Milne Library News

State Times Library Corner: Finals Week Stress Busters

State Times — Posted by Kay Benjamin @ 09:19

For some of you, the best way to relieve stress during exams is simply to have a quiet place to study. Often this is not a dorm room or an apartment, since friends and  housemates may be studying (or not) in a style that is considerably louder than your own. The library can provide an alternative to constantly roaring at your roommate, “Be quiet!” The third floor of the library has been designated an absolute quiet floor, which means that you are free to remind people of this and you can come to the Reference Desk on the first floor for back up, should you encounter persistent noise. Beginning December 5,  the library is open  extended hours, until midnight on Friday and Saturday, and until 1:00 am Sunday through Wednesday, then until midnight on Thursday.

What else can you do to relieve stress during periods when intense concentration is required? Here are some suggestions:

1.     Get help: If you’re having a tough time with your research, call the Reference & Information Desk at 436-2722, email your question to libref@oneonta.edu, or come to the library and get face-to-face help.

2.     Read a magazine. The library has lots of popular magazines, including really light reading like “People Weekly,” in the Reading Room on the first floor of the library.

3.     Eat food. Jazzman’s is oh, so convenient to the library for coffee, cookies, coffee, sandwiches, coffee.

4.     Watch a movie. You may not have a lot of cash, but you don’t need any to take movies out of the library. To browse, go to the second floor, head to the Dewey Room straight ahead, then aim for the far corner to your right where DVDs, videocassettes, and books on tape are shelved. You can also search the catalog for a specific movie, or to get a list of the popular movies search for the subject “feature films.”

5.     Laugh. Friends are the best for this, but if you want a few minutes of absent-minded chuckles, try some of this  web site: Final Exam Humor at webcatt.net/humor/final_exam.html

6.     Do goofy stuff online. You probably have your own favorites, but here are some librarian’s favorites in no particular order.

Just remember, do not do any one of these things to the exclusion of actually writing papers and studying for exams. Good luck.


State Times Library Corner: Finding Those Danged Articles

State Times — Posted by Kay Benjamin @ 18:38

Looking for articles? Your professor usually assumes you know what an article is, right? Not an Article of the Constitution or an article in the grammatical sense (a, an, the), but an article from a magazine or a journal or a newspaper. He or she does NOT want you to go to Google or Ask.com, do a quick search, and drag in the top five results – 99 times out of 100 these are not going to be articles. True, magazines like Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly put a small number of their articles on their web sites and these might show up in a Google search. Read “small  number” as the important phrase here – not the full content.

 

Basically using a web search engine like Yahoo! is a totally unreliable and inadequate way to search for articles. Especially when the library web site has exactly what your professor expects from you. Read my lips –  E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. The tools you need are called databases. These are essentially large digital holding tanks for the contents of thousands of magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals. These are articles that were originally published in the print version of periodicals such as the New York Times or the Journal of Animal Law and Ethics. The library pays to subscribe to these using your technology fees and tuition. Think of these databases as being like HBO and Showtime – premier content, while web search engines like Google and Yahoo! are basic cable full of ads and a tremendous amount of junk, with a good show appearing only now and then.

 

All the library subscription databases can be accessed from the library home page under the heading marked “Find Articles and Databases.”  The top links under this heading are Databases (A-Z) (useful if you already know the name of the database you want to use) and Databases by Subject. Since the library subscribes to about 100 databases on a wide variety of topics, it’s helpful to use this second link to focus on those databases that are most appropriate for your topic. The remainder of the links on the library home page are to popular and highly-used databases.

 

In addition to there being many subject-specific database like America: History and Life or Science Direct or Business and Company Resource Center, there are a number of databases that include the text of articles across many subjects. One of the best is Academic Search Premiere, which is pretty much a good database to start with for most topics. You’ll find the link to this index in the list on the home page under “Find Article and Databases.”

 

Here are some tips for searching Academic Search Premiere.

 
  1. Key Words: Use key words and phrases and place one concept per line in the search boxes.
  2. Peer-reviewed: On the page listing the results, look for the links above the list of results -  “Academic Journals,” “Magazine,” “Newspapers” – and click on the one you need. Many professors give assignments that require you use scholarly or peer-reviewed journal articles – select the Academic Journals to limit your search to peer-reviewed.
  3. Narrow the Results: On the results page, use the links on the left to narrow your set of results to a specific subject. You can always back up and select a different limiting subject.
  4. Email the Article to Yourself: Instead of printing every article you might need, email articles to yourself using the link on the upper right of the page of the article you want. Go through them later and print only those you really need.
  5. Find It: Some articles will be available in full-text – HTML full text or PDF full text – but some will not. Click on the “Find It” link to find out if the article is available in one of the other databases the library subscribes to.
  6. Interlibrary Loan: If the “Find It” link tells you the article isn’t available anywhere else online, and it’s an important article for your research, look for the  “Request item on Interlibrary Loan” link on the “Find It” window and use this to have the library get a copy of the article from another library, delivered to you electronically.
  7. Search Multiple Databases Simultaneously: Academic Search is just one of many databases made by a company call EBSCOhost. It’s kind of like Toyota making many different models of cars. To search several EBSCOhost databases at once, find the dropdown box just below the search boxes that indicates the name of the database you’re searching. Click on this to see the full list of EBSCOhost databases, and check the other databases you’d like to search.
 

As always, ask for  help at the Reference and Information Desk, call 436-2722, or email your questions to libref@oneonta.edu.

 

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