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Thomas
F. Saffell Library
For library information or services, phone 620-276-9511,
fax 620-276-9630, or email mailto:library@gcccks.edu
Your assignment said you must go to the library.
The library has stuff you can’t get elsewhere.
The library staff can often give good suggestions to save time and get on track.
Lots of books. Very few books and very little of the total information in books is available on “The Net.” Of the information from books that is accessible by way of “The Net,” much of the best is only available to paying subscribers.
Lots of magazine subscriptions. Many magazines, journals, and newspapers have some of their content on “the Net,” but many do not. Very few have all of their content there. The library has about 100 magazine subscriptions received in print, and more than ten times that number in full text through online subscriptions. For details on locating magazines, see Saffell Library Resources
Online book catalogs are used to find books in the GCCC library, in the state of Kansas, and all over the world. The books inside library book catalogs are invisible to general Web searching tools on “the Net.” A book catalog is one kind of index, and indexes are the way you find books and articles when you research published information. The catalogs of libraries beyond GCCC can be used to find books to order on interlibrary loan. For details on locating books see Saffell Library Resources
Indexes are used to find articles in periodicals. We subscribe to indexes that cover articles in periodicals we receive in print as well as indexing even more that we don’t subscribe to. Indexes to periodicals we don’t subscribe to can be used to find articles to request from other libraries on interlibrary loan. Several of our online indexes also include online subscriptions to the full articles that can be read and printed from the screen.
Good advice that can save your time and help you do a better job: we can often send you straight to the best books, web pages, and indexes for your topic. Searching for information to prove a point in a paper or speech is different from surfing for personal entertainment. Learn how to come up with good search words and how to recognize which Web pages would be good to use and which should be avoided.
A good place to start is in the library. There the library staff can show you where to start and how to use the resources that are suggested for you. It is easier for you to understand our advice when we can show and tell. You generally need to make your own copies of anything for which you need copies. If you can't come in to see us or if you have questions after you leave, we will be happy to answer reference questions by phone. For contact information see About the Library
For other tutorials and explanations on "library" research see Online Guides to Research Methods
When you are looking for very basic information on a subject, or when you are searching for a topic to write about, you may want to ask a librarian to suggest a good place to start. In that situation we are your human index. For example, we could tell you that we have a couple of books with lists of suggested topic and ways of coming up with topics for speeches and papers.
After you have selected a topic, define it exactly and find some key words that describe each important point under your topic. For more detailed information about searching techniques in online databases, see Search Concepts. For help researching specific subjects and doing research for specific courses see Subjects and Courses
Try to write out a brief description of exactly what your speech or paper is going to prove, or demonstrate, or describe. Then make a written note, or at least a mental note, of the subjects you would expect books, parts of books, or articles to cover in order to have the information you need. Think of more than one set of words that would be likely to be in the titles or lead paragraphs of the articles (or books) you are looking for. You can use a dictionary and/or encyclopedia article to find new terms. Also use the dictionary or another reference to verify the spelling of the key words you are selecting.
You will use these words to type into the search input blanks in online book catalogs and online magazine indexes. In a typical list of results following a search you will find books or articles that are not what you had in mind. If you are persistent, you should find some that are what you need, or close to it. Look at the words in the titles and first paragraph of articles you retrieve that are close to what you want. Look for subject or descriptor words on the screen displays for books and articles that are close to what you want. Use any new terms you find there to search again for more books or articles. As you read more articles and abstracts you may change the points you want to make as you learn more about your subject. Then, you may need to search again for articles and books that connect with your redefined subject or redefined points.
You may have to be more creative searching for information in books than in magazine articles. The “entry points” that a magazine index can use to find an article are the words in the title, the words in a separate set of tags added by the indexers (subject or descriptor field), and, often, a one paragraph abstract that describes what the article is about. The total information in the article may be one to twenty pages on one relatively narrow subject. So, there are lots of entry points, lots of information indexed compared with the total amount of information in the article.
In contrast, the entry points for a book catalog are similar, except there is no abstract and there are often fewer subject or descriptor tags added by the people who made the catalog record. But, the biggest difference is that the book may have 500 pages of information instead of 5. So, the amount of indexing information compared to the total amount of information in the book is much less than in the case of an article.
To find all the information in the books in a library on a specific subject, you must often figure out what kind of book would be likely to have a chapter or a few paragraphs on your subject. Often, no key words exactly on your subject appear anywhere in the library catalog record of the book. If you are looking for information on a less well-known civil war general, you may search his name in the book catalog and come up with nothing. Then you should look for military histories of the civil war or even general histories of the civil war. Pull each book you select off the shelf and look at the table of contents in the front and the index in the back. With a little luck you may find your general. If you were diligent looking for books on the civil war that took place in the United States from 1861 to 1865 you might find that you needed to specify which civil war, since there have been other civil wars in other countries. You should also have found that you would need to search for United States -- History -- 1861-1865.
If it is necessary to use the index to find information in one 500-page book, it is even more important to use the index to find information in an encyclopedia that may have 3 or 4 or 24 volumes. Even though the encyclopedia articles are arranged alphabetically by the title of the article, that only give you one entry point – the first word in the title of the article. A 5 page encyclopedia article contains much more information than can be described by the first word in the title of the article. The index, usually in the last volume or last two volumes, give you many more entry points into to the information in the set of books. It is very common for different aspects of a subject to be covered in several different articles in an encyclopedia.
A library catalog is typically made up by each library from the books (and other materials) that it owns and gives no information about what other librarys may have in their collections. In Kansas (and many other states) there is a Kansas Library Catalog that includes most of the books added to most of the libraries in Kansas. There is a national catalog, World Cat, of most of the books added by most of the libraries in the United States (and many beyond).
Our books are arranged in a few collections. Each collection is shelved by Dewey numbers. For more information on using GCCC's Saffell Library see Locating Books. For more information on finding books in a library that uses Dewey numbers to organize books on the shelf see Using Dewey Numbers.
Magazine article searches require a little bit different kind of detective work. (A journal is a magazine written with academic or professional readers in mind -- articles are written by authors with credentials showing some expertise and statement made in the article are supported with references to the author's information sources.) Finding key words or subject words and trying different combinations in searches is very much the same whether finding books or articles.
However, there is only one book catalog for all the books available in one library. The library book catalog shows you all the books that are in the library, and none that the library does not own. Magazine indexes are not usually built for any one specific library – they are designed to index all of the articles that appeared in a specific list of magazines over a specific period of time.
The GCCC library will subscribe to printed copies of some, but not nearly all of the magazines covered by the index. The GCCC library also has online subscriptions (which are bundled with indexes) for some, but not all, of the articles in covered in the index. To be sure you have searched for all of the articles available in the GCCC library, you would need to use all of the indexes.
On many topics, searching First Search, Periodical Abstracts and then searching Infotrac, Academic ASAP will turn up articles on most topics. These indexes, also have full text for many of the magazines (and journals) in the index. They all display lists of article references retrieved by your search, with a link to full text labeled when full text is available.
Newspaper articles may be indexed in some periodical databases, but the full text is not usually available from the index. Our subscription to Lexis-Nexis covers many major newspapers, including the New York Times, with full text for almost all articles. Custom Newpapers on INFOTRAC also has full text newspapers.
Sirs Researcher is a quick source of articles on many topics. It covers only a selection of magazine and newspaper articles, all in full text. It is not a comprehensive index, so the fact that you found one article from Time Magazine in Sirs does not mean you will find all the articles on your subject published in Time Magazine.
All of these periodical databases are only available through paid subscriptions. If you don’t have a subscription at home, you can’t get them. (People who use the Kansas Library Card for database access are using their library subscriptions, verified by the password they must give.) Furthermore, general Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo can’t find the articles and other information in these subscription databases -- using them, you can't read these articles and you won't even know they exist.
Magazine, journal, and periodical defined. Libraries sometimes refer to magazines, journals, and newspapers as periodicals because they are publications which are printed in issues that appear on a regular or irregular schedule with different articles, but keeping the same title for the whole publication. For example, Time Magazine publishes issues every week.
When instructors emphasize the difference between magazines and journals, they want you to know the difference between publications intended for a general audience and those intended for a professional or academic audience. Whether or not “journal” appears in the title, a journal in this sense is a periodical which accepts only articles authored by qualified academic or professional experts in the subject area of the article and written in a scholarly format – citing authorities for the points made in the article. A peer reviewed journal goes a step farther, and submits articles to other professionals in the subject to be approved for professional quality (but, not necessarily for the reviewer's agreement with the conclusions in the article).
You have already seen that we can use a web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, to access our magazine and newspaper subscription databases. But, they are a part of the “hidden” Web that general search engines such as Google and Yahoo cannot reach. The Web pages that are found on a search tool such as Google could have been put on the Web by anyone. It is not always easy to tell from a Web page just who is responsible for it. Even if it is from a reliable source, you have no assurance that the Web page you cite as authority in your speech or paper will be there tomorrow for anyone else to check or use.
Google searches as much of the “Web” as it can find. It is an index to web pages just as the Saffell Library Catalog is an index to books in our library. Google helps you find sites that have a better than average chance of being “official” or highly regarded, because it puts the pages that are most pointed to by other pages toward the top of its list. But, although it is probably the most comprehensive search engine, Google only covers 25% - 30% of the pages that are probably out there and not technically invisible. You can use other competing search engines, which may find pages Google did not and which usually will put different pages at the top of their lists. You may also use general purpose directories like Yahoo or more specialized directories like the Internet Public Library.
For more about using Web pages see our Web Advice
In the case of Web pages, you should look through the page you have found (and if necessary back to the root or home page of the Web site it is a part of) to identify the organization and the people who sponsor and edit the page. If you cannot identify them as reliable for the kind of information presented – an official government site for government documents – the American Museum of Natural History for scientific information – etc. – then you should be wary of using the Web page as a reference.
In the cases of books, magazines, and journals you might check with librarians or faculty about the reputation of the publisher. Many publishers are well known for having procedures for selecting authors and checking material that give some assurance the information they published has been checked against some reasonable standards. Of course, that does not guarantee that everything in every publication of theirs is accurate or generally accepted.
You have a responsibility to also compare information from several articles, books, or web pages from reliable sources to help you evaluate your sources.
For suggestions on the types of identifying information to record for sources, try our forms for Books, Periodicals, and Web
You should have several reasons for completely and accurately documenting the information you find from your research. Your instructor requires it. You may need more information from the same source either while you are still working on the same class, or later for another class. If you transfer to a four-year program, you will need to know how to document for the courses you will take there. If you write something used out in the real world, your readers may need to find your information sources to make your project useful to them. You may have to defend your paper and its sources when discussing it with an instructor.
The basic elements of a reference to a book are the complete title, name(s) of the author(s), publication date, place of publication, and the name of the publishing company. For a periodical the elements are the title of the article, the name(s) of the author(s), the title of the periodical publication (ie Time Magazine), the volume number (issues within one year are often given a volume number that changes every year), issue number, publication date of the issue, page number(s). When you access books or magazines in full text online, and when the online version is taken directly from the print version, you will need all the information above for the printed version, plus the name of the database in which you accessed the article to read and the date you accessed it. In the case of Web pages, you should record the URL (that is the address showing usually at the top of the browser screen that looks like http://www.yahoo.com), the title of the page as nearly as you can identify it, the sponsoring organization, and the personal name of the author(s) and editor(s) if given, the date of the information on the page if any date is given, and the date you accessed the information. There is other specialized information you should record for other types of information, for example laws and court cases.
One form of such citations or references is published by the Modern Language Association (MLA). A simplified version of their style is available in a handout from the CLC. Much more detailed directions and examples are set out in the manuals published by the MLA, which are available in the GCCC library. More suggestions for using MLA style are in our English I & II Resources