New Research Guides and Help Finding Journals

If you look to the right of this blog post, you’ll see that the list of Research Guides & More is starting to flush out a bit, and there are more to come, including a Wyoming history research guide for the fourth grade and whatever else you may need for your students.

I have had a few teachers and staff members drop by occasionally looking for help locating journal articles, and so I thought I’d post a few tips in case they are helpful to others. If you would like further help, please don’t hesitate to stop by, and I’d be glad to assist you.

For education, your number one go-to place is ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. A growing number of articles in ERIC are available in full-text for free, but if you find one that isn’t but looks useful, we may well be able to locate it for you in a library database.

The library’s Research page is your portal to all our databases. If you are inside the school, you should be able to get to them directly. If you want to search from home, you’ll need your library card number and PIN.

I recommend starting with EBSCO. After clicking on that link, choose “EBSCOHost Web,” and then check the databases you would like to search. Academic Search Elite will have the most articles available full-text. The Teacher Reference Center is an abstract-only database, but again, we may be able to get the full article.

These resources are not all very easy to use, and they often take practice. If you are stuck or frustrated, please let me know — I would be happy to set up appointments with you during your planning periods or whenever else is convenient for you.

In the meantime, though, have a great weekend!

Filed under: Online Research

Your Classes, My Schedule, and Resources For This Year’s Election

I had a great time talking to Kandi Bennett’s health class about doing online research a couple weeks ago, and it’s been great to have the 5th grade come to the library for some library instruction. The 4th grade is scheduled to come in to learn a little bit about how we organize and find things in the library. If your idea of library research involves the card catalog and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, you might like to come see some of the amazing new things we can do. (Imagine searching for articles, putting them all in a folder, emailing them to yourself, and getting perfectly formatted citations for all of them in the style of your choice!)

If you’re interested in having your class come to the library or having me come to your class, that’s great, but please schedule with me ahead of time. Starting next week, I’m going to be traveling quite a bit for conferences and such. I’ll be gone September 25-29, October 1-3, October 9-12, and October 19-23. Also, I will be traveling to the other Park County libraries fairly regularly on Thursdays (or occasionally on other days) in order to do public and staff training.

A number of you may be doing or considering units on the Presidential elections. I have orders out for biographies of the major political party candidates, but they have not arrived yet. In the meantime, though, there are lots of other great resources available to you for learning more about the candidates, the issues, and the electoral process. Here, Q&A style, are some of the places to look online at parkcountylibary.org/research or in the library.

Who the heck are these people running for president, anyway?
Wilson Web has the complete run of Current Biography, which will give you some good general background information on the candidates.

So what are the issues in this campaign?
Try CQ Researcher, SIRS Researcher, and the Opposing Viewpoints Research Center for great coverage of issues and perspectives on the candidates.

Whoa, those sites are awfully text heavy for my primary grade students! Don’t you have something simpler?
Try Searchasaurus, Kids Search, or eLibrary Elementary.

Searching Hint: use the terms election 2008 to get material on this current election.

I really, really, really just want something that’s on paper.
The library subscribes to Time, U.S. News & World Report, the Billings Gazette, the Casper Star-Tribune, the Cody Enterprise, the Powell Tribune, and the Northern Wyoming Daily News. We keep the magazines for a year, the Cody and Powell papers for a month, and the other papers for a week or so.

Candidate so and so said thus and such. Is that really true?
Check out FactCheck.org. For voting records, try Project Vote Smart.

That’s enough for now! Happy researching!

Filed under: Online Research, Updates & Reminders