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Video Link: https://youtu.be/Vqm7LI8jgEE

 

Mysteries of the Library: Revealed! Time Saving Tips and Tricks

 

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Narration:

 

>>    ANDREA LEMIEUX

 

get started.

 

Welcome again everyone to this month's mysteries of the library. This month we are tackling time-saving tips and tricks.

 

We are assuming that you have a little bit of library knowledge so these things will help refine your search strategies and approach when you were coming to the library. Obviously the first thing you need to know is where to find to the library so we are going to start with the obvious for tip number 1 the easiest place to find us is simply going to the direct URL which is library.waldenu.edu but you can also find us multiple other places such as in your blackboard classroom and in your student portal.

 

What do I mean by going directly to the URL clique that simply means on your browser you go up to your address bar and you type in library.waldenu.edu and hit enter and that will bring you right to the library homepage. This is a good place to bookmark so you don't actually have to go into your student portal or into Blackboard if you are working on an assignment and you just want to go right into the library. So that is tip number one, where can you find us.

 

And what is actually one other bonus tip with that is that we are available 24/7. You might not be able to ask us questions 24/7 or I should say get a response. You can always ask questions anytime of the day, but all of our services are available any time and week of the time as well.

 

Let's move on to tip number 2. Tip number 2 is to know your research homepage. This is another great place to bookmark. The analogy I like to use with students is the Walden library is not that dissimilar from a physical library. That simply means that when you go into a physical library especially University library, it is arranged particularly by subject so think of the second floor east corner of the library being the health sciences section where you can find health sciences journals, books, tests and instruments, that is what this research homepage is that is simply the section of the library where all of those resources are collected in one place.

 

So let's take a look at a couple of these pages so you can see depending on what your field of study is or your program at Walden that the actually all look the same.

 

The reason we did that is because to make it easy to use for you all because we know that even though you might be a health sciences, be in the health sciences program you might, that might cross a bit with social work or psychology and so you can navigate between any of these pages and know what it is that you are looking at. So let's look at health sciences. We're going to go in the research by subject drop-down menu and you can see Julie's picture there and her colleague Lisa Presley who was our other health sciences Library and. Let's decode what we are looking at here. You can actually change your research homepage really quickly at the top so you don't have to go back to the homepage if you don't want to.

 

This gold search box searches across journals that are labeled health sciences. So a journal might be, one journal might be in one database and another health sciences journal might be in another database and this searches across journals with that label.

 

The way you can think about these two sections, you will see this first section, health sciences articles, journals and books and then research help: this first box up here is like any physical materials that you can actually touch. So if you look at health sciences databases these are all databases that have particular kinds of health sciences materials, typically journals.

 

Then we have health policy databases and tests and instruments and then recommendations to specific journals. So these are all items that you can actually touch and use.

 

How I like to think about this second page is that this is all research help. Is kind of how to guides. How do I use the library to do a literature review? Here is some information on how to do that. How do I find statistics, theories, tests and measures? These are all again how to guides and how to do that.

 

So that is our second tip, get to know your research homepage or the layout so you can easily navigate between them. And then you can see on the left is all the options to get help, quick answers, ask a librarian and doctoral appointments. So it is kind of your one stop shop for this page.

 

Julie do you have any other things about our research pages that you want to share or a particular resource you like on the homepage us?

 

>>     It is funny because at my previous job I was all health sciences and I knew those databases inside and out but I like the way that hours are so similar to each other because I can help a business student, I can help a social work student, I can help a criminal justice student because they all sort of work the same way and all have this gold box at the top which I will talk about later.

 

>>     You can see on the business page is arranged exactly the same way. Materials at the top and then how to guides at the bottom which is great for business because these are specific to business. How do you research common business topics such as business failure rates or business plans? So these can be really helpful pages again to bookmark.

 

That was tip number two.

 

So bonus tip within those research database lists there is one or two databases in there that we call best bet databases. My advice to you if you get a little bit of anxiety or a little overwhelmed using the library databases or resources, find out what your best bet database is and get to know that database really well. Because all of the skills that you learned searching that one database will apply to all the other databases. So we put a list here for you that is sort of the one database that you should for sure know really well and again that will help you with all the other databases.

 

>>     We have a question if you want to pause for a second. What do you recommend for topics that are across areas. And public health we also publish in social science and public policy. How would you conduct a search that cuts across all of these topics?

 

>>     That is a great question. We are going to cover that in tip number 4 to know where you are searching. We actually have a specific tool that will help you do exactly that so we are going to go and move on to tip number 3 but we will return back to that question for tip number 4.

 

Tip number three how do you find an exact article? Sometimes you have optional readings in your classroom that are not linked. Sometimes your instructor or a colleague of yours or another student will recommend a title of an article for you to read so what is the easiest way to do that? The easiest way to do that is to simply look up the article by title. And this sort of is going to address the question that was just asked as well. How we do that is we use the search box at the top of the library homepage. That searches most of the library. We call that search Thoreau because we like to be funny and clever, a little inside joke since we are named Walden University. It is really as easy as pasting the article title into the search box so we want to look for this exact article title. The influence of work at home interference and facilitation on job satisfaction: an attachment theory.

 

We click search and it prompts me to sign in because I have not signed in and typically you will see one results. And we are going to talk about full text here in a little bit. But you typically are going to see the full text access at the bottom. This is the article, all I have to do is click PDF to get to the article. So that is the easiest way to do that. So to save time, we do have an -- we have another option on here that I will let you explore on your own. Sometimes that search does not work because databases are not perfect. Sometimes there are data errors, data entry errors or glitches in the matrix and we have to deal with that so in those cases you can double check that we have the article by looking up to see if we have the journal and the coverage that your citation falls under. So that is a secondary measure you can use. But worst cases you can always ask us in ask a librarian and we can do a quick search for US well.

 

Let's move on to Tip number four med. the rest of our chips fall into how to best search the library databases.

 

Tip number 4. This is the question that was asked earlier. How do I search across disciplines? If your discipline crosses, your health sciences discipline crosses social work or psychology or business even. There is three main things you should know about our website and it is really important to know where you’re searching because you are going to search in certain places for specific reasons. The three places are Thoreau which we already talked about. The gold search box which we talked about in the databases which we talked about. Let's go over to the website.

 

And we will talk about those. So again up here this search search is Thoreau which is our main search box at the top of the page. It searches most of the library databases. What I recommend to students is to click on advanced search underneath and then you get the three search boxes. If I were to do a search, job satisfaction and management styles I will check full text and peer-reviewed and we will see how many results we get. We are searching the entire library so you can see there is quite a bit of results. We have 1091 results so that is searching every thing. It could apply to business, social work, it could referred to a a number of disciplines.

 

We could go to the management a business research page so we could searching the school search box. So to do that with one search box we will have to put in job satisfaction and management styles and we will look at the results that we get here as well.

 

So 781 but we have to remember that we do have to go down here and check peer review and then we could compare numbers. So 629 about half as many because we are searching a smaller subset of the library.

 

Lastly if we want to really narrow our research because we have an assignment due in two articles we could click on a specific database and search an even smaller subset of even the gold search box so full text and peer-reviewed are checked and we see we have significantly less results. 155. So Thoreau is very broad. The gold search box is narrower in the most narrow search box you can do is in a specific database. So that is tip number 4. Thoreau for most of the library, the gold search box which searches journals in that field and then the databases search subject specific journals in a smaller subset.

 

We are going to go back to the slide and I'm going to turn it over to Julie and she is going to take it from here.

>>     Thanks Andrea. Let me get back to where I was at. We have talked about this between ourselves a lot but if you ask 10 different librarians after search something frequently you will get 10 different answers and some of that is instructive and to try to do it in different ways. When I am helping a student typically I will go to the middle option that Andrea was explaining and I will go to the gold box, search for that particular subject area and I will put in a big topic like diabetes. I tried to take the biggest, juiciest topic of my question. And if you are in health sciences and you have a bunch of elements to your question that might include your population, intervention, all of these things, I like to start with the main topic partly because one thing it will do is return E books first. So if I am grasping at words the E books can be really useful for that. But now that I'm in the big three box search screen here I can use these boxes suggestions to help guide my search. I helped somebody recently who was doing adverse events in diabetes and so I started to type in adverse events here and then I looked to see what the suggestions are. And look through these particular types and every term that I include with or in between it says will take any one of those four ways of saying it. So not just adverse events but also adverse effects, incidents, medical errors.

 

One thing that really does is it helps brings us coverage from other countries because other countries don't always specify these terms the same ways that Americans do so that will broaden that way. And then I will get further down into the population, for instance, of the people I am looking at and look for a population separately.

 

There might not be that many articles that are all about diabetes adverse events and discuss the effect that race has in it so I will take this selective field here and I say let's search the full text to see if African-Americans are mentioned in the article, and that will help narrow it down a bit. So yes any time I put "or" in between any of these words it says I will take any one of those. And the "and" is connecting these three lines so we have to have diabetes and there, and one of these terms in there and one of these terms in there. You comply around with the selective field but it does help to know that these EBSCO databases and that is just the company would get these from, by default it searches the title, the abstract the subject headings of the key article. It is not search full text but we can make it search the full text like this.

 

If we are in a different database and for instance we have other health science databases here including ProQuest health and medical. It has a completely different company behind it. ProQuest is the name of the company and it still connects these boxes with "and" but by default this searches every bit of the article, the entire full text of the article and this ProQuest database does not provide very good suggestions which is why I just pop over to my EBSCO search and I grabbed the suggestions that EBSCO gave and I pop them in here. If I did anywhere, anywhere, anywhere here this searching the full text of the article it could mention medical errors on page 6 met, it could mention African-Americans on page 12 and mentioned diabetes somewhere down. Is the algorithm that is trying to figure out how important these terms are.

 

So you do a search and you usually get a jillion results in ProQuest because of that full text thing. Does not mean it is a better database just means it has a different type of search and is maybe not as relevant in the long run for all of the topics so we can make it search like the previous database by saying anywhere except full text or say I only want it if adverse effects is in the title of the abstract or in the subject headings. The anywhere but full text makes it behave more like this EBSCO database. So that is a pretty big distinction between those two databases. One only searches the title, abstract and subject headings and the other searches the full text of the article so you can see how that could be a little bit confusing to see your search results like that.

 

Okay so know what you are searching, what in the record you are searching, that is what this is demonstrating anywhere except full text. I started my search really broadly with just diabetes and then I started adding more search terms down there. And I really like the topic of job satisfaction and management styles. I should have shown you some of the suggestions that it gives for that because those are interesting as well. The basic limiters are really important and it is the same throughout all of the EBSCO databases when you scroll down in the left-hand column you can always click these the peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the publication date on the left it is too bad you have to scroll down to see it but I try to get in the habit of doing that every time and putting in my 2015 there and then you can either hit enter or click off to narrow it. In ProQuest it is on the left as well but set up differently. You can use the little slider to come over or you can say 2015 and I think it is going to make me put the day and there. So that is how to apply those limits because almost always our students are looking for peer-reviewed journal in the last five years and checking the peer-reviewed journals box here is a lot easier than having to look up every single journal and see if it is peer-reviewed.

 

Subject terms I almost forgot about subject terms. Because these EBSCO databases show the subject terms here beneath the titles I look at the most relevant titles and then I look at some of the words that they are using underneath it so I may want to look up ethnology. I may want to look up hypoglycemic agents, different ways of explaining, different ways of narrowing down your topic because some of these can be subheadings too so we could actually put in a subject heading for race or ethnicity.

 

So that could be other clues, what other words are being used in the articles that do match what you want. Okay?

 

And getting the full text. Most of you have probably discovered by now it does take a little persistence to keep going for that full text. If you get presented a list like the one on the screen that has several different entries, noticed they have different dates. The very first one is 2008-present and then we have 1994-present. So depending on where your article falls and the date range you may want to pick some different ones and if one of them does not work try another one. Because these linking mechanisms are so numerous now that sometimes they just break in the middle of things but sometimes you have to hunt for that little PDF icon so be persistent and if that does not work know how to ask for help.

 

Andrea showed you earlier we have quick answers that will help with a lot of the frequently asked questions you see. We have ask a librarian at the top of every page on the website where you can submit that citation by email and frequently you will get a reply within a couple of hours at the most. 24 hours at the very most. We can search it out we can look by journal and see if we can find it that way and we can see if there are other ways of getting to the article for you and give you a link to it. Sometimes does require a little detective work.

 

My favorite page on the website is get help because that is where our recorded webinars are, our how-to guides, all of these mysteries webinars are all under get help under recorded webinars and library skills. What questions you all have? We are almost out of time but we have three minutes left.

 

>>     Right now we don't have any questions but if I am understanding one person's question correctly' can you show once you limit to date on the results page how to remove the date limiter? So if you limited to the last five years but then you want to maybe change that?

 

>>     I've done that in EBSCO before by just putting in some random very very early date. 1900 usually does it. And then in ProQuest I believe yes you can just do the same thing over here and just take it all the way back out and it will figure out what the first date is again. I have not had to do that so there may be I guess this little X would do that, wouldn't it?

 

>>     That is another option, too.

 

>>     And I see somebody else asked to go back to tip number 9. Okay so getting the full text. When you find that find at Walden button sometimes it will lead you to a list like this. If you don't see a PDF full text right away may have to coach one of these other databases because it is trying to detect that it is in another database. We have like 150 databases altogether from 15 or 20 different vendors so it is trying to reach out across to another database and find the article for you. And sometimes that can be just require a couple more clicks than you expected to do. Find at Walden is the finder utility that we use and that is just what we call it. When you are in one of our databases and you see find out Walden, that is going to link you to the full text, hopefully, once it does a hop or two and then if it does not find the full text, if this is a dead end and you cannot find any PDF, we may not have access to that particular item. We don't have, no library has a subscriptions to everything but often there will be a supplement or a poster presentation and things like that that may not be included in our subscriptions so anytime you really want something you cannot find the full text go ahead and hit that ask a librarian link and submit the citation that way and we will check it out and see if we can track it down for you. Okay?

 

>>     There was a few other questions about the PowerPoint being recorded, missing some of the tips so the recording is going to be sent out to everyone who registered and let me grab the PowerPoint link one more time and I will repost that the chat box. It was at the top but I'm going to repost it again so you can have the PowerPoint as well. If you were taking notes and missed something you look at both the PowerPoint and the recording. We did have a few other questions let me go back a couple.

 

>>     I did reply to some of Matthew's questions privately but looks like he's had several more since I saw these. Oh yes when you reply to Matthew you only replied to the panelist. Matthew I will send you an email with Andrea's replies to you. Sorry we are still getting used to the Zoom platform so I will follow-up with Matthew separately. Okay? I think you answered -- Matthew you were sending it correctly we just were not sending the replies correctly.

 

>>     I've been sending all of my replies to all the panelists and all of your our attendees so no one saw any of my answers. I was sending them to no panelists.

>>     We will follow-up with you as needed with these answers. Sorry Sarah I don't even know what your topic is so I cannot really address your topic as to what database would be the best for you without reading back. Okay I do see one of Sarah's questions she is looking for specific research articles for example a qualitative or quantitative article without those words specifically. That is a great question and especially for Sarah but everybody can follow along here if you would like. If you go to our quick answers and put in qualitative or quantitative, we have got how do I find a qualitative article that has all of these lovely keywords that also mean qualitative. So if I am searching for a qualitative article on diabetes I would say in a separate search box I would put qualitative, ethnographic, or phenomenological and then if you scroll down to the bottom of this it has a link somewhere, the specific methodology so we have specific words here that also mean quantitative so if ANOVA is in the article is probably going to be a quantitative article because that is a quantitative algorithm. The PowerPoint will not be sent to your email, you have to download that yourself from the link in the chat.

 

>>     Let me send that one more time because I was only sending that to the panelists we don't have so here is the link again.

 

>>     Thanks everyone for your patience and I will go through the conversation and try to follow up with the rest of you individually. Thanks everyone.

 

>>     Thanks so much see you all the third Monday of next month.

 

 

 

 

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