Research Help....from the Web!

If you're like most students, you probably spend a lot of your time researching on a computer. Luckily there are many free apps and tools to help manage your research, create citations, and find help- all by spending less than a minute downloading the tool! Here's some of my favorites:

*Zotero: Zotero is a Firefox extension that allows users to save data from a website (or library catalog), organize links and references into lists, and pull together a citation for the saved items.

*Notefish: Notefish can be used to compile and organize all of your Web research into one easy location for quick reference. Check this page out for an example.

*CiteULike: CiteULike lets researchers search citations and abstracts for over 4 million articles right from the Web. Each citation was submitted by fellow researchers who found the article helpful. You can then create lists of articles that you'd like to read and cross-reference them with the Seminole State Citation Linker or request an interlibrary loan copy.

*LINCC Catalog Search for Facebook: Here's a quick way to get some of your research done while you check your Facebook account! Just add the app to your page and you'll be able to search very similarly to the Seminole State library catalog, for books, e-books, and articles.


Do you know of any others? Please tell me and all your fellow researchers about them in the comments section! I'd love to hear what you're using.

Library in your Pocket

BooksinMyPhone is a way to read free books that are in in the public domain right on your phone. No need to get a Kindle or other e-book reader (although we will be having Kindles soon in the library).

Features of the BooksInMyPhone book reader program include:
•Adjustable font size settings - make the letters bigger or smaller according to your personal preference.
•Night-vision mode - makes it easy to read in a dark room.
•Chapter navigation navigate the book by chapter.
•Pause & Auto-resume function - automatically pauses and resumes to accommodate incoming calls.
•Auto-bookmark - you never have to remember where you're up to in the book.

You can read everything from Pulitzer Prize winners to classic science fiction. All the books are out of copyright in the U.S. and in most cases the UK, Canada and Australia.

Avoiding the Too-Narrow Topic

Picking the right topic is very difficult, especially when you are new to a subject area. Very often the issue that prompts a learner to talk to a librarian is the problem of the too-broad or too-narrow topic.

Having too broad a topic can be frustrating. You search and find way too many resources. But once you’ve found that out, you can quickly see what areas are well-covered in the literature, and focus in on a particular area.

Too narrow a topic can be much harder to deal with, especially if you’ve already committed yourself to the topic. If you think your topic is too narrow, here are some things you can do:

• Search comprehensively: make sure you’ve tried many alternative keywords and all of the relevant databases.
• Bibliography Mining and Cited Reference Searching. All scholarly works, whether in print or electronic form, will have bibliographic references (also known as a Works Cited or Reference List) that can help you expand your research by looking backwards in time. You can use the bibliography to find related articles that you wouldn’t discover otherwise, locate seminal works, theories or authors and trace an idea to its source. These along with Interlibrary Loan – can help you flesh out your list of resources across time.
• Ask a Librarian for help with any of the above!

Best of all is to get in the habit of searching a bit before committing yourself. Five minutes of searching in the library databases can help you identify good topics from impossible ones.

Stay Current on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

In the past few weeks, students have been looking for information on the oil spill occurring in the Gulf of Mexico. Since it is such a new, current topic, obviously there are limited sources available. These websites (and databases) may point you in the right direction if you're looking to research the issue or just want to stay on top of it:

*Deepwater Horizon Unified Command:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/
*U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services Response:
http://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/
*United States Environmental Protection Agency:
http://www.epa.gov/bpspill/
*BP Response:
http://www.bp.com/bodycopyarticle.do?categoryId=1&contentId=7052055
*U.S. Geological Survey:
http://www.usgs.gov/deepwater_horizon/

Since books and journal articles take time to be written and published, newspapers and other news magazines are the largest sources of information at this time. You may also want to search in the following databases from the Seminole State library:

*Americas Newspapers (NewsBank)
*Academic Search Complete (EBSCO)
*Access World News (NewsBank)
*New York Times (NewsBank)
*Newspapers Direct (Proquest)
*SIRS Researcher (SIRS)
*Omnifile Full Text (Wilson)