Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/Td3zUfU_WZw

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay, hello everybody. Welcome to this webinar on Introduction to Social Welfare Policy Research. My name is Taylor Leigh and I am the Liaison Librarian to the School of Public policy and Administration here at Walden. And I am joined by Amanda Solomon who is the liaison for the School of Social Work.

 

We are happy to have you join us today. Amanda, do you want to say a little bit about the scope of this webinar? What this webinar is designed for?

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Sure, Taylor. Thank you everybody, welcome. I am the Social Work and Human Services Librarian. I thought this was a great webinar today to introduce some of the social work students, any policy students or anyone who is interested in social policy welfare in general, just given them a brief introduction to finding social welfare in the library and hopefully guide you to some of those useful resources for social policy welfare research.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Thank you, fantastic, Amanda. You can see our faces right now, hopefully. Amanda, are you seeing the screen and hearing me okay?

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Yes, sounds good.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay, hopefully that holds true for everyone else. We are going to talk about a few logistical things before we get underway. This webinar will be recorded and it will be added to our webinar archive once everything is said and done.

 

The slides from the presentation are available to you right now to download. These are in the handouts tab of GoToWebinar so you can grab this file if you want to use it at a later date. It will also be available later, so don't feel like you have to get it right now. Captioning is also available. If you need that, click on the link that I have posted in the chat tab of the webinar and it should open up a separate window with captioning.

 

The way we are going to handle questions today is, you're free to ask questions as they occur to you. Depending on what each of us is doing at that point in the presentation, we might have time to respond to you right then or we might have to wait to get to her question until the end. But we will reserve 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the session for questions. So we will get through the presentation and stop the recording, then we will have time for questions.

 

Okay, with all of that being said, I am going to go back here to our start and I am going to start the recording. Oh, then I'm going to say bye in terms of WebCam.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  All right, bye.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay, hello everyone, and welcome to the Introduction to Social Welfare Policy Research webinar. My name is Taylor Leigh, I am the Liaison to the School of Public Policy and Administration. I enjoyed by Amanda Solomon today, she is my co-presenter and she is the Liaison to Human Services and Social Work.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Hi, everyone.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  So our objectives today are threefold. This session is meant to introduce you to the library and how the library's resources can be useful to you in terms of social welfare policy research.

 

So we're going to begin defining social welfare policy and its implications for your own research. It just so happens that Walden's mission statement very closely aligns with the concept of social welfare policy. So, Walden's mission statement is to create scholar practitioners and to equip them to effect positive social change. So that is really what the whole business of social welfare is about. So it's very relevant to Walden's mission.

 

Next, we are going to learn how to explore social welfare policy using library resources. We are going to look in some databases. Amanda and I have also created this guide that I have linked here in the presentation.

 

And really, everything that we talk about today is located in this guide. So you might want to open that in a separate tab and bookmark that for use at a later date.

 

Then finally, we are going to learn how to continue researching social welfare policy using things outside our own collections, so things like government websites and think tanks. And we will conclude today by just pointing out some other helpful library resources and how you can get in touch if you have any questions.

 

Okay, so, Amanda, did you want to talk about definitions?

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Sure, Taylor has the definition for law and a lot of the social welfare policies are public law. Some of these include things like healthcare, you may be thinking of the recent Affordable Care Act or Empowerment, public housing and other programs. But all of these programs are geared toward assisting the unemployed and marginalized in society. So getting back to that positive change that Taylor just spoke about.

 

I included a couple examples here, one, social welfare policy, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, you can see it is abbreviated with ASFA with a public law number. Again, you will see something like that referred to in legal terms. Then we have Older Americans Act, which was just revised recently. But these are examples of social welfare policies that we are using still today.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Great. And, subject areas.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Basically most of your social welfare policies fall under the broad, subject umbrellas. When you're thinking about your research interest in social policy you are going to think about these broad, overarching subject areas. Whether it is your community, you are looking at race, class and gender or you're looking at systems of care, or older Americans, it is pretty much going to follow these categories.

 

So when you are doing social welfare policy research, you are likely going to use a lot of different information sources. Because policy research is informed by other types of information, and it is informed by things like government agencies and government reports, statistics, also by policy and advocacy groups -- also known as think tanks. Direct reports on policy. And also the media public opinion, newspapers, public debate. All of these things kind of complex circle involve social policy research.

 

Policy research is also going to be informed by other types of information. And including whether you are doing research on a policy that either state, federal or local level. But keep in mind the policy research is not done in a straight line. You're going to explore lots of different information sources.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  So, when you're just getting started with your research on social welfare policy, you're likely going to want to do some searches for just general background information on broad topics.

 

There are a few places that are good to do that. The first that I have listed here are CRS Reports. These are Congressional Research Service Reports.

 

Essentially, what the Congressional Research Service is is a think tank that produces very detailed reference -like information for Congress as they ponder a certain issue.

 

So, all of these Congressional Research Service reports are available online. They will be available through some of the government websites we see later on in the presentation. But they are an authoritative source for background information, and they are going to provide a lot of detail.

 

Another place you might consider going is Thoreau. And that is our multi-database search tool. And I'm going to hop over here to the library's website to show you where Thoreau is. There's two ways you can access Thoreau. You can access it here in our Databases A-Z list. This is our comprehensive list of all of our databases. But you can also search in Thoreau by just using this main search bar at the top of our website. You can see do about this there are two options for Thoreau and Search Everything. You want to leave this Thoreau set to Thoreau. And you can search for something like social welfare, for example.

 

When you search for really broad topics like this, a lot of times what you will see in your results is before you even get to result number 1, you will see these things called Research Starters. And this is going to give you some of that reference type information, background information on a particular issue. So this is similar to what you would find in an encyclopedia.

 

Now, once you're in Thoreau, you also have the option to explore all different kinds of resources. So when you do a search in Thoreau, not only are you going to get these research starters, you are going to get research articles. You can limit to peer-reviewed, if that's what you're interested in. You're going to get books in these list of results. You can limit to those over here. You're going to get encyclopedias. So, all kinds of different resource types.

 

Then, the other two resources that I have here, one is SAGE Knowledge, that is another one of our databases. That is particularly good for this kind of background information, because it has a lot of handbooks and encyclopedias. So, another good place to look.

 

And finally, Wikipedia. I have included Wikipedia here with a caveat. Wikipedia is a very useful source for background information. However, as most of you probably know, it is not an authoritative source, whatsoever. It is good to use to get the leads, but aside from that, you're not going to want to cite Wikipedia in your research. Because it is not an authoritative source.

 

The most helpful part of Wikipedia in the context of social welfare policy is, or any type of policy, actually, is the fact that it will provide citations for the individual policies that it mentions in a particular entry in its list of references at the bottom of the page. So you can actually use those references, those references will be hyperlinked and you can use Wikipedia, then, to track down a citation which you can then take to a more authoritative source of information like Nexis Uni, which is one of the databases we will be seeing, or a government website. So, Wikipedia -- helpful, but again, not appropriate to include in your research.

 

Let's see ... just a few notes here, Amanda, I think I am hearing an echo, you might want to mute yourself.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Okay, sorry about that.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  I just wanted to note a few things about looking for policy in general. The first thing being, you're going to see a lot of different terms associated with policy. So it would be really nice if everything that was a policy is called a policy, but that's just not how it works. There's all kinds of different terms. Very rarely will you even see the word "law "when you're talking about policy and law, you're really going to be seeing the terms "statutes" "regulations" and "court opinions." Those are the three big ones, especially at the federal level.

 

But you will also see terms like "bills," "public laws" and "private laws." I just included this slide in case you ever came across some legal terms you were not familiar with.

 

This slide is just meant to show you where these things are published. Again, this is at the federal level. It will differ slightly based on if you're looking at state-level resources. But statutes, which are those pieces of policy enacted by a legislative body, once it passes through Congress and becomes law, it will eventually be added to the US Code.

 

Now, the US Code is only updated once every six years, so if something were to be signed in to law today, it would have to wait until, I believe it was last updated in 2016, so all the way until 2022 to be added to the code. So until that time, it is a public law. So it still carries the weight of law, it's not technically part of the US Code yet. But that's where statutes are going to be published.

 

Regulations, which are the policies that executive bodies enforce, those are going to be housed in the code of federal regulations or the CFR. Then finally, policies that emerge out of the courtroom  are going to be called case law or court opinions they are published in US Court Opinions.

 

So where do we look for legal materials or policy materials? Legal databases are going to be one place. Two legal databases that we have are Gale OneFile: LegalTrac and Nexis Uni which we will see in a moment. The benefit to Nexis Uni is that you can access the official policies and secondary information to secondary sources like law reviews and news articles in one place.

 

Then, other relevant databases that we have in our collection are Political Science Complete, SocINDEX, Sage Stats and ICPSR. The last two are specifically or particularly helpful for stats.

 

Then, Google Scholar does have a case law search that not many people seem to know about. But just keep that in mind. You can switch, you can toggle between articles and case law under the main search bar in Google Scholar.

 

Then, this slide just lists out various government websites where you can track down policy. We will only see one today which is FDsys.

 

At the bottom there, if you are looking for state-level policies, the website openstates.org is a really good source for that.

 

So how do we go about searching for policy cereals or legal materials? There's three main ways. The first is by citation. A lot of times people don't have the citation and that's fine, especially if you're just beginning our research, you're just browsing, you're not going to have a citation for a particular policy. But if you do, say for example you were reading a Wikipedia article about adoption policy and it gives you a reference, it's going to give you that reference in citation format. So you could then take that and look in these databases and government websites. So that's one way. Another way is going to be back common name or popular name, so for example The Freedom of Information Act. Finally, you can just browse generally by topic.

 

With that being said, I'm going to hop back over to my web browser. And I want to talk with you, we will go straight to Nexis Uni. I am going to.... I'm sorry, Amanda, we were going to do the SocINDEX for search, first.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Sure, that sounds good. Let's go into ...

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  I am going to give you control here.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Great. I am going to show my screen.

 

All right, hopefully everybody can see that. You got it, Taylor?

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Sorry, yes. That's good.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Perfect. So, a good place to explore your social welfare topic is in one of our library databases. And a good starting point is the database SocINDEX which is a very comprehensive social work and sociology database. The way we get to that is just from the library's homepage. Just click on Select a Subject and scroll down to Social Work. And what comes up is a Social Work Research guide. This is something that I created and it's kind of a one-stop shopping place for databases in the social work field. Selected journals and lots of other useful information here. But what I am going to do is go ahead and go straight into social work databases SocINDEX and just click on databases, scroll down, so SocINDEX full text.

 

So you get your basic ebscohost search screen. What I am going to do right away is, one of the great things about SocINDEX and EBSCO databases, right up top where it says choose databases, you can choose to add a few more databases to your search. So you can choose more than one at a time, which is a real benefit here in social welfare research. Because we can also choose a political science database such as Political Science Complete to add to our search. So we are covering sociology and social work and social welfare, but we also are going to look into some of the political science aspects and legal aspects in the policy. So it's great to add that Political Science Complete database. I am not going to go and add too much more, just one, and we will do a combined search. So right now we're searching SocINDEX and Political Science Complete.

 

Something I'm interested in is public housing. So this is a social welfare topic. And let's add another keyword. Let's put urban development. And am going to uncheck the full text box and just do a basic search.

 

Again, starting broad with your topic is really your best bet. At least in the beginning stages of your research.

 

Now, the first thing I do before even start reading my results is I start limiting. Because I really want research articles at this point. So using the databases SocINDEX, Political Science Complete, we really want to [indiscernible] peer-reviewed, scholarly journal articles. So I want to make sure I click that box right away.

 

The second thing I want to do, and try to get used to doing this so it's very natural, you click the peer-reviewed box and then also change your dates, I am going to switch my dates from 2013 to 2018. Just because I want the current literature, I really don't want any outdated articles.

 

Now I am going to update my search. So this is actually really good search. I have 83 results. Everything is looking relevant.

 

Another good thing when you get a list of results, I may not know of any policies related to public housing and urban development, because I am just in my exploring stage of research. But one thing to do is look at the subject heading under your titles and authors to get an idea of what they are talking about. You don't have to read the abstract really, just yet, if you can see what the article is discussing from the subject headings. So I'm just going to scroll down and look at my subjects a little bit.

 

What I am seeing is [indiscernible] number six is actually referring to an actual policy called HOPE VI, it's a social welfare policy aimed at revitalizing some of the worst public housing in the nation through a series of grant programs. I don't really know anything about it, so I am thinking maybe this is a policy that I am going to write about or am interested in. You can click on the title of this article and you get a lot more detailed information, some more subject terms which is always great. But it also links me to HOPE VI program, and I can find all the articles in these databases that really deal with the HOPE VI. So this is a good way to find just articles that are dealing with this particular policy.

 

So following those steps, browsing our subject headings, clicking on [indiscernible] then finding policy. You may not know what policy you're interested in first, but doing the broad searches and it leads you to a particular policy, and then from there, you can take that and explore some databases that Taylor is going to talk about.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Indeed I am, thank you, Amanda. So I am on the Nexis Uni homepage now. Nexis Uni is a database for legal and business information. It contains all three kinds of policies -- statutory, regulatory and case law, as well as those secondary sources that I referred to earlier. Law reviews, law journals, case notes and briefs, as well as news articles. So there are lots and lots of different ways that you can search in Nexis Uni. I do another webinar on legal research that goes into more detail about the various ways to search in Nexis Uni. Before today's demonstration, we will just see how to do a basic search.

 

As you can see, there's this big search bar at the top of Nexis Uni and you can really type in anything you want to end here, whether it be natural language like how you would search in Google or something like that, or Boolean operators.

 

So, the search feature is much more intuitive than many others, the databases might be like the one we were just in, SocINDEX.

 

You can see that over here, we have this drop-down menu we can tell it exactly where we want it to search and how we want it to search. So you have this ability. We are just going to leave the set to all Nexis Uni for now. And this is a really useful way to search because it's going to give you a variety of information related to a particular issue.

 

So again, you can search in a lot of different ways. You can search by citation. You can search by the name of an actual policy. Or, you can search by general topic. And that is what I am going to do right now. I'm just going to type it "adoption." You can see, as it takes us away, that it suggests certain documents to us even before we search. And we will see that again in a moment.

 

So I'm not quite sure why, to be honest, but the default page that it shows you for any search you do in that main search bar, it's going to default to the News articles. And you can see, it gives you over 10,000 of these four option. However, you can change what you are seeing by using these different resource types along the left-hand side. So you can change to Cases if you are specifically interested in case law. Statute and legislation, law reviews and journals, code reviews and regulations down here. Among other things. So you have a lot of options here.

 

So I am going to go to statute and legislation. And then, I am going to keep scrolling down and I'm looking on the left-hand side. I'm going to specify a jurisdiction as some of you might want to do. I am going to say I want to see these statutes as they exist in Maine. Okay.

 

So, these are, this is what your results are going to look like. You can kind of look at the title of each one and see exactly where you are in codes in Maine.  You can view tables of contents for a lot of these documents because they are quite lengthy. If you click on one, we got into the detailed citation, the detailed record, that is. And, I just wanted to point out a couple things. The first one is this big Copy Citation button. If you click this, it's going to give you the citation right down here and that's very easy to copy and paste. Law citations can be very confusing, so this is a nice tool to know about.

 

Also if you look down here, it's going to give you the hyperlinked, the various hyperlinked parts of the main code. So you can sort of navigate that way as well.

 

Another nice feature is up here, this Search Document box. So if you're looking for a particular aspect of adoption policy in Maine, you could enter that up here and that is going to search within this very long, dense document for that term.

 

As you can see, it does highlight the term we originally search for already, so you can use that, as well.

 

Oddly, the last thing, this drop-down menu for Go to, click on this, and you can go to different parts of the document. An area you might want to go to is Research References and Practice. That is going to take you to the very end and it is going to tell you all the different references for this piece of legislation, so that might be helpful to you as well as you begin to follow leads.

 

Let me just go back here. And when I do go back, one thing you will notice is you see this eyeglasses icon over here. This tells you that you have viewed this document, which is helpful, because these names they give you an citation format, it can be hard to remember which ones you have seen and which would you haven't.

 

I am going to go  all the way back here to the search page, let's go back here. I am going to type "adoption" in again and I want to show you what it suggests before we hit search. So it gives you these suggested documents. And just by looking at these, you might have a pretty good idea about a particular policy you might want to investigate further. There is this one, Adoption and Safe families Act of 1997. There is this court case down here. So that is good to know about. Also there's recommendations for legal phrases. So if you're not quite sure if the term you are using is the most appropriate, you might take a look at these consider those as well.

 

So I am going to select this first recommended document, Adoption And Safe Families Act. This is going to take me straight to that piece of legislation.

 

So, that's a really nice feature. Now, if I wanted to, I could actually, let's see, if I can pull this off. Well,  I will just describe it. You can actually type the name of a policy that we were using, the safe families and adoption act in here in quotation marks. So let me actually do it.

 

In quotation marks, because that tells the database that you want to see all the results for this exact phrase. Then, you could search that way as well. And instead of taking you straight into the actual piece of policy, uh-oh, safe families and adoption?

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Taylor, they are just backwards. It is the Adoption and Safe Families Act. There you go.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay. So if you were to search this way, you would again be presented with that same list of results that we had initially. So now you can look and all of the statutes and legislation where this act has been cited or you could do the same thing for news articles or case law or what have you.

 

So before we leave Nexis Uni, I just went to point out this help link here. This has a lot of really good instructional content. So both this link and down here, this Tips link, both of these are going to provide some really good suggestions. So if you come back and get confused about how to best search in this database, definitely explore those resources.

 

So now I'm going to go to FDsys. FDsys is the largest online provider of government documents. It's kind of a one-stop shop for government documents online. It covers all three branches and it includes all three kinds of policies -- statutes, regulations and court opinions.

 

Similar to the links I was just pointing out, these links over here on the left-hand side are going to be really helpful in instructing you how to best use FDsys because it is a bit different from other databases you might have encountered. So these are helpful. Then over here, you can use these links to specify a collection or a type of resources that you are interested in. So you might, for example, select the US Code down here, then you could select a year and title and a chapter. However, there won't be any option to use search terms if you go about your search this way.

 

In order to use our search terms we are going to use this main search bar. You can see that it is kind of small compared to what we saw in Nexis Uni. But I am just going to type in "elderly" and search. Again, as I mentioned previously, statutes going to end up in the US Code. Case law ends up in US Court Opinions and regulations end up in Code Of Federal Regulations. So again, everything we are discussing right now is federal level. But if you know what kind of policy you are looking for, you can use, you can limit your results, you can see we are getting 66,000 results right now. You can limit to United States Courts Opinion right here, the Federal Register, the Code Of Federal Regulations then the United States Code is down here. But there's a lot of other options, as well.

 

So I'm going to limit our search to the United States Code. That gives us 302 results. And I wanted to point out that you have the ability, sort of like we saw in Nexis Uni, you can search within these results. So we are getting 300 now and you really wanted to hone in on a particular aspect of policy regarding the elderly, you can type in another search term here and check within results. And it would search within these 302 results.

 

You could also add terms. I am going to add a term "older," which is a synonymous term we might consider using in this context. We are going to separate these terms with the word OR, and that is one of those Boolean operators. And I am going to search again. I think we are going to have to specify, go back and specify that we want only ... yeah, we are ... only things from the US Code.

 

And, once we do that, we are going to be left with 695 results. From here, you can simply, you can click on one of the results to go straight into the document. Now, these are going to be very long, dense documents. This one is only four pages, so this was not too bad. But some of them will be extremely long. So one trick you might consider doing once you get to the PDF is Ctrl Find, and that will bring you to this search box appear and from there you can type in any particular term that you might want to see highlighted in this document.

 

What else did I want to point out? You can also click on this More Information link down here. This is going to give you the equivalent, a detailed citation for this official government policy. You have this list of Actions over here. So you can browse the US Code. You can find witnesses at a federal depository library. You can view it in the Catalog of US Government Publications among other things.

 

Also, another option you have is to see ... where did I see this? If you scroll down, you can see this Document in Context. So this is going to give you the entirety of the code that this came from. So this is helpful for getting an idea of the different parts of the code that might be applicable. For example, this particular part that we are searching is it Chapter 89. But if we scroll up, we also... I'm sorry, it's in Chapter 42. But if we scroll up, we also see, let's see ... you know what? I think I chose a different result and it's messing me up. Yeah, I did. [LAUGHS] But the point is, you can browse through these different parts of the code, because of the parts might be applicable to your topic as well. Let me go back now.

 

You could also, for the sake of, we are running a little behind on time, I won't do this, but you can also search for specific pieces of legislation. And again, you are just going to want to wrap these names, like for example, the Older Americans Act, you would just want to wrap that title in quotation marks so it knows you are looking for that exact phrase.

 

Let me go back to... so we only linked it there ....

 

Before I hand it back to Amanda to talk about policy and advocacy groups, I just want to mention a couple other databases. I mentioned these at the beginning, but Sage Stats, particularly for statistics, the database Sage Stats is going to be really helpful, as well as for secondary data, ICPSR, both are databases that we have access to. And another, one last thing in terms of statistics, there is, this is linked in the social welfare policy guide that I pointed out at the beginning, as well as other places on the library's website. But we have something called a Combined Statistic Search. And if you use that, let me see if I can pull that up really quick.

 

This is a good time to demonstrate how to get to our guides. So from the library's homepage, we're going to switch this search up here to Search Everything. This is how we get to guides and Quick Answers. I am going to type in statistics. Guides are going to display over here on the left. Quick Answers are in the central column here. And I'm going to go to the Statistics and Data Guide.

 

Again, what I am pointing out here is also in the Social Welfare Policy Guide. But this is the Statistics Combined search. You can search for anything in here, and it's going to return the most relevant government websites that have statistics on this topic. So you can see all these various results we're getting federally. So that's a good thing to know about. And again, for state level statistics or government websites, the website Open States.org is going to be helpful. With that being said, I'm going to pass it back to Amanda.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  All right, thanks, Taylor. That combined statistics search is so useful.

 

Just to recap, we have looked at exploring your social policy topic using encyclopedias, Wikipedia, Thoreau. We have looked at sociology, the social work database in conjunction with Political Science Complete. Then Taylor has shown us some of that great legal research.

 

There's another part of doing social policy research that involves think tanks. They are also called advocacy centers, policy groups. But think tanks, they basically create reports on social problems. Also, they write reports on existing policies and proposed policies. They are going to write about the implications, were they successful? Why or why not? So these think tanks are actually a really good place to go for some policy analysis to look at what's being said in the public about that particular policy.

 

One thing about think tanks is some obviously do have distinguishable political bias. Then, some don't. So you really have to put on your critical thinking, when you're doing a think tank search, when you're doing research using think tanks.

 

But I want to show you, and this is also linked in our guide, the Harvard Kennedy School has a free, Google custom search. It searches all the think tanks based on just a keyword or phrase that you can add right here in the search box.

 

For instance, if we are looking for various think tanks that are writing about child welfare, we are not just sure who out there is studying and writing on child welfare. You can just type in your keywords and get a list of results.

 

Just right off the top of my head, I am familiar with the Rand Corporation. So I am going to click there. But there is so much more. I think a lot of us have heard of the Urban Institute. A lot of these you will be familiar with. But let's click on that first link. It's going to give me a lot of information about certain policies going on right now with child welfare. So within that is exploring something, you can also do other categories and other subtopics. But this is just an interesting way to explore other areas of social policy. And think tanks is a big part of that. So like I said, I do have that link on our guide and you can go in, as well as, I have linked several other think tanks that just deal with social welfare. And those are linked as well.

 

Taylor, I'm going to throw it back to you, now.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay. Thanks, Amanda. So that really concludes what we wanted to cover in today's session. Just a couple of closing notes, I have linked, again, here, the Social Welfare Policy Guide. Then also a link here to our webinar archive. Like I said, I do a couple of other webinars specifically on those legal databases and government websites. So if you have any more questions about those, that would be a good place to look.

 

Then, I have also included links to our Library Skills guides which we saw an example of and Quick Answers, which is a really good resource to know about because it offers answers to some of the more commonly asked questions in a very succinct form.

 

Finally, if you want to contact us to ask us a question you can do so by clicking on the Ask a Librarian. I am going to pop over here to show your that is. This is the Library website. Just click up here on Ask a Librarian. When you do, you will see the various options you have for contacting us. You can email us. You can chat us. You can call in a question. If you are a doctoral student you can schedule a research appointment with one of the research librarians to discuss any aspect of your research. So I hope this session has been helpful. Thank you so much for joining us today.

 

With all that being said, I will just say thank you, thank you. And have a wonderful day. We will open it up for questions in just a moment.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Yes, thanks everybody.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay. We have stopped the recording and now, we are going to take a look at some of these questions that you have here.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  I don't see any questions. Do you see any, Taylor?

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Don't see any questions. So we will give you a couple minutes, I know we hit on a lot of things, so you might not have had time to digest everything that we talked about yet. But if anybody has any questions for us, now is the time to ask.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  I think we have stumped them, Taylor. [LAUGHS] It was overload.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Here we have one. "One question I have is if you will have access to the PowerPoint?" Yes, you do have access right now. Click over here in the Handouts tab, you should be able to download it right there. And then, if you wanted it at a later date, as well, you could contact us for that, as well.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  And, Taylor, won't they get a recording as well in a follow-up email?

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  That's correct. I should have mentioned that. Everybody who registered for this webinar will receive an email in about four hours or so that contains a link so they can view this webinar again if you aren't able to make it. You can view it then. So, yes. Good question.

 

"Do you guys have an email?" Yes, if you wanted to email a question in, you're going to use this Ask a Librarian feature that we pointed out here. That's going to be the best way to contact us because that's going to ensure that we get back to you as quickly as possible.

 

"I joined late, but can we use this tool to research any social welfare topically?" It depends on what tool you are referring to. We covered a lot in this session. So you might need to go back and watch all the different places that we go. The answer is, yes. You can use these tools that we talked about to research social welfare. Definitely.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Absolutely!

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay, we are getting some thanks, thank you  everybody a lot for joining us. maybe just a few more seconds for any last minute questions.

 

"Could you please review how to get into Nexis Uni?" So there are various ways you can do that. I am going to show you from the homepage. So, two ways that I would do this, one would be to use this Databases A-Z button. From there you can navigate along the top here to get to Nexis Uni. That's one way. Another way ... actually, that way is not as accessible as it used to be. But another way would be to go to the public policy and public administration research homepage here. And you can go into databases and, unfortunately, it's not linked in these databases that you will see right off the bat. You have to come here to view all public policy databases, then you can scroll down and get to it that way, as well.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  It looks like one more question.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  So, you just answered my question ... yes. Good. Thank you, Anita. Then we have, "GPO.gov is for state or federal policy levels?"

 

I guess that's a question. The GPO, that is at the federal level. So what we were seeing when we were searching in FDsys, that was all federal level policy. So, yeah. For state level, to figure out what the, what the legislative bodies are in your state or the executive bodies, you're going to use this website openstates.org. So Stephanie, open states.org. correct.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  You got it.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  You're welcome.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Yeah, you're welcome.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Okay.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  It's getting quiet.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  It does seem pretty quiet. I'm going to assume you guys are digesting ... here we go:

 

"At times we are unable to access Walden Books, it says we don't have access."

 

Okay, any problems with accessing any of our databases or anything like that, be sure to report that using that Ask a Librarian tool. Because we definitely want to get to the bottom of that as quickly as possible. So, Carmelita, if you wanted to submit a request or a question about that, we will get that to you really soon.

 

And then, Josephine says she is trying to find info on Jane Adams. Again, that is going to be specific to your own research, so feel free to ask that question in using the Ask a Librarian feature. We have people who staff that multiple times a day, so they will get an answer to you really quickly.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Hmmm. "Viewing books are difficult." Hmmm.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  We might be getting sort of off the social welfare topic here. But books, if they are course texts, you need to secure through either the bookstore or another vendor of your choice. If it's not a course text, be sure to get in touch with us. Because there's certain books we have in our collection. Then if we don't, we have ways of getting portions of the books. So, submit a question and we'll get back to you soon.

 

Okay, let me just say thank you everyone so much for joining us today. We had a pretty good turnout. I hope it was helpful. And if you are doing some research on social policy,  social welfare policy in the future and have any questions or don't remember something that we talked about, feel free to get in touch. We always welcome questions and we're always here to help.

 

Thanks again, and hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Thank you everybody.

 

>> TAYLOR LEIGH:  Bye bye.

 

>> AMANDA SOLOMON:  Bye.

 

End Transcript

 

Created June 2018 by Walden University Library