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Mysteries of the Library: Revealed! Books

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

 

KIM BURTON:   Hi everybody.  We will get started right at the top of the hour and let a few more people coming.

 

We are going to get started.  My name is Kim Burton and I am one of the reference liaison librarians at Walden.  It looks like my camera is not working so I apologize.  But I am here and I went to say hello and Andrea is here with me as well.

 

ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Hi, on the psychology and counseling librarian at Walden so welcome to our webinar tonight.

 

KIM BURTON:  Before we get started went to go through a few housekeeping items.  So this is the Zoom webinar screen, and this is what it looks like on your computer.  To the left at the bottom there is a link for audio settings, you can click on there to make sure those are set up correctly.  In the middle of the bar the chat button and this how we will do all our questions and comments through the webinar.  So if you could click on that you can type your questions and or type allowance let us know where you're from, you can do so right there.

 

You can also send it to "all panelists" or" all panelists and attendees" where everyone can see it.  We will try to answer your questions as we go along.  If they are too off point or in-depth we may refer you to the "ask a librarian button" in the library, and we will show you how to access that prediction before I get started I am going to take the link to the captioning service, and I will put that in the chat for you.  So if you need the captioning service you can use that link right there.

 

And the next link I will put is a link to the slide decks you can get the slides with all the great links in it.  So I am going to go ahead and hit record.  And we will get started.

 

So welcome everybody, to the July Mysteries of the Library: revealed webinar plate and we have books and even though we are virtual we will talk about a can access books that are available to you.  These Mystery of the Library series are the third Monday of the month at 7 PM Eastern.  So mark your calendars and you can join us for future ones we have coming up. 

 

So we're talking about books today.  With talk about using books in academic work and demonstrating how to search by topic and how to locate books in the library if you're looking for specific title.

 

The first thing that we have to address is the big elephant in the room.  The library does not have textbooks for your courses.  There's a lot of reasons for this.  There are some restrictions when it comes to copyrights and limited licensing privileges that prohibit the library from obtaining and landing out the books.  But there are a few options for you. at the Walden bookstore, you can use an outside vendor.  A lot of outside vendors rent textbooks -- not true about the Walden bookstore.  We have a link on the slide to the quick answer that goes over some of these options with links to the bookstore and some other outside vendors if you want to go that way.

 

Before we can answer the question "why you scholarly books and academic research" we need to take a step back and look at the more generally as books and what they are.

 

Obviously, books have a lot of information for they have more information on an article because they are so big.  However, information in books is generally a lot older than articles.  There's a lot of collaborating especially in scholarly publishing with researchers, authors and editors bad then they go through the publication and marketing process.  As this goes on, the material in the books is aging.

 

However, we don't want to write them off.  You can still go to books for a lot of great information.  Books are great for history and background information on topics but they also give you a general knowledge on concepts, such as theories and research design.  Often the original or groundbreaking work on a theory in your area of study will be published in a book and not in an academic article. 

 

Books also have different types of coverage, some folks have a very broad coverage on many topics.so this would be the category your textbooks fall under since the purpose of the textbook is to provide information on concepts covered to the whole course.  So they have a little bit of information about a lot of stuff.  Other books go very in depth.

 

They take that one topic and they have all the room to give you the background information and other information.  For instance, let's say you have a research project.  And you have to choose a research design, you have to expend how you will collect and analyze your data and you have to provide a reason why you should choose the design you chose.  So you’re thinking back to foundational courses or research courses you took a new member the qualitative research you heard about their and you think that is what you want to do.  But you're not sure.  So you can go back and look at your old textbook or you could go into the library into a very broad search for books on qualitative research.

 

Andrea will show you how to do that later.  So I actually did a search and I found this book on qualitative research.  And if I down to chapter 5, chapter 5, conducting effective interviews.  The starts on page 107 and ends on page 136.so 30 pages of qualitative research.  If this what you want you can search for books on interviews and we have this book here called Interviewing Groups and Individuals in Qualitative Research.  And you see this book is 147 pages long.  So we go from the first broker we have 30 pages, you can see if this is how you want to go and then you have the next book, 147 pages just on doing the interviews.

 

Now, one thing you have to remember when we talk about books are books are not peer-reviewed.  While they do it through an extensive editorial process, especially scholarly books, that is not considered the same review process that a peer-reviewed journal goes through.  And for more information on peer review and how to find peer-reviewed articles, you can go to the library's guide to peer review and I have the links that up here in the slides.  I'm now going to turn the presentation over to Andrea.  She will take it from there.

 

ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Thank you, Kim, I will share my screen.  You should be able to see my PowerPoint.  If not let Kim know and the chat box and will get that fixed.  Let's rewind a bit more and talk about, what do we mean by scholarly books?

 

Generally, scholarly books are not books you will find in Barnes and Noble or the public library.  The general public are not necessarily interested in scholarly books and they want something more generalized and easier to read.  Scholarly books are meant for an academic audience bad so they have much more dense reading than you would with popular books you will find that your public library.

 

What is interesting about scholarly books is the same researchers who publish the peer-reviewed research articles that you read for your classes also publish these books.  As Kim said, a lot of seminal works are actually founded books.  But the same authors also publish peer-reviewed research as well.

 

So what is really helpful about using scholarly books? What they do is they synthesize and analyze really complex topics.  So they are great for dissertation research, final projects, because they give you an overview and background of all of the scholarly material, although scholarly research articles out there.  And they presented it in a more digestible format, if you will.

 

So it will give you context to better help understand peer-reviewed literature on that topic.  Why are they using particular theories or methodologies?  Books will often help give you that history and help you understand the current literature.  What is also great about scholarly books is they will often have an extensive reference list.  So typically in your assignments and discussions, you are asked to find scholarly sources.  This at Walden typically means peer-reviewed research articles although you can always check with your instructor.  Sometimes you can use scholarly books and other sources but if for some reason you find a book that interests you or that addresses your topic, you can look at the reference list and go to the work cited and go to the original research article and this is helpful for dissertation research or assignments or discussions, where you need that peer-reviewed research article.

 

Let's hop over to the library.  And we are going to look at, how do you search books by topic? That is something that is very common, very common task you will want to do.

 

You should be able to see the library homepage now.  Again, if you are not able to, let Kim know in the chat box and we will get that fixed.  Let's say you are doing dissertation research, working on a final project and you want to look at the different variables you're interested in or the concepts.  And you want to do a book search.  The first place you would go to is the publications button over here on the right-hand side.  So we are going to click on that.

 

You will see on the left-hand side a menu for different types of publications.  You will see the third one down is for books.  And when you click on that, you will see this center page change to a search for books.

 

Hopefully you are familiar with database surfing.  All our books reside in databases and the basic will for searching databases is that one idea or concept goes into one search box.

 

My rule of thumb is one search box, one concept.  And if you want to enter in more concepts look for an advanced search link.

 

I have a topic, drug use, teen drug use, and preventative measures, that you might use.   So that's three different topics and I'm going to enter them into three different search boxes.

 

Just as we would search for a peer-reviewed research article, I will enter in "drug use" but I will give the database options for searching similar and related concepts.

 

Does can go into the same search box.  One idea per search box.  Synonyms can go in the same.  We will put in teen in the second search box and * and now will take the place of any other  endings for the word team, took teen, teenaged and teenager, and we will also add in "adolescent" because that's also a term for teenager and we will use an * again to search for adolescent with a "t"or adolescence with a "c" and then we will put prevention in the last search box. we click search and look at the results.

 

We have 530 results.  Now, when you are looking at the results list, it is good to know what type of book you are looking at.  You are looking at a general book, handbook or maybe an encyclopedia.  And are you looking at a chapter of the book or the full book itself.  Basically this first link will be the title.  To find out if this is a chapter title or book title, you simply need to look at the publication information below it.

 

Here I see this is giving me citation information for a full book.  If I scroll down, for instance, let's look for another example.  Let's look at this.  This is another title.  This is also a book.  Handbook of Adolescent Drug Use in Prevention.  Because when I look at the publication information, it is just for a book but if I look at the one directly above it, there is the title Theoretical Models of Drug Use Etiology.  But in the citation you can see it's coming from the book below it.   In the Handbook of Adolescent Drug Use in Prevention.  So were both seeing a chapter of the book and the book itself.  So let's take a look at the full book. Just like you can  in the other databases, if you click on the title you will be able to see an abstract or summary of the book so you can see the description listed here if you even want to look at it.

 

To get the full text it is just like the databases look well.  You look for a PDF link  Or you look at the "find at Walden" button, this is the "find at Walden" button. it's telling us it's in the database called site books. Because the results lists are coming from databases IU advise that you simply click on the link available and look around for options of how to navigate the book.  In this case would be clicked on the link, we saw that the table of contents was listed below. And that each chapter is linked.

 

Like Kim was saying earlier, this is a great place to look for theories-- let me zoom in so you can see there's a chapter on theories, that you saw on the result list.  If you scroll down it will talk about different research and concepts related to this topic.

 

And you will also see information on evidence-based research, and other related concepts.  So this would be a good place to start if this is a topic that you are searching.

 

So let's look at one more result.  If we scroll back, and we looked at this result, Parenting and Teen Drug Use.   This is a full book because I'm going to look at the citation information in it is not telling me that it is a chapter so I will go into the book.

 

I will click on "find at Walden".  Too this is telling me it's coming from a database called ProQuest e-book central.  I will click on that link and you will see that the interface looks significantly different, right?  But all you have to do is realize you are in a book database looking for some of the different options available to.  Download the book, read it online, and of course, a summary of the book that you can see here, and the table of contents.

 

So you can see different chapters on this topic.  Click on the menu will be able to read the full chapter of the book.

 

So it is really as simple as that.  You just generally have to avoid getting flustered that the interfaces look different and browser until you see links that will bring you to the table of contents you can navigate.

 

So that is one way to look up books by topic.

 

We are still on the books page here.  And we can navigate in the middle.  There are two other database collections of books I want to point out.  This is a general search for books that will search all of the books.

 

But sometimes you may just want to get background information from a handbook, short article or in Encyclopedia.  This is also on the publications page so if I click on encyclopedias  and handbooks you can see specific databases listed in the middle.

 

I don't know about you, but I often, in my younger years -- a little bit ago -- I won't tell you how long -- but when I was in high school and middle school, the reference section and library was my favorite place to go.  Because I could go in and simply look up a topic in the encyclopedia or other types of handbooks that no one was allowed to check out -- and you did a very succinct overview of the topic.  You didn't have to go through chapters and chapters of the two or 300 page book.

 

While we have databases that do the same thing but the not world book encyclopedia is remember when you were younger. these are scholarly and have much more dense information than those of very general and simplified world book encyclopedia entries.

 

SAGE knowledge is the first one we will look at.  I will use the same example as earlier.  I will look up "drug use".  So I don't -- I just want to look at one variable at a time.  I find that SAGE is best used for that reason, to look up one concept.  Sometimes if you get too complex it doesn't bring back the search results are anticipating --so I will go ahead and click for search for drug use and the same advice is applicable here.

 

Look at the results list and determine what are you looking at?  Are you looking at an encyclopedia?  A handbook?  And are you looking at a chapter in a book or the full book itself?  This is an encyclopedia of crime and punishment.  If I click on it, it will give me alphabetical entries.  Everything from A-Z that you might want to know about the encyclopedia of crime and punishment.  That will give you a brief overview of something of interest.  If I go back to my results list, I’m seeing there is a handbook of implicit cognition and addiction.

 

Handbooks are arranged by chapter and topic.  So if you go to the table of contents-- this one does not look available to us so I don't see the -- oh we do have this one.  You can see they are arranged by chapter.  You can click on each chapter to get an overview but unlike encyclopedias they are not alphabetical.

 

Let's take a closer look about what we might find in a handbook entry.  I'm going to scroll down and find a chapter that we can look at in more detail.  This one looks interesting.  This is a handbook and it is a chapter in the handbook called 21st-Century Sociology.

 

The chapter is called "the sociology of drug use".  Let's look at what we might find in a typical chapter in a handbook.  I don't know if you can see this on your end, but if you look at the scrollbar it is really small, and that means I'll be able to scroll down for a while.  This'll be a relatively long chapter.  It is often going to give you on the right-hand side as well subheadings in that chapter.

 

So I don't even have to scroll through to see this is a very long chapter.  What is interesting is, as Kim said, it will give me a history of the research on drug use.  And it's going to talk about seminal researchers in this area of study.

 

It is also going to give us theories of drug use.  So they are going to talk about social control, self-control, conflict there.  And it is going to go in all the way down to different methodologies that you might want to use in surveying drug use.  Again, handbooks and encyclopedias and general reference books can be particularly helpful for dissertation research, final projects, or any assignments or discussions where you can use scholarly sources that are not peer-reviewed.  This would be a great place to start, is in the reference section.

 

So I am going to -- go back over to my PowerPoint quickly read do we have any questions, Kim, on searching for books by topic, either in the general book search or the reference section?

 

KIM BURTON:  Not yet.

 

ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Great.  So we covered during a general book search, looking at the reference section, and lastly, we are going to talk about how to find an exact book.  Often when you are reading scholarly research, you might find, again, a seminal work that is a book or a reference to a book, or you have the exact title.

 

So in that case, what you can do is search the library for that book by title.  So we are going to go back to this book search.  So you will want to select the general book search.  And you can see the search box is here.  Can I have one title, one idea goes into one search box.  For instance, say you were looking for Malcolm Knowles', The Adult Learner, that is a seminal work of his.  So I am going to enter that into the search box. And I will go ahead and click search.

 

What happens with general search boxes is they are going to find these words in some kind of order in our database we know we are looking for a title and nobody wants to scroll through 245 results.

 

So we can tell the database that this is a book title.  And to only look for these terms in the title of the book.  And this is the same functionality our other databases have as well.  So on the right-hand side we have the drop-down menu to select a field.  And tell the database this is a book title we are looking for so we will only look for the terms in all the book titles.

 

Now we have 30 results but we can easily see without having to do much more searching that it looks like we have two additions for the book and we know they are both by Malcolm Knowles.  So if we want to see if there's any additions hidden in these 30 results, if we want to we can also put in his last name until the database that this is the author's name.  And we can update our search if you want to as well.

 

Now we see that we only have those two editions of the book.  I would always start there.  When you are looking for a book.  We might not always have it in the library.  So what I want to talk about is, what do you do if we do not have a book by title?

 

There are options.  You can go to the public library and ask them to request a book for you through interlibrary loan.  That is an option.  We also have -- there is an option called "WorldCat" which is a worldwide book catalog or it's actually a library catalog it searches things other than books, that you can look up the title of your book and see if it is in a near library.  So if we wanted to do that, we could take the Adult Learner and see if we could find that in a nearby library.  If we are on the library homepage, we can go to the publications option.  Go over to books.  Yukon and there's a link here, find books "Beyond the Walden library."

 

So one of the options is to find it through WorldCat.  So if I want to do that, I simply scroll down. economist does not have it listed.  Here it is.  I am sorry.  It will give you instructions on how to use WorldCat. W what you do is you click on books,  you search by title and then you can actually put in your ZIP Code and it will tell you which libraries have a book.  And within how many miles.

 

So that's an option if the Walden library does not have the book you are looking for.

 

That is essentially the two main ways you will look for books, book spike topic and exact books.  If there are no other questions I will wrap up with how to ask questions after the webinar is over.

 

There are three ways to do that.  Quick answers, ask a librarian and doctoral research appointments. Where do you find these options on the library homepage?

 

If you want to look up quick answers, which is a database of FAQ you can click on search everything and if you want to refresh your mind on what peer review is, you're not sure, we've mentioned it a few times.  You can simply type in "peer review", click search, and we will give you some quick answers on different areas of peer review.  What it is, how you verify your articles peer-reviewed, how do you cite your article?

 

These are all short little answers that you can look up for a refresher on a library skill or strategy.

 

All the other help in the library you'll be able to find under "ask librarian".  So if you click there, you can email us, chat with us or leave us a voicemail.  Just know with voicemail be only respond via email because we staff our ask a librarian service at various times during the week so there's really not a way to reach you back by phone to ensure you are there.

 

If you are a doctoral student working on your dissertation, you can also schedule a 30 minute appointment with us.  So I would explore all those options as you continue on at Walden in your program and you have questions, whether about books or any other library resource or research strategy we might be able to help you with.

 

With that, we are going to stick around for a few extra minutes.  But Kim, why don't we go ahead and stop the recording now.  And then we will just check in with everybody to see if there are any final questions.

 

KIM BURTON:  I stop the recording --thank you everyone for coming tonight.  We will hang out a little longer if you have any questions.

 

ANDREA LEMIEUX:   If there's a title or topic you are interested in that maybe you've been having problems with, we are happy to look at that briefly. And we will stick around.  I am not seeing any questions but

 

KIM BURTON:  I am not seeing questions come in either.  We can wait a few more minutes.

 

It doesn't seem like we have questions coming in. So I think that is it for us tonight.  We will wrap this up and hopefully we get to see you guys virtually next month at our next Mysteries of the Library: Revealed webinar.

 

ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Send us questions.  And we will see you then.  Goodbye.

 

 

End Transcript

 

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