Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/A53ptWv1c1A

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Welcome everyone to tonight's webinar. This is the first in our Evaluating Resources webinar series. The title is What Is This Stuff? Identifying Materials in the Walden Library.

My name is Emily Adams, I am one of the Reference and Instruction Librarians here at the library. Joining me tonight is Trish Pierson, another one of our fabulous Reference and Instruction Librarians. We are excited to get into this stuff. This stuff matters to us and we think it also matters to you, that is why we are sharing it. I will turn off my WebCam now and get started with the presentation.

As I said, we are doing a series on how to evaluate resources in the library. Tonight we are going to go over the nitty-gritty of what are you looking at so that you know what to do with it. In a month, we will do one on evaluating resources, the Three Ps of Evaluation. We'll talk primary versus secondary sources, popular versus scholarly resources and peer-reviewed.

In July, we'll talk about when to use what you find, how to evaluate library materials to know when to use them.

The last one in August, we are going to talk about, what about stuff you find on the Internet. That's a big topic and a lot of fun, actually, to talk about. So, please do join us for these other webinars if you have a chance. At the end, we will show you where you can go and register for these.

 

Now, on to our goals and objectives for tonight. Our goal really is to help you identify all of the materials that you will see in the Walden Library. You may ask, "Why do I care?" [LAUGHS] It really does matter if you are asked to turn in a journal article, peer-reviewed journal article, and you give somebody a book chapter. Those are not the same thing, and you may lose points on that.

 

Similarly, if you are looking for a scholarly source and you end up with a newspaper article, newspaper articles aren't scholarly.

 

So it really is important to be able to look at what you've found and figure out what it is so that you know how to use it appropriately.

 

So, tonight, we are going to talk about locating and identifying ... well, not locating, sorry, just identifying books, dissertations, journal articles, encyclopedias and newspaper articles. Those are our focus.

 

I am going to throw up a disclaimer here that we are not the APA people. That is the Writing Center. We do share some citations on our slides. If they are not correct, sorry. [LAUGHS] But talk to the Writing Center if you have questions about APA, and I did link to the information here on the slide.

 

With that, let's get started. Journal articles, this will probably be the material you will see most often and be required to find most often throughout your studies at Walden. A lot of the sources you use for your discussion posts and for your assignments, if you are at dissertation level, for your dissertation literature review, it's a lot of journal articles. That's just where the research is often published. So it's really important that you are able to tell that what you are looking at is a journal article.

 

I want to point out that here at the top of my screen I have a citation for a journal article. Couple of the things that really set apart journal article citations are the fact that there are two titles. There is one not italicized, there is one straight up. Then there is the italicized title.

 

The first one is the title of the article and the second one, the italicized one, is the name of the journal.

 

So if you see two titles in your citation that you have found, you can start thinking hey, this might be a journal article.

 

Then what you will look for is the numbers, the volume and issue numbers. Pretty much journals are the ones that are going to have these extra numbers, because they are published periodically and you need to know which specific issue you are looking at and for that you do need a volume and issue numbers.

 

Also, journal articles don't generally take up the entire thing. So you will have page numbers. Here we have 107-118. Those are the pages you actually find that journal article.

 

Those are the things to look for when you have a citation. When you have a reference citation and you're thinking hey, what exactly is this? You see those two titles, volume and issue number, page number -- pretty good indication those are a journal.

 

Let's look at the flipside, let's go into the library and run a search. I want to show the library homepage. What I do is for example type in social change AND education in the Thoreau search box on the top of the page and that will open some search results.

 

I am going to scroll down to see a journal article. In some of our databases, you will see that it says academic journal over on the side or it says e-book. So that's a pretty good hint. But if that isn't there in the particular database you're looking at, you can come here to this section below the title and say here is the title of my article right here, have gotten another title here, I've got it here, I've got a volume, page numbers, issue, that's a good sign this could be a journal article. If you are still not sure, you can always click on a title of an article in the databases and they will generally tell you straight up. It will say document type, article. That is another good hint that this is an article, this is what I have found. And you can look for the information about it and you will see, again, you have your journal title, date, volume, issue. Those are all things you look for in journal articles.

 

Are there any questions about journal articles? Being able to identify them, before I move over to books?

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  I don't see any questions.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Great, then let's talk books. We just saw our journal articles and now we have books. We see right off the bat couple big differences. One is, we just have one title. That's all we have. We also have a location to which we did not have before. And we have a publisher, which is also something we did not have for our journal article. So these are all signs that this is a book. It's got these editors, that is what the Eds stands for. Then one title, a location, then the publisher. That's a pretty standard book citation.

 

So let me go back to my search that I did, go back to my result list and look at one of these books. EBSCO makes it easy. It says right here it's an e-book. But as I look through this I am not seeing another title in here. I see a publication group, I see a total number of pages but not like a page range. And I saw a place. So again, good indication that this is a book. This is not a journal article. Over here in the title it even gives me an editor [indiscernible]. I am going to go ahead and click on this one just to show ... again as I scroll down, I can see publication type:  book. That generally makes it pretty easy and straightforward when you're in the databases.

 

With that, I am going to talk about, I am going to move through these pretty quickly unless there are questions, and Trish can jump in with that.

 

I want to talk about book chapters. Book chapters are slightly more tricky than straight up journals or straight up books.

 

So, book chapters also have two titles. I see up here, Foreign Policy and Social Change, that's my chapter title. Foreign Policy and the Developing Nations is my book title. And I have a page range. So that is kind of similar to a journal article and having two titles is similar to journal article.

 

But then, there are things that are not similar. For example I've got two authors going on here. You can have multiple authors for journal articles but they are both right together. It will just list them out, Ness, Butler, Smith -- whatever.

 

But in this one, and has two sets of authors, it has the word in, then another title, and it does give you page numbers because this is a section out of the book. Another thing you can look for is this Lexington, Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky. Those you don't find in a journal. That's a good indication this is not a full book, it is part of a book. But it is definitely not a journal article because it has all this other information you would not find in a journal article citation.

 

Again, let me jump back over to the library website. I am going to go back over to this book that I pulled up and show you what the book chapters look like and why you have different information for book chapters.

 

Once you go into a book in the library, this is just one example. You scroll down, you will see the table of contents. I am going to go to Part 1 and show the subject sections.  You will see  you have different titles. You need that chapter title to be able to identify it. But generally, you also have a different author for each book chapter.

 

In that way, it is kind of like, a lot of these scholarly books are kind of like a journal with different articles published in it, it's just a whole lot bigger and may not be peer-reviewed. But it is the same kind of idea with a journal article, with a book chapter to a book.

 

Let me click on this so we can see what the book chapter looks like. I've got Chapter 1, and again, I've got these authors. They are the ones who wrote this particular chapter. But they are not the authors of the book that are listed over here. Or, not all of the authors or editors of the book that are listed here.

 

So that is what I wanted to talk about with book chapters.

 

Are there any questions before I pass it over to Trish?

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  I am not seeing anything.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Awesome. Then I am going to let Trish talk about dissertations.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  So, what I am going to do is show you some other fun things you can find in the library. That looks like we might actually have a question about one of yours, Emily.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Yeah, I just saw that. The question is, do you only use the name of the authors in the chapter?

 

Trish, if you want to go back to my slide for book chapters ... slide 8.

 

So, with book chapters, it is important that you list, the first author is definitely going to be the author of the book chapter. So that specific chapter. But then you will see it says in and then has other authors. Often times editors in this case. So you do have to use both because it's important that you're able both to identify the chapter that you are looking for and who wrote it, but also the book and who wrote that or who edited it.

 

If you do have questions about how to cite book chapters and books, the Writing Center really is awesome. They are really good at answering questions, all kinds of questions about APA. So hopefully that clears that up. Okay, Trish.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Dissertations! Okay. With dissertations, a lot of times, they are pretty easy to identify because in the citation itself, it often is going to mention something about dissertations like you can see here, doctoral dissertation right there. So, they tend to be a bit more blatant.

 

The other things that you will see, often, is that it is going to tell you that it is retrieved from ProQuest dissertations and theses database, because that is the main big dissertations database we have here in the Walden Library and that is often where you will be finding the dissertations from.

 

Otherwise, it does have like the author, so the person who actually completed and brought that dissertation, the year, the title, that sort of thing.

 

Often times, you will have either a UMI number or another numbery thing that follows at the end.

 

Those are just different ways you can help identify dissertations when people are trying to track things down. That is slightly different, typically you're not seeing things like page numbers, definitely not like volumes or issues, because this is one big, giant work that somebody has completed. It is not part of something.

 

We will go ahead and look in the library. I have gone ahead and done a search in the ProQuest dissertations database. And you can see that we've got a bunch of results listed here. With this, if you are searching with the dissertation databases, something that kind of gives it away is you will often see the name of the college, like University of South Florida or Walden University or University of Illinois, whatever. You are often going to see that information listed in the citation type information that is below the title.

 

Typically, you are going to see the ProQuest dissertation publishing, because those are the people who are putting together this particular database. We do have one that's just Walden information, and this is the bigger one that are dissertations from all over the place.

 

I don't know, we could try a preview and see if this will work. These are typically really big files, if you click on the full text it is going to open up the entire, giant dissertation, which can sometimes take a bit of time.

 

Otherwise, when you open them up, you're going to see a title of the person and you will see here below that a dissertation submitted and partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree for whatever degree that person has gotten. In this case, a PhD in education and they will tell you College of Education, University of South Florida.

 

So you will see that all that information about what school, what degree, etc. etc., then the list of people who are on the chair and on the committee. That is something that is totally different than any of the other kind of other stuff you're going to be out there looking for in the library. Those are all things that are a dead, dead giveaway that you are looking at a dissertation and not a book or whatever sort of thing that you need.

 

So, are there any questions about dissertations?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  No. I think you can move on.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Yeah, those are usually pretty straightforward, unlike some things ... like encyclopedias!

 

Encyclopedias can be confusing because they can sometimes look like book chapters. You will see here, we have, like the book chapters, we have two titles in this case. Social change is the title of the entry. Encyclopedia of Anthropology is the title. But you will see it also has that little in like in book chapter. Sometimes people get confused with those. If it says something like "Encyclopedia of Anthropology" or "Encyclopedia of Leadership" or whatever, then, that can be a dead giveaway there. But sometimes encyclopedias don't have encyclopedia in the name. In that case you are like hmmm, is this a book chapter or not?

 

Sometimes what they will do is if there are multiple volumes of an encyclopedia, they will tell you like a volume number here and it will be followed by page numbers. Typically, page numbers for encyclopedias are really, really short. It is going to be like one or two or maybe three pages. So that can help in differentiating between like a book chapter and an encyclopedia entry. Because a book chapter is typically going to be a bit longer. But if you have ever looked through encyclopedias, things are pretty short and sweet. Is like here's the thing about social change, boom, boom. It's a little overview. It's not getting into huge number of pages there. If you look and are only seeing a couple pages, that can point to it being an encyclopedia over a book chapter.

 

Again, you are going to see that place where it's been published and then, the publication company. In this case, SAGE Publications. They have huge numbers of encyclopedias out there.

 

We will go ahead and take a look at that and one of the databases just because I think sometimes it can be a little easier when you're looking at it.

 

I have already done a search in the SAGE encyclopedias database, which is called SAGE Knowledge. There are all kinds of things in there besides encyclopedias, handbooks, etc.

 

If you go through you will see it has that lovely little icon and it will tell you encyclopedia so you can go, "Okay, this is probably an encyclopedia."

 

Here you are going to see things where it is going to be an entry in the encyclopedia which is here, this is something on stewardship. You can see it's found on the Encyclopedia of Educational Leadership and Administration. I will go ahead and click on that.

 

You will see that it opens up and this is really pretty short. It's just going to tell you a little bit about stewardship and then, stewardship and servant leadership. So it's just going through and giving you a little overview. The search that I did originally was for servant leadership. This is why it's pulled this little piece up.

 

You can see, this is super, super brief. They are giving you little references and things there, but not like the giant reference list you would see in books or in journal articles.

 

Again, once you look at the entry, it's usually pretty easy to go, this is probably not a book chapter. This is probably an encyclopedia or the shortest book chapter ever in the history of mankind.

 

Typically, not so much.

 

Did we have any questions about that before we move along to  the next thing, which is, newspaper articles.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  We love newspaper articles. Go for it.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  All right, newspaper articles are, again, super short and sweet. They are a little bit different when you see the reference citation. You will notice that instead of just having the year, it's going to give you a date. Because if you look at newspapers, typically, they are published every day of the week or, at least most days of the week. Some of the print papers have gone to dropping out like one or two days a week. But they are pretty consistent. They have to let you know which day that thing was published because otherwise, if it just says May, even, you could be looking through 30 days of crazy newspaper articles which should be quite a lot. So, it is trying to help make it so you can find things fairly easily.

 

Here you are going to see that it's got the title of the newspaper article and then, it's going to have the title of the newspaper, itself. Sometimes that is kind of a dead giveaway because it's something like The New York Times or Washington Post or whatever, which are like the big, really common newspapers that are out there that people have heard of. So you are like, okay. It will not have any volume or issue numbers. Sometimes it will have a page number. It just really kind of depends and I don't know what the proper APA formatting for that is as far as page numbers. I have seen with both, either/or. That would probably be something you would need to double check with the Writing Center to make sure you've got it in the right format.

 

So, will go ahead and pop it to one of the databases we've got newspapers which is ProQuest Central. And I have done a search for Social Change. And you can see that, there's kind of a variety of different things here. You will see the title of the article. Below that, the author. And typically, you're going to see the name of the newspaper. So, here, University Wire, Carlsbad. And you will see an actual date, 16 September 2015.

 

If we looked down here, you will see some that are more distribution services for newspapers. And then also, things like the Irish Times, Dublin. A lot of times they are going to give you a city, too, just so you know what city it's being published out of. You will see this is another news service in Washington. The advertiser which is in Adelaide, South Australia. A wide variety of things. Atlanta Journal, etc. You are going to see these newspapery names, that is a good indication.

 

And all of these will have things like 23rd of February or 10th of January 2008. So they are going to give you the full date so that you know exactly which date that was published in this newspaper so that you can go back and find it without having to look through 30 days or more of a newspaper, which would not be fun, whatsoever.

 

Then you can go ahead and take a quick look at one of these and you can see that these are typically pretty darn short. So you will see the full text is just listed out here and this is the entire thing. And it will sometimes give you the word count. So, 609 words, not an academic or scholarly journal. Those have way more words when you're looking at those particular things.

 

So, that is what newspapers look like.

 

Did we have any questions about that?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  No, I think we are doing well.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Okay, I've got a couple other things just to point out to you guys as we go out here.

 

Since we didn't get into like, how do you find all these crazy different things in the library, what we did is, we have these different links we have shared. So if you want to know, what if I want to, if I want to find a dissertation, how do I find that? Where are the encyclopedias? How do I find that? Where do I find it newspapers? What these links will do is, and will walk you through how to do each of these different things. These are all from our Quick Answers which are kind of like frequently asked questions. And I can point out where you can find that on the library website.

 

So if you are on the library homepage at the top, right, there are some smaller tabs up here and you will see one for Get Help. If you click on Get Help and scroll down just a little bit you will see FAQ, Quick Answers. It has a little box, "How do I find…" populated in there. You can type in anything. If you type in dissertation, it will pull up any of the questions with the answers that have to do with dissertations. That's a really good, fast way, if you've got a basic question that you, boom, you want a super quick answer, then that is a wonderful resource.

 

We do always have Ask a Librarian service available. That is up here in the upper, right corner. If you click on that you can contact us through email. We have some chat hours, etc., etc. If you have other questions that are more than what the Quick Answers can do then you can contact us that way.

 

And a couple other things I wanted to point out are ... let me go back to the main page ... is, we do have an Evaluating Resources Guide. If you are on that main, homepage and you scroll down a bit, there is a fairly big button for Library Skills. If you click on Library Skills, to the left you will see a box that says Build Library Skills. Under that the first link is Library Skills Guides. These are many of our different guides and these are in alphabetical order. You will see there is a link for Evaluating Resources in that alphabetical list. If you click on that it will open the Evaluating Resources Guide. So if you have a questions later about remembering how to tell the difference between encyclopedias and book chapters or newspapers or whatever -- and we do have other things too, conference proceedings, etc. -- you can come here and find that information. It will also walk you through a lot of other things, too. Like to evaluate things, etc. Some of the things that we will be getting into as we go through this particular series in evaluating resources.

 

I think I am going to turn it back over to Emily unless we have any other questions.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  I think we are good. Actually, could you show where to register for the other Evaluating Resources?

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Yes. So, we will go back, all the way out to the main library homepage.

 

On the main library homepage there's a couple places you can go. But if you click on Library Skills like we did to get to the Evaluating Resources Guide, you will see in the middle section, to build library skills, there is a box for webinars. You will see either upcoming or recorded webinars. If you want to see upcoming webinars, you can click on that, and you will see all the stuff coming up that you can register for it. You can also find that just on the library homepage. It does go kind of by, they can only fit so many things that are upcoming on here. So you have to click View All Upcoming Library Webinars if you are not seeing the things that you want -- which in this case, you would have to do that to get to the next ... there we are. Three Ps of Evaluation. I think it only, by default, shows five or six of the upcoming things. So you just have to click on that a little more and you will be able to see all the things we have coming up in the future and you will be able to go ahead and register for all the things that look interesting.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Awesome, thank you, Trish.

 

Can you show the last slide, the Test Your Skills slide?

 

With that, that is pretty much what we wanted to talk about tonight. Thank you for your attendance. Now, if you want to test your skills, you can stick around and we have a quiz for you.

 

End Transcript

 

Created June 2018 by Walden University Library