Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/UOdRs7LzwQQ

 

SOCW 6002 Library Lab

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

               >> AMANDA SOLOMON: Hi, everybody, and welcome to SOCW 6002 Library Lab. Hi everybody. My name is Amanda Solomon, and I'm the Social Work Librarian hhere at Walden Library. So glad you are joining me today.

 

            This is supposed to introduce you to some library services and resources that will help you through this course and help you the rest of your journey here at Walden hopefully. I just want to make it very productive. I want you to feel free to ask questions. I'm super laid-back when it comes to my presentations. I just want it to be useful and productive. I try not to go over 30 minutes because I know it's late in the afternoon and it can be hard to sit and watch a webinar. But we will do our best.

 

            I will turn off the camera and check chat periodically. Let's go ahead and get started so we can get on with the rest of our afternoon. Thanks for joining me.

 

            Before I get started, and hello Ms. Bell, I want to go over little housekeeping. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get closed captioning at such a late notice, so there's not going to be any closed captioning for this webinar. I do apologize. Feel free to ask questions. I have a PowerPoint that I uploaded that you can get, but I don't really follow it. I'm kind of going to loosely follow the PowerPoint, but it's there if you need.

 

            Also, I want to let you know there will be a link to this recording, if it's good. If it's terrible, I will delete it. But if it's pretty good, it'll be included in the email that you guys get. I think it's a follow-up email and you should get that tomorrow, so look for that.

 

            What we will cover is where to find your course readings. Within this course you have required course readings and those are generally journal articles and peer-reviewed articles that are going to help you with your discussions and assignments. Where do you find those? We make it really easy. Then second, we are going to look at a page that I created for my social work students. That's the social work research page. I'd like you to bookmark it and come back to it.

 

            I want to talk about choosing and using databases. I was looking over the course and I noticed in week six you do have a paper where you are going to need to find some peer-reviewed literature and review a peer-reviewed article. In order to do that, you need to know how to choose and use a database. The earlier you can figure that out and really learn how to master the databases and keyword searching, the better off you will be in this course and all the remainder of your coursework. It's such an important skill, and really it's actually easy to learn with a little practice.

 

            Then lastly, we will get help. The library has so much help and support and so does Walden in general. The Writing Center and Academic Skills Center, so there's so much for our students and we will talk about where to get help.

 

            So what I'm going to do now is go onto the Internet. Sorry, I do not know what all this stuff is. Let's start at the library homepage. If you haven't come to the library yet, this is our library. We have 24/7 access to articles, help, guides, tutorials, journals, databases, dissertations. Everything is here for you to access at any time. I recommend my students bookmark this page. You can always come back to it. I'm a huge believer in favorites and bookmarks. This is the number one page I use pretty much all day.

 

            I want to briefly go over the website. You have a search box here. That's our main search engine called Thoreau. This is great for just typing in a couple of keywords that you are interested in or maybe for a particular assignment. It's a really great beginning search. It's perfect for just our beginner researchers. It's so good. It's Thoreau. I love it.

 

            We have other skills down here where we have tutorials and webinars like I'm giving today, guides, instructional help. We have databases here. So just broad tabs where you can explore later. But it's what's most important today as you know how to get your course readings.

 

            From the library homepage quick course guides here. Scroll down to S because you will choose your course code. SOCW. S through Z, SOCW and then your course number which is 6002. Changing lives, changing society. Once you find your course guide, what you I recommend you do? Bookmark it. Make sure you bookmark this and then you can come back and see all of your required readings.

 

            This page has every one of your required course readings. You do not have to go find them yourself. You don't have to go into the library and do a title search or Google scholar or wear yourself out trying to find your articles. They are all listed here for your convenience in alphabetical order by author. You guys have a lot of readings. You will be doing a lot of reading. That's good.

 

            Here you can access your readings, make sure you come back and you know how to find this. It's very important. I have a lot of students that don't know that we have the readings available. This will take you to the fulltext article. I will demo quickly.

 

            Sometimes when you get to the page different databases have different ways that they have the fulltext. You might actually have to click on the fulltext. Sometimes you might see a PDF that you want to download so it takes a little bit of critical reading to find the articles sometimes. This one is just laid out right here. Perfect.

 

            But sometimes you have to download a PDF and it might look a little different. Voila. Your course readings.

 

            Another thing that's important is looking at the assignment guides on the left. If you have an assignment that leads -- needs a library push, I will put a library assignment guide together. So week two I believe that you will be asked to locate a historical figure within the discipline of social work. That could be a little daunting to find a historical figure in the databases. So I lay out exactly how to do that with visuals and numbered instruction.

 

            So you will be able to complete that assignment hopefully with ease. The same thing for your assignment in week three. So for that, you will do some local research about licensure's and that can also be difficult. But you will have a little bit of assistance in the assignment guide so make sure you look for that.

 

            Can you guys hear me? Hello? Thanks for answering, you guys. It looked like someone said the audio went off, and I freaked out. Thank you. Thank goodness.

 

            So that's your course readings guide and we will want to make sure that you have that so you can get back to it. You have a lot of readings. You want to make sure you can get right to it. What's the second thing I wanted to show you? The social work research page. From the library site, I created a page just for my social work students.

 

            Under Select A Subject, we will go to discipline, social work. Some of the best people in the world are social workers. Here you have this picture of me. But also, most importantly, there's a lot of things here that are very helpful to my students. One, here is a Goldline search box. This search box is really good for social work research as a beginning student. You can type in keywords to get articles. This is a little more focused than that mean library search on the homepage. Remember that main search? Thoreau?

 

            This actual Goldline search box on the social work pages going to just target social work journals and databases. So you will get probably more relevant results if you start here for your social work assignments just because I handpick the journals. So it's coming from family studies, violence studies, gender studies, social change, cultural competence, journals that speak to these issues, so you will probably get good results if you use this Goldline search box.

 

            Second, what's most important about this page is I do have a list of social work databases. Remember what I said when we started. Getting to know the databases, practicing, learning how to speak their language, which will come very organically and natural to you as you practice, but it's a very important skill to master early on. I think it's so important for my students so I do have a list of databases here that are best for social work. Now your researcher your assignment might have an education focus or maybe you are looking at nonprofits or something that has a different focus. You might just not want a social work database. You might go into the education research page or business research page. You can change the research home here.

 

            I have a lot of students looking at inmates, prison, female inmates, so I would recommend they actually start learning a criminal justice database. It really depends on your assignment and topic. But mostly my social work students are going to learn -- be using a social work database, particularly my personal favorite is SocINDEX with fulltext. The most (hence of social science database there is. All the top universities have it and we are so lucky we have access to this database. Not to mention it's super easy to maneuver.

 

            Let's take a look at it. And I know I talk fast, so if I'm losing you, just tell me to slow down, but I just want to make sure we get everything in and we are not too overloaded or too tired. This is your basic database search screen. A lot of students say I'm in EBSCO host, but they have a lot of databases. So make sure you are searching SocINDEX with full database here.

 

            First of all, it's such a great skill to learn a database. So come in and start playing around. The second most important skill for students to master finding articles for assignments, mastering how to find articles for discussions and papers and if you are going to go on for that PhD or DSW, you are going to want to start saving the literature that you find in your coursework for your dissertation. So choosing and using a database is key.

 

            The second key is keyword strategy. What do I mean by that? A lot of students want to put in search streams.

 

            This is a sample search. Databases are very picky when it comes to how you speak to it. And believe me, you will learn this. The more you get results, the more you start seeing how the database is indexing subject terms, it will be like, I get it. They don't want me to say teenage or they want me to say adolescent or teenager or teen. So you will start seeing those things but do not overwhelm the database with large search streams. We call this keyword strategy.

 

            Instead we might do-- the database actually helps you putting keywords, which is great. Anytime you connect a word with "or", it's Boolean, searching synonyms because you will get articles addressing teens or adolescents.

 

            So do you see what we did there? Instead of putting one long search string that was confusing to the database, we break the topic up into keywords. Now we have some pretty good articles here that are addressing the things that we were most interested about. Teenagers, drug abuse, and athletes. Maybe I wanted to go narrower and look at marijuana or type of drug like alcohol. I could add a search box if I wanted to include that. Let's just go over that one more time.

 

            I know that in week six you guys I think it's you're studying the very important concept of cultural competence and awareness. I believe you will have to find some articles on that. For example, you could simply type it in. I love how the database gives you ideas. It didn't used to do that and it is such a great addition to the database.

 

            We are looking at cultural competence, cultural awareness or cultural sensitivity and the reason we do the or is because some scholars may refer to cultural competence as cultural awareness and another scholar might refer to it as cultural sensitivity. You just want to make sure the databases are going to give you all those results.

 

            Here's a good example. We have a lot of results, over 3000. Don't freak out when you see that many results because the second part of using a database is taking control of the search. You don't realize how much control you have over a database. You can tell the database what you want.

 

            Before you even look at your results, number one, I know you guys are going to be asked to find peer-reviewed literature. What does that mean? It means this particular article has been reviewed by an editorial board of peers within that discipline so these are going to be experts in the field of social work. And that journal has reviewed that particular article for nonbiased or for bias or for current, look at the references. Is the methodology sound? So it's the highest level of research kind of and that's called peer-reviewed.

 

            It's important you get peer-reviewed literature for your papers and your assignments as an MSW student. So we will want to make sure we click that limited peer-reviewed articles. So bam. The database does it for you. I don't have to worry about if it's peer-reviewed. Now all our results are peer-reviewed.

 

            The second thing I want you to do right of the bat very naturally is we want to look at current literature most of the time. So I don't want articles from 1937. I'm actually going to highlight and change my publication date and update my results to get current literature.

 

            Right now I'm looking at peer-reviewed current literature loosely related to cultural competence. I still have 800 results, so if you wanted to, you could still come back up here and add another keyword. So maybe you just want to look at cultural awareness within the African-American community. You could add your demographic. Maybe you want to look at cultural competence in the geriatric community. So you would want to add that.

 

            Really practicing with that keyword strategy, not overwhelming the database. Right away you want to do your limiters, fulltext, peer-reviewed, current literature. There's a lot more you can do, but this is more for advanced students and I do recommend you guys watch my advanced webinar.

 

            But there's a whole lot of stuff you can do. You can limit to geography, language, professional practice, methodology. This database is so neat with all the things you can do.

 

            Once you get a good list of results, say you want to look at the article and read it and at least browse the abstract and the conclusion. That's what I typically did. I still do. Before I point that out, remember how I said you will learn how the database talks?

 

            When you are looking at results if you look at the subjects, you will start to see what -- this is saying what the article is all about. So cultural pluralism is something I would not have thought of, so maybe you want to plug that into your keyword strategy. Yeah. I keep seeing that so the database likes that. You will start to learn what are these articles talking about? And how do they want me to say -- how do they want me to talk to it?

 

            For LGBT people, you could plug that keyword in width or gay or queer or queer youth. You will start to see how the database wants you to talk. Multiculturalism. We probably could add that to our search on cultural competence. That's definitely similar. Cultural relevance is very interesting. So this is called critical reading. Also called information literacy. It's becoming a scholar, really looking at the subjects and applying those new keywords to your search strategy.

 

            It's very easy and it really comes naturally. It just takes a few searches into database and you've got this down pat believe me.

 

            Let's take a look at this first article. Say we really like it. It's current. When you click on the title it takes you to something called the detailed record. It gives you the title, authors, source. The source is always the journal, so this is coming from a journal called social work education. Pretty current, 2015. Volume 34 issue two. It gives you the subject terms. We have to start looking at these. Then I like how the author always provides terms as well.

 

            So we might add the word diversity to our keyword search. You have the abstract and then you have the PDF here. So you want to open that fulltext article and save it however you save it to your desktop. You save it to your email? If you want to be really snazzy, you can go over here and use things like print, email it to yourself, save it -- that's a floppy disk. Probably some of us don't remember what that is. I remember floppy disks. Flash drive or whatever your saving mechanism.

 

            Then if you want to throw it into a Microsoft Word document, you can hit the permalink right here. Why is it not showing? Why is nothing happening? Normally you will get a link. I don't know what's happening on this record. There it is. It's up top.

 

            You would just copy and paste this link and throw it into a Word document or however you save. It's just important. I want my students to start learning to save material early.

 

            Lastly, you want to copy that APA citation. Under cite, you would click on APA and copy and paste that into your paper. Of course, you have to look at it with a Kenai because it's often wrong. So you want to make sure you are having the correct citation. For APA. But there's a lot of neat things the database does for you.

 

            I will just do one more demo. I don't know if it's week three or one of the weeks you're looking at poverty within your area and you may need to support that with literature. We will do one more example. IOS pick the one with the most words. Poverty or low income or low socioeconomic or disadvantaged. Then you probably would want to put your location. I'm not picking on Florida. I love Florida. I went to graduate school in Tampa. So I just thought of Florida first.

 

            So that's one way you would want to maybe get some local -- peer-reviewed articles that are still speaking about poverty in your area.

 

            Are there any questions? So far so good. So back to that social work research page. Do you have the Goldline search box? Which is a good start. But you know me. I want my students to master the databases as early as possible. So that's why I took you into SocINDEX with fulltext, the most comprehensive database where we did some keyword strategy. We don't want to overwhelm the database, we want to pick concepts and put them in different boxes.

 

            Then when we get results, we want to make sure we have peer-reviewed. That's scholarly literature. And then update the publication date to 2015. Thank you, Michelle.

 

            Michelle is telling me that this is informative. Well, that is the feedback I like to get. Thank you because sometimes it's very difficult to talk into a camera and a screen but not see people's faces and not hear your voices. It's hard.

 

            The other thing on your social work research page I will point out is get familiar with some journals. We have a video database that shows actual sessions of social workers in counseling sessions and some interesting things there. We do have books. Yes, we are a virtual library, but I can get you a book. If you need a book, let me know. Or you can browse books, the DSM is super popular so I have a link to it on your page.

 

            As well as we do have book collections. And then I also just have some other things down here, residency materials. If anybody's planning on going to Orlando, I will be there. I'm getting excited about October. Just a research basics if you forget what we went over today. You can go here, choose topic, do the keywords, so in overview here.

 

            Thanks, Miss Bell. Thank you. So now the last thing I was going to show you is how to get help because there's a lot of support for our students. Line from the library homepage, which we all have bookmarked by now, you go to Ask a Librarian right here in the top right corner. So I have a lot of great colleagues. I am the social work librarian. And I mostly work with social work and human services students, but you can meet with any librarian. All of my colleagues are amazing. We love working with students. So you can either email us and that goes to our reference desk, the virtual reference desk. Usually you will get a response within 24 hours. It's usually a lot sooner than that. Term start can get crazy, but you will get a response as soon as possible.

 

            It could be me or a colleague. The other thing you can do is actually chat with a real-life person, which is fun in this virtual environment. Sometimes you just want to actually have this real-time chat. We have certain chat hours and you can see our schedule. So if chat is ever open and you have a quick question about library services or resources, you can easily chat. This would say online and you would click here. You would chat with a real, live librarian. It's really popular.

 

            You can call us, but unfortunately you just have to leave a voicemail. But we will get back with you via email. Sometimes it's just easier when you have a question to actually talk it out. So if you feel like you are one of those people that you can explain it better with voicemail rather than email, just leave us a voicemail. We will get back with you.

 

            Then I meet with my doctoral students one-on-one. I believe my MSW students can do that as well. I'm certainly not going to tell anybody I'm not going to help them. The writing center is an amazing support and then customer care is help with some of the technical issues like Blackboard and other things.

 

            Lastly our quick answers. Let me scroll back up. On your Ask a Librarian page, Quick Answers is amazing. It's my favorite little hidden jewel of the library. Say for example you forgot what I said about peer-reviewed. You can just click that, click on the one you want and you will get some really good detail about peer review, what it is and how to find it. Maybe you forgot what I said about Thoreau.

 

            Remember how you have to find information about a person? Thoreau can do that and give you help with visuals. Quick answers is my favorite thing about the library. I use it all the time. I type in stuff and pretty much find my answer almost every time.

 

            Thank you, Telly. That's an awesome name. I've got a question. Do we call you to schedule one-on-one? You will have to go through the form. You have to go through an online form. That's how we collect statistics. So go back into Ask a Librarian and just fill out that form down here. It says doctoral and dissertation students only, but I'm not quite sure that is the case. If so, email me and I will be happy to help you.

 

            Let's just review really quickly. I met my 30-minute mark and you know how I like to keep it to 30 minutes. We went over a basic library search you're on the road. Easy to do something here. However, if you want to start learning the databases, we went into the social work research page. This is a more focused search.

 

            Or you can advance and go into your social work database, SocINDEX and do some keyword strategy.

 

            We also talked about finding course readings because you will have to do lots of reading. That was under your course guides from the library's homepage. Remember we just went to S, SOCW 6002 and we found our course readings guide and bookmarked it.

 

            Lastly, we looked at where to get help. Where was that? Actually, let me get back. Ask a librarian is how to get your help, so the rich, quick answers as well as email, chat and voicemail.

 

            That is your SOCW 6002 library lab. I wish all of you so much luck in this class. It's going to be great. You will do amazing, especially now that you know how to find your readings and you know how to use a database. I have a comment from Angel. She's like, instead of trying to figure this out on your own, it's nice to have a webinar.

 

            Who could ever figure this out on your own? Unless someone shows you, you don't know. So it's very important that I show you this and even though it's 30 minutes, I still think we got the basics. Like I said, I'm here for you if you ever need anything. I'm always going to be available. Thank you, guys, for attending. If there's not any more questions, I will let you go enjoy the rest of your afternoon and evening. Don't forget. You will get a recording tomorrow. All right?

 

            I'm going to turn my camera on and say goodbye and waved goodbye. Thank you, Kimberly. Thank you, Telly. You rock too. That is very close up. Sorry, guys. Thanks for coming. Good luck this semester, this term. That me know how it goes and email me if you need any help. I wish you guys all the best. Bye.

 

End Transcript

 

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