The Truth about Wikipedia

Wikipedia is not verified, fact checked, or guaranteed to be true.
Honest!
From Wikipedia:
“It is in the nature of an ever-changing work like Wikipedia that, while some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish. We are fully aware of this.”

With Wikipedia, anyone can change any page. Are these changes fact or opinion? Are authors the expert on their topics? Some are...and many are not.
Wikipedia is great for casual research, and excels at pop culture information. (The Anime page is comprehensive and packed with verifiable links and references.) But with academic research, you want information to be correct and written by experts, not by enthusiastic volunteers.

 

You must go beyond Wikipedia for good research. Check out a book, or find an article in Academic Search Complete.
Unsure where to start? Library staff can help! We know the online and print resources and love research. Just ask!

Is your computer keeping you away at night?

Have you ever been up late working on a paper or project until the wee hours and then fallen into bed certain that you will be out like a light, only to lie awake for hours? 
 Perhaps the problem is that you have been staring so long at your unnaturally bright computer screen. 
 F.lux is an application that can help to minimize the effects that the bright light has on your ability to relax and go to sleep at night.  F.lux adapts the color of your computer screen to be bright during the daylight hours and then warms these colors in the evening, reducing the strain on your eyes and allowing you to fall asleep when you finally finish that paper in the middle of the night.  It automatically adjusts the lighting of your computer based upon where you live and what lighting is occurring naturally at each moment during the day.

Click here for the free application.

Printing From Our eBooks

We're all back from Spring Break here in the library. Did you have a chance to explore our eBooks while you were away from campus? Even if you didn't here's a quick tip that might entice you to check them out...

Are you aware that you can print pages from any of the library's electronic books? It's true: all of the Seminole State Library eBooks will let you print, and the number of pages allowed has grown exponentially over the past year or so. Here's how you'll do it:

Netlibrary books will allow you print up to 60 pages from one book. Simply click on the print button and choose the number of pages you want to print. They do need to be 60 consecutive pages, either; pick and choose from individual chapters, if you'd rather!


ABC-CLIO books don't explicitly state a number of printable pages and will seemingly allow you to print from anywhere in an eBook. First, choose a chapter, section, or page by using the Contents section or by flipping through individual pages. Then press the "print" button at the top of the screen. The chapter or page you selected should appear in a new window. From there you are able to print that entire section or just a single page.

Hopefully you've given eBooks a try- they can be extremely helpful. This is just one tiny way to maximize their benefit...and not just to save money on photocopies!

“Read an E-Book Week” / March 6 – 12, 2011

 Did you know that electronic books or e-books, for short, have been around for 40 years?
It is true!
In 1971, Michael S. Hart embraced the idea that computers should do computing, but should also be used for the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. His very first e-book was a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

From this quiet start, Mr. Hart founded Project Gutenberg which allows you access to 33,000 free e-books for your PC, iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Sony Reader, Android, and other portable devices. For more information about “Read an E-Book Week”.

Seminole State College Library has a large and growing collection of e-books. You can find them, along with the print books, by searching the Library’s Online Catalog.

Currently the Library has approximately 37,000 electronic books that come from two main vendors, NetLibrary and Ebrary, plus Gale Virtual Reference Library, which contains a collection of about fifty reference books.

 Ebrary, which requires the download of the free ebrary plug-in, contains close to twenty thousand scholarly books. This collection is growing and will continue to grow.

 NetLibrary has some scholarly books and some for more general reading.

Gale Virtual Reference Library doesn’t require any special software and is a good place to start to get background information on topics.

There are two ways to get to our e-books:

1.You can go to the Library’s Databases A-Z page and choose NetLibrary, Ebrary, or Gale Virtual Reference Library, then search each of these groups separately.

2.You can also go to the Library’s catalog, where you can search for books by topic and get a single list that includes all the books from these three collections that match your search plus all the matching paper books in the Library. Use the limiter "ebook".

To open the book, Click on the book title to go in the record.

Then click on the green "View online". Next log in with your 14-digit SSC ID and last 4 number of your Social Security or student number

So the next time you just need to quickly check on some information, whether for pleasure or for research, you might want to try e-books as an online source

Search all State College libraries

A little known fact is that you can borrow books from all of Florida's state/community colleges. You can do this from the LINCC online catalog by requesting a book from a member college.
The first step is to visit the LINCC online catalog on the Library home page, then from the Advanced Search page change the drop-down menu from Seminole State College to search "All 28 Colleges". Search for the book, and once you find a college that owns it, you can borrow it if it's status says "Available". If the book is available, click on the "Request" link next to it and fill out the form.
Remember to select which campus of Seminole State College the book should be delivered to. It will generally arrive there in just 5 days, and staff will notify you when it does.