Library Transcripts

 

Video Link: https://youtu.be/6eM5wmvla9c

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>>:  Hello everybody, and welcome to Mysteries of the Library Revealed webinar series. We are going to start in about a minute or two. I want to make sure that you can hear me so if someone can type in the questions box if you can hear me to make sure that my audio is working. Great, thank you so much. We have about one more minute, so we will wait for more people to get here and we will start at 8:30. Thank you

 

It is 8:30 so we will get started because we have a lot to cover. And I am going to start recording. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Mysteries of the Library Revealed Thoreau webinar. My name is Kim Burton, I am one of the instruction reference librarians here at Walden. With me is Traci Hector, also a reference librarian here at Walden. We have our cameras on to say hello and let you know that we are real people but sometimes it can interfere with the broadcast, so we are going to shut those off.

 

Before I get started, I want to do a little housekeeping. This is the GoToWebinar toolbox. If you don't see this box, look for an arrow like this and click on it and it should expand to look like this. This is how you can ask us questions during the webinar in the questions box. Just so you know, we have a lot to cover tonight, so we are just going to be answering questions that are about Thoreau. Otherwise, we will just refer you to the ask a librarian if your questions are off-topic.

 

The PowerPoint presentation that we are using tonight is in our section right here for you. You can click on that to open it. Sometimes it does not open, it goes down to your downloads and if you click on it and nothing is happening, go to your downloads folder and it might be in there.

 

The reason I recommend downloading the PowerPoint is because we have a lot of links that we put in there, so you will have access to all of those links.

 

This webinar is being captioned and this is the link for the closed captioning. I also put it in the chat, so you can copy it and paste it into your browser.

 

Finally, I am recording this webinar so all of you are going to get a copy of this recording in about a day or two.

 

That is going to come directly from GoToWebinar, it may also come from Susan Stekel, just so you are aware, it may show up in your spam, so if you're looking for this and you don't see it, look for something from GoToWebinar or from Susan Stekel who is one of the instruction librarians here the library.

 

This is one of the Mysteries of the Library Revealed webinars. This is a series that we do once a month on a library topic. We usually keep it nice and short, 30 minutes, and we try to let you know everything we can about this one particular topic.

 

We present them every third Monday of the month at 8:30 p.m. eastern time. We have the webinar scheduled throughout the rest of the year, so our next one will be on November 19 - - I'm sorry, on finding full text. So if you're ever in the library, you are looking for this and you can only find the abstract, this should be the webinar you should go to. In December, we are doing a Google Scholar one, which is a great mysteries webinar. It shows you how you can use Google Scholar to enhance your searching and really use it as a tool.

 

That is what is coming up in the Mysteries series. Tonight, we are talking about Thoreau. What is Thoreau?  Thoreau is a multi-database search tool developed for the Walden University library. Nobody has this. If you go to any other library and you say you want to use the database Thoreau, they will not know what you are talking about because it is just in Walden.

 

What it does is it searches much of the library's collection, but not everything. The reason for this is not all databases or all of the library content is available because of publishers licensing and copyright restrictions.

 

I think of it as it does a broad search, but not a deep search. You just want to keep that in mind when you are using Thoreau. You can use it to find videos, articles, books, all different types of resources and all different levels of resources as well.

 

It will find trade publications, reference materials such as encyclopedias, dictionary entries, but it will also bring back scholarly information. Even peer-reviewed articles as well.

 

It will also bring back information from many different subject areas. The Walden Library has a bunch of databases that we have curated to support you and to support all of the programs that we have in Walden.

 

If you are looking for something specific in education or business or the social sciences, you may want to go look in those databases individually. But sometimes one field will overflow into another. And you might not realize there could be other areas you might want to look into. So if you are in education and you are doing something with distance education, there is a lot that flows into technology, you might want to look in those technology databases. So Thoreau is a great place to go to to see what other databases you might want to look at. When I talk about subject specific databases, I want to show you where you can go to find them. These are the databases that we have curated and put together for you to support the programs, no matter what program you're in.

 

If you go to the library website, click on select the subject and here we have all of our different programs. So if you are in nursing you can click on nursing and you are going to find all of your subject specific databases right in here.

 

If you are in education, same thing. And here are the subject specific databases that you are going to want to look at. As I mentioned, you don't just want to rely on those solely because a lot of times things overflow and you want to be comprehensive and search everywhere. So searching Thoreau is a great place to find what other subject areas might have information on your topic.

 

This brings up the question of so Traci, when should you use Thoreau and when should you not?

 

>>:  I am going to show my screen and we are going to look at the pros and cons of using Thoreau. When should you use Thoreau? Thoreau can be perfect for most undergraduate research because you are often looking for the big picture perspective or like a big picture application to the topic or the field at large. It can also be used for graduate research. The total scope of the different assignments that you're going to have is going to vary, but Thoreau can be useful for those assignments, discussions, or those smaller papers where you are asked to explore the broader perspective of a topic.

 

You also want to remember that the library homepage where you can select a field like business or education, nursing, and see the databases that are recommended for that field. So Thoreau would be good for a topic like nursing management because that fits under more than one of those fields.

 

It is also good for those topics that really don't have a corresponding program. So if you are looking for articles on scholarly writing, for example, education might have some great resources on that topic, but Thoreau would probably be your best bet.

 

Thoreau is also good if you get very few results on a subject specific data base. All of us librarians have that issue sometimes. Students have that issue sometimes. Sometimes the topic is just going to be covered more broadly in the general literature so that those articles would be sufficient to support your paper, a point that you are trying to cover in your paper, but maybe not so in-depth that they are going to be included in those subject specific collections. So Thoreau would be a good option in that case.

 

Finally, you can do a general exploratory search and Thoreau. That's to give you an idea of where research might be published, whether you are talking about individual journals or databases. So what is an exploratory search? Have you ever come up with this really specific, amazing topic and you are energized, and you are all pumped up but when you start to look for articles, everything falls apart?

 

When you come up with a really specific topic first, and then you're trying to then go and find the literature to support it, it can be very challenging. So because you are dependent on what is already out there in the existing literature, it just helps you to make sure that that topic is covered.

 

When should you not use Thoreau? We talked about the pros - - it's kind of a pros and cons sort of thing. For example, doctoral capstone students who are working on their dissertations or the project studies should really be using the databases that are most relevant to the topic, especially those subject specific databases that we talked about.

 

This isn’t really about Thoreau being multi-disciplinary, because there are several multidisciplinary databases that will provide capstone students with fantastic articles. The reason is because Thoreau isn't a database but a search tool, and it does not really exist outside of Walden. When you are a capstone student, you will need to write about your research strategies in terms of specific, individual databases.

 

But keeping that in mind, students can use Thoreau as this great jumping off point. For example, if you have those topics where you're really not quite sure of what synonyms or related terms that you can use for keywords - some authors might use various terms when talking about the same concept - you can use Thoreau to get an idea of potential subject terms and the common terminology.

 

You can also use it to get an idea of which databases are more likely to contain relevant resources. For example, in Thoreau, each article will show you the individual database that it originates from. We will show you that in just a minute. The search results pages also have a database section that shows you the originating databases for the overall search results. For example, if you have 300 search results and 280 of those come from the PsycINFO database, then that might prompt you to then conduct your search in PsycINFO.

 

Another situation where Thoreau should really not be used is when your topic is very broad and easily aligns with a primary subject or field. For example, if you are looking for articles on something like challenges in nursing - if you go in Thoreau, you may come up with tens of thousands of articles that mention nursing somewhere in there, but really have nothing to do with challenges of nursing. So you would want to go through the steps Kim showed you of going to the homepage and selecting the subject of nursing to get to those databases. You will see the databases specifically recommended for nursing, so your results are going to be far more relevant and much more manageable.

 

Next, we want to talk about how to access Thoreau. There are several ways to access Thoreau from the library's website. You will notice there is a big search box right at the top of the library homepage and this is the best place to start your Thoreau search. You can type in your word or phrase right into that box, click on the icon or press Enter, and immediately be taken into a Thoreau search. We also have the advanced search link right under that search box; you can use that to go into an advanced search in Thoreau; you will get the three search boxes like you see in the other EBSCO databases. And you also have a few other places you can go to, like Databases A through Z. When you click on that button, you can actually choose alphabetically the letter T for Thoreau and go right into Thoreau.

 

In the top menu on the webpage where it says “Start your research”, if you click on that top menu site selection - or if you go into the More Resources button that is on the webpage - they will both take you to the same place, and it gives you some options like Google Scholar, Thoreau, and some other places like ScholarWorks, where you can get a few additional resources to use for your research.

 

Also, you can get to Thoreau whenever you are searching our Quick Answers. You will notice that next to Thoreau there is a radio option that says “Search everything”. That's in blue in this screenshot here. “Search everything” searches our Quick Answers - which are sort of like commonly answered questions, frequently asked questions - and you will see search results for Thoreau right in that section.

 

Kim, do you have a favorite way to get to Thoreau?

 

>>:  I do. I like just going into search articles, books, media and more and doing my search right from there. What I am going to do is I will share my screen and then I can show you how I do that. Can you see my screen?

 

Perfect.

 

Okay. As Traci said, right here on the library website you can type in your topic or keyword and it will launch a Thoreau search for you. We have Thoreau accessible in so many different areas we want you to be able to find this tool to help you search the databases. One of the quickest ways is this big search box.

 

I am going to take a topic and do a simple search for you. My topic is effective communication because that is a very broad and very general topic. It can be applicable in many different disciplines. It's here and type in effective communication and then I will click on magnifying glass.

 

This is going to bring us into Thoreau. This may look familiar. We use EBSCO Discovery service to run this search engine. So a lot of people when they see this think that Thoreau is a database from EBSCO, but it is not. Remember, this is just at Walden University. EBSCO just helps us run it. So what Thoreau is doing is searching all of our - - most of our databases for information on effective communication.

 

It is going to bring back a lot of information. Over 65,000 resources. We can go down, one thing we can do is look at the icon in front of the item to see what it is. We see here we have a book, we can scroll down, and this is an article and an academic journal, and you can also see that it brings back video recordings.

 

If you want to get a more detailed information from your results, you can click on the title. That is now going to open up the article, it's going to open up a detailed record where you can get in and access the description or the abstract, so you can read about it and see what this item is about and if it is appropriate for your purposes.

 

If you want to access any of these results you have to look for a couple things. One thing would be a PDF link. Clicking on this will open up the item in a PDF.

 

And HTML full text will open up the item in HTML. Another thing you want to look for is the find at Walden icon. This means that they found the item, but it is not in one - - is in a different database, it's not accessible by PDF directly through Thoreau. So what we can do is I like to right-click on this and open it in a window. It's either going to open up the article right away or it's going to bring it to the database -- this was a video where it's located in. I can click on Walden University and I will be able to access that.

 

Now, this is a lot, there is over 65,000 results. I need to narrow this down so let's say I am looking for something for a weekly assignment. I need something right away. So I want to make sure that it is full-time, so I can get access to it. It's only going to bring back items that I have access to.

 

The instructions say that I need peer-reviewed scholarly journals, so I'm going to click on that to limit that just to those peer-reviewed scholarly journals. We lost about 20,000. The instructions also say I need current information, so things within the last three years. I can change the date to 2015 and hit return.

 

It is going to update to full text peer-reviewed items published within the last three years. There is still a lot of them here but at least I have been able to narrow down a little bit. That's just a general quick way to do a simple search in Thoreau.

 

I am going to pass it back over to Traci and she's going to go ahead and show you how to do a more advanced search in Thoreau.

 

>>:  That was a good example we talked about earlier, if there's something that doesn't easily align with an existing topic or Walden program, like effective communication, Thoreau is a great use for that. Another great use that we talked about was whenever you have something that does not easily fit into one of those subjects.

 

Say, for example, we need to find articles for our topic on diabetes and prisoners. Well, under Select a Subject we could go under health sciences or nursing, but what about criminal justice for the prisoner’s aspect? Whenever you go into Thoreau, you are able to search multiple subject-specific databases at once. Let's go ahead and do that. My favorite way to get to Thoreau is actually using advanced search. I'm going to click on the advanced search link right under that primary search box, and that will take us right into the advanced search page in Thoreau.

 

I will login, and whenever you have the three search boxes, you are on that advanced search page. I am going to go ahead -- and remember, our topic is going to be on diabetes, and for the second box we can put in prisoners. And whenever you are doing research - we mentioned this a little bit earlier in the presentation - when you're doing research, you want to think about the synonyms or related terms. You are trying to cover those various ways of wording a concept that different authors might use to reference that concept.

 

You can see here we can choose criminals, incarcerated. I'm going to type in a few of these, let's do inmates. So now we have diabetes in one box and the different related terms that are related to that similar concept in the second, and I can click on search. And that will begin the search.

 

Now, right away we can look through the search results and we can see that we have quite a few results. We have over 1,200 results, and these are going to cover those articles that touch on diabetes and prisoners. Whenever you are in the search results page, you still have the option that Kim pointed out on the left-hand side, the different ways to limit by subject, peer-reviewed, date, and so on.

 

You also have the option of changing the fields at the top that your search boxes, to sort of tell the database where you want the database to look for those terms. So let's say, for example, we wanted to make sure that these terms were kind of a primary topic in the articles that the search results were getting us. We could choose abstract, limiting both of those search boxes to AB abstract. What that is doing is it's telling the database I want you to find articles that have diabetes, but diabetes has to occur in the abstract. And, I also only want those articles that talk about diabetes and either prisoners or inmates or offenders, or more than one of those - that also has to appear in the abstract. That's a neat way to try to look for articles that are more prevalent in the topic of the article, so it is not just where it's mentioned somewhere in the full text.

 

We can go ahead and add another - - let's say we wanted to focus on maybe racial aspects of the diabetic health of prisoners. We can put in a few different search terms, and I will change that one too abstract to because we want this to appear as a primary subject. If it's going to touch not on that abstract and that's a good way to ensure that it's going to be relevant in your search.

 

We can scroll down, and you can see that it brings up a good search. And one thing to point out again, the database that these results are coming from are going to be shown in that detail snippet that is just below each result. So I can see that, for example, this first result comes from the Science Direct database. If I were a capstone student and was doing my initial search here, this would tell me that that is one of the databases that I can go and continue that search in.

 

>>:  Traci, I have a question, why isn't Science Direct linked out? Because I see in the second result, it looks like you can just click on the PsycINFO database to go to the PsycINFO database.

 

>>:  Right, this one is clickable, and it is really neat because it not only takes you into the PsycINFO database, but it actually runs at search. So if I were to click on that, it would actually search PsycINFO for the search terms and the limiters that I used here. That can be really helpful, especially for those capstone students that need to go in depth.

 

I am not quite sure, but I would guess that the primary reason that some are linked and some are not is because our EBSCO databases PsycINFO is an EBSCO database, academic search complete is an EBSCO database, different vendors work differently with Thoreau and with the platforms that we use for discovery of these journals and science direct is one of those where the vendor just uses a different way to connect. You can still get to Science Direct or any other database that is not linked here. We can go to - - here is the library's homepage and we can click on Databases A-Z. If you click that button, you can choose something like Thoreau under T or go to S for Science Direct and go directly into the database.

 

>>:  Great.

 

>>:  If anyone has any questions on the searches that we have done or other questions that you have about Thoreau, please be sure to type them in the questions box and we will definitely get to those.

 

>>:  We are okay right now. I am going to show my screen and we are at the last screen, we want to talk a little bit about if you have questions, where you can go to get answers to those questions and where you can go if you need some help.

 

We want to show you the quick answers, ask a librarian, and live and recorded webinars include being the upcoming mystery sessions. From the library homepage this banner is always across the top of every page in the library. If you click on ask a librarian, it will bring you to this ask a library page where you have options to either email us, you can chat with us, you can call us. We answer emails seven days a week, we usually have a 24-hour turnaround, usually it's a lot faster than 24 hours but we say that just in case of a holiday, the library's closed. If you want to chat with us, you can click on chat and when chat is live this but is lit up like that. We also have each day highlighted so you can see what hours chat is open.

 

You can go in here, type in your question and send it to us and talk immediately with a librarian. We also have quick answers which are frequently asked questions at the library. So if you have a question, probably someone else has had that question as well. This is one way to access it. Tracy showed us another way to access it from the main library page by clicking on search everything and then clicking in here and if I type in Thoreau and hit search - - because I didn't finish spelling it. You can see it found here quick answers we have a quick answer on what is Thoreau and talks a little bit about what it is. We have how do I search Thoreau so if you forgot anything that we talked about you can always search for Thoreau and look it up here.

 

Also, in the first column we have links to library guides and things on the library website to help you with these topics. You can even click here on how to search the road to get to the library on Thoreau. Somebody asked a question, because they joined a little late, and this webinar is being recorded and you will receive a copy of this recording in about a day or two.

 

Another question that we have is can you search by your course?  If you go to the library website, you can search for courses, but it is not really involved with Thoreau. We do have a link to course guides, you can click on this and all of the courses in there that the library has access to any reading materials that are required, you will be able to access through this big course guides button.

 

Lastly, I want to show you is where to find the mysteries of the webinars - - I'm sorry, archive sessions and upcoming sessions. If we go over here and click on get help under webinars there is upcoming and also recorded webinars. Let's look at the recorded webinars first. If we go under library skills, you will see all of the mysteries of the library recordings are here. We have a little introduction about what the mysteries of the library revealed serious is and you can go through here to look for the topic that you're interested in, how you use Google Scholar, what are search alerts, and it will bring you to the Mysteries webinar.

 

If we go back to get help and look at upcoming webinars we get a list of the upcoming webinars. It usually goes out a couple weeks. This one actually goes all the way out, but it does have next month's webinar in there. If not, you can always click on view all upcoming webinars in order to register for any of the upcoming mysteries of the library or any other webinars that are coming up.

 

>>:  I was going to add, even if you can't attend the webinar, go ahead and register because you will get an email whenever the recording is sent to those attendees. So if you are not sure, register either way. Because you have access to that recording.

 

>>:  Yes. Someone did ask a question about asking Thoreau if you have to be connected with your account. Yes, you do because it is a search tool that is searching our databases so since you do have to login to access your databases you would as well with Thoreau. I don't know if you were here before but when I first went in here and looked up effective communication, instead of bringing me to Thoreau it brought me to the login so I had to login with my username and my email and my password before would allow me to get to this stage to get actual resources from the library.

 

This is the end of our session so thank you everybody for coming. We hope to see you at some future mystery session or at any of our upcoming webinars.

 

>>:  Thank you. Have a great week.

 

>>:  Everyone have a great week. Goodbye.

 

End Transcript

 

Created June 2018 by Walden University Library