scope of this webinar.

 

Here up in the top right-hand corner is where you will find our Ask a Librarian service. Again, I am on the library homepage but if you go to any other page through the library website, it is still up here in the top right corner. Just click on Ask a Librarian and you will see all the different ways that you can get in touch with us. We will get back with you within 24 hours if you email us. It's usually a lot faster than that, but we have 24 hours, you usually don’t have to wait that long. And we do have chat hours, just specific hours where we offer chat service. It's not 24/7, we don't have enough people for that. But, for instance, we are live on chat right now there is someone available. If I click this it would be a real live librarian on the other end. So you can send questions that way and we hope that you will. If you need more help with either search alerts or anything else that we were not able to get to tonight.

 

Let me just make sure - - also, if you save this PowerPoint we have included, well, Kim included wonderful links to specific account help through these vendors. We don't control the EBSCO vendor. We pay them money and we get service from them, but we don't always know all the technical ins and outs of their services or the things that can go wrong, technically, with their content. So you can contact them, you can see their help page for using that my EBSCO folder. ProQuest does have a service where you can create an account, it's called my research so if you wanted to learn more about that you can go to that my research help page. We just don't have time to go through all of that tonight.

 

And just another reminder that this is a series and if you want to learn about specific journals alerts where you would just get alerts about new articles on your topic from one journal or particular journals, come to our webinar in July. We would love to have you back there.

 

And I think I will go ahead and stop the recording and we will hang out and see if you have more questions.

 

Thank you again for attending.

 

>>:  Yes, thank you.

>>:  I think you got most of the questions, Kim. Sorry about that.

 

>>:  No, that was fine.

 

>>:  You held their attention so well they had more questions when you were talking.

 

>>:  Okay, thank you for coming.

 

>>:  I see a question about the five-year rule. Yeah, so I think what that person is asking about is with dissertations, with doctoral studies, there is a rule that you want to have your literature review mostly looking at current research which means the last five years and absolutely. You will want to look at your dissertation guidebook or if you are in another program that is not a Ph.D dissertation and let's say you’re a DHA student, you want to look that doctoral study guidebook. Make sure you are following all the rules for your specific literature review. If you have more questions about that, please do contact us and there is a lot more we can say but I will just keep it nice and simple there that, yes, for most of literature reviews for doctoral studies and dissertations, you want to have your lit review focused on research for the last five years.

 

>>:  And someone else had a question about if they can have the transcript of this webinar with screen shots. The transcription service link is right in the chat, but you will be getting an email in a couple days with a recording that will have all of the screenshots. The transcription service does not have screenshots, but you will be getting a copy of the recording and if you download the PowerPoint presentation in the handout section, you also have the PowerPoint slide deck. The PowerPoint slide deck will not be included in the email with the recording of the webinar.

 

>>:  Correct.

 

>>:  And that email – it will be sent. Erin, you said you can usually do it --

 

>>:  Yes. I can set it to be a few hours after we are done.

 

>>:  And you can set up as many alerts as you would like. Opportunities are boundless.

 

>>:  Yes, there is no limit to the number of alerts. As many as you can handle getting, I guess.

 

>>:  The PowerPoint slide deck is in the handout section, so that's in the Go to Webinar toolbox. If you are not seeing a large rectangle that says Go to Webinar, look up and see if you find something with an arrow pointing to the left. If you click on that you will get a drop-down menu and the handout section will be included in there.

 

>>:  I am just making sure that we got to all of the questions. I think there were some questions in there about general dissertation research help. We do have - - I think I'm still sharing my screen. It's one of the options under Ask a Librarian for students who are working on the dissertations, those literature reviews, we do have doctoral research appointments. Any questions related to that that we were not able to get to, please, all of you, make an appointment with your library. We have designated librarians like Kim said she's for education, I'm one of the health sciences librarians so you just click that. Do please read all of the information about the appointments and then you select your college and it will give you the librarian that works with your college and then you can set up an appointment.

 

Do that, please, since we were not able to get to things that were a little bit outside the scope of what we were talking about tonight. All right. Well, thank you all for attending and with that I think that's a good note to end on. So I will go ahead and end webinar and you can look for that recording.

 

>>:  Okay, good night everybody.

 

 

 

End Transcript

 

 

Created June 2018 by Walden University Library